Mass readings for the Feast of the Nativity (during the day):
Isaiah 62.11-12 Psalm 97.1-2, 5-6, 11-12 Titus 3.4-7 Luke 2.15-20
The prologue of John is one of the greatest pieces of writing ever composed. It is thoroughly intimidating to have to stand here and speak after proclaiming it to you. I don’t have the lovely story of Mary and Joseph, of shepherds and angels to draw upon so much. While poetic, this is all very philosophical, theological; it explains who Jesus is so efficiently: he’s the Word of God made flesh.
Now that seems pretty awesome. We confess that Jesus is the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, that he is God. But what is John getting at with calling him the “Word of God” employing a very specific Greek term in the original untranslated text, Logos?
Well, we can understand what John is doing as his telling us just how God solved a huge problem. That problem was our inability to really understand God, to have an essential clarity as to what God wants from us, and to overcome the fact that God can’t just come to us and talk – it’s been long understood, testified to in the Hebrew Scriptures, indeed, even affirmed by pagan philosophy, that we can’t stand in the face of such absolute and overwhelming perfection; that the glory of God is both magnificent, but for us imperfect mortals, its deadly. Were God to appear to us, we would die of shame over our imperfections, our sins. To see even a little of him, is quite overwhelming. Moses wanted to see God, and God said no. Moses insisted, so God placed him in the cleft of a rock and told him only to look once he’d gone by, to only then see God’s back. The prophet Isaiah said he’d seen God in the Temple, but really it was only the hem of God’s robe that he saw; and that for him was absolutely transformative in its power; he couldn’t handle any more.
God has to find another way to reach us.
The Jewish philosopher Philo is someone Christians study for insight into Jewish thinking right around the time of Jesus’ arrival. Philo knew that humanity’s only hope was in our receiving the Word of God. That without God’s saving wisdom we are doomed. But how does God communicate this to us. He can’t do so directly. He’s already tried intermediaries, and that didn’t work.
God’s chosen people failed to understand what God was after. There is a lot of discussion of how badly the project of Israel had gone. Israel was supposed to be a special nation, a chosen people, who would proclaim to the world the reality of the one true God. And the proof of their testimony would be in how successful Israel was as a kingdom, and not because it had a mighty army, not because it had magnificent riches, that it controlled a massive empire, but that its success was attained by its virtue – it was to have been the little nation that really worked. But that didn’t happen; or it happened for a little while, it happened in fits and starts, but then fizzled out.
You might come across essays, articles, youtube videos that talk about how Jesus arrives at just the right time. The historical circumstances for the Gospel could not have been better for all that we see that was wrong in the world back then. One providential development was that Jews learned and began to use Greek. And Philo knew Greek, he wrote in Greek, and through that language he had access to the Greek philosophical tradition, to the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. And he was not alone in that. Because John who wrote the gospel also knew all this.
In Hebrew the word for word is dabar. It’s like the English. It means a word, something that is declared, said, written. Philo began to understand that there was something more to words than in their being spoken or written and having certain meanings, and it came to him through Greek language. The Greek word, logos, has a great deal more to it. It had the further sense of a thought, an idea, being expressed; that in a word we have a mind behind it that gave rise to the thought uttered in that word. Logos is word and thought, its utterance but also the mind that prompts it. The Word of God is also the mind of God. And John, understanding this then could understand and then tell us how Christ could come to us. How God could be manifest in a specific time and place, be in one sense limited, how he could be that little baby in the manger.
When I speak to kids about this, I ask, where is your mind? And how big is it? We tend to think its up here, behind our eyes, that the mind peers out from the skull, but that’s really not the case – even if we assume that the mind is just the product of our brain, that must then take in the whole nervous system, that means its in the whole of our body, not just up here. And what size is it? Is it the same size as my body? Big people have big minds, little people have little minds. Well, we can refer to small-minded people of narrow perspective, limited concerns, often selfish in outlook and lacking in charity. How big is a big mind then? One that perceives so much more than the self, sees others, the world, and then the possibilities that exist among others and in the universe. Can you tell how big or small minded someone is just by looking at them? No, of course not. You come to know of the size of their mind, how much it holds of faith, hope and love, by getting to know them. The bigness or smallness of mind is not a matter of physical space; its really a mystery as to what it is, where it really is, but we know from our own minds, minds exist.
And the miracle of incarnation is in the fact that the mind of God dwelt in a baby born in a manger in Bethlehem, a mind that encompassed the whole of creation and more. That in Jesus growing up into the full stature of his humanity, we have someone to whom we can speak, to whom we can listen, but also someone who can communicate divine wisdom in both word and deed, in preaching and teaching, in miracles of healing and exorcism, but more importantly, can show us the mind of God in his sacrifice; and so, show us the truth of life in something more than mere words.
And here we start again today, to further our knowledge of Christ, the Logos, the Word of God made flesh. How big minded is our Saviour? You can’t tell by just looking at him there in the manger; only if we come to him again and again, with the eyes of faith will we know better; and hopefully in and through that, our own minds might grow in greater dimension of faith, hope and love.
Amen.