1 Christmas B December 27, 2020
Is.61:10-62:3 Ps. 147:13-21
Gal. 3:23-25,4:4-7 John 1:1-18
I was raised in a family where the Bible was the main book, so the Bible has been in my life since birth. And one could say that I have had a growing relationship with the words of the Bible. And the words have changed in their meanings as I have grown and become better informed about the biblical contexts and about differences between ancient paradigms and modern paradigms.
One thing that I was not prepared for was for six words of the Bible to change my later life forever, and put me into another realm of understanding.
The life changing words for me come from the Christmas story in the Gospel of John. But you say, John's Gospel does not have a Christmas Story, just like the Gospel of Mark. How can the Christmas Story in John's Gospel change your life?
The life changing words for me were this: "In the beginning was the word." In my graduates studies, I was reading about Habermas' linguistic constructivism and Derrida's notion of a person's life being constituted by having language. It occurred to me that the writer of John's Gospel long ago knew that human life as it can be known at all, is constituted within language. Language has an omnipresence in structuring every human experience of life. Language is very reflexive; meaning we use language to establish that we are language users who use language. So the fact that we have language is hidden even in our own understanding of ourselves being language users. This is what I would call reflexive omni-presence of language and word ability.
You may say, "O but there is a life outside of language." And I would say, but you used language to say that. One cannot escape language.
O but babies and infants can't use language. But they are born into a situation of their parents whereby they are totally coded by people whose lives are dominated by having language. So before they are active language users, they are passive objects of our cultural coding of their existence, and so they do not escape the world of word and language.
How does John's Gospel express this omnipresence excellence of Word from the Beginning. The writer of John goes on to say, "the word was with God and the word was God." How much closer can Word in the broadest sense of the total Language Effect get to God? The writer of John confesses that such Word is God. There is no greater expression of equivalence than this.
The other book of the Bible which begins with "In the beginning," is the Book of Genesis at the start of the creation narrative. In the creation narrative, how does God create? God creates using words. God said, "Let there be light! And there was light." God and God's Speaking in the Creation narrative are equivalent in the creation of the world. And what does John's Gospel affirm: Everything that has come into being has come into being through this Profound Word.
We can understand this. It is not some philosophical abstraction. We can only understand the existence of anything and ourselves through the mediation of Language. Things only have knowable existence because of Language.
So why are we reading this at Christmas? Indeed, why is John Chapter One, one of the Christmas Gospels?
We also read, "The Word became flesh and lived among us." This is how John's Gospel states the Bethlehem event. How do we understand this relationship between The Word and Jesus of Nazareth?
The Profoundness of the Eternal Word is too inaccessible to human consciousness which can only have limited capacity. The Eternal Word has to be reduced through a funnel and become limited in the life of a superlative Exemplar to give us the definitive Model of how we are supposed to live our lives as language users. Jesus is where the rubber hits the road. The connection of where Eternal Word become instantiated within a human person. And this person Jesus came to exemplified what loving God and our neighbor truly means. He did this with his words. He said that his words were spirit and they were life. He did this with his body language, with his deeds of healing and whispering people to peace and calm. He did this with the sacrificial giving of his life for the cause of what is love and just.
He showed us, he modeled for us how we are to best use our worded life. If we are going to get better in our lives, it is going to involve the words of our lives. It is going to involve the inner scripts which we are acting out without even being aware of both good and bad body language habits.
At Christmas, it is time to renew our lives with a profound commitment to Word therapy, not just in how we manifest the word products of speaking and writing; but the inner words which constitute the habits of our desires, thoughts, emotions, volition. We need to get at the inner playwright in our lives who is determining our lives toward speaking, writing and body language deeds which are not worthy of the scrutiny of Jesus, the living model for us.
Let us this Christmastide and in the New Year take stock of how we are programmed by our word life. Let us look to Jesus to inform the direction of the kind of changes which we need to make. And let us use the words of prayer to become our therapy with God to alter our lives toward more Christ-like behaviors.
If we can do this, we will know that our lives to have become the Bethlehem where Christ has been born again. Amen.
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