For Sunday, January 5, 2014 – John 1:1-18
I am thinking of the old hymn: “Sing them over again to me, wonderful words of life. Help me more of their beauty see, wonderful words of life” (text by Philip P. Bliss, 1838-1876). Some of the most beautiful words in scripture are today’s opening verses of the gospel of John. Thankfully, they defy rote dissection and must be heard as poetry. They speak of the past and yet are not a history lesson. They offer patterns of belief and yet are not merely a creed. They inspire a different kind of understanding altogether, nuanced and “felt,” the way surfers understand the rise and fall of waves, and painters understand colors on the canvas, and farmers know the rhythms of seasons and soil. Such understanding relies less on factual knowledge and more on the give and take of relationship between knower and known, the intuitive interplay of thought and being and life.
In the beginning was the Word — Breath and Spirit taking physical syllabic form. The creator of all that is comes into that creation as a Word — commonplace yet immensely complex, with endless connotations of meaning for each of us. How the Word loves mingling with other words, creating in each encounter new insights and fuller expression. Like a choreographer leaping into the middle of the dance, a teacher lowering herself into a desk among her students, or a director of the whole symphony disappearing into the mass chorus, the Word becomes one of us, another hauntingly beautiful voice among all the voices, a steady note holding the entire piece together.
If we try to comprehend John’s description, as we might try to comprehend a map or a recipe, we miss the poetry. For want of feeling like we know more than we know, we risk missing out on the life and the light that have been and will be and are, right now, among us. We miss the ever-evolving aliveness of the mystery, the ineffable and eternal witness of God’s own Wonderful Word—each letter of which is compassion, mercy, justice, forgiveness, light—reaching out to us, speaking to us and in us and through us. We miss the coming and the becoming of that Word as it is even now being lived in our midst, grace upon grace upon grace.
