Is.61:10-62:3 Ps. 147:13-21
Gal. 3:23-25,4:4-7 John 1:1-18
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.... This singular verse in the Bible is perhaps the greatest human insight of all on which rests the central identity of humanity.
In the beginning; the Greek word for beginning is arche which in philosophy can also mean first principle. Word is the first principle of humanity in knowing anything at all including knowing that we exist. Everything has existence because word creates in being co-extensive with anything being known to exist.
This verse gives us insights about the profound analogical imagination that we have about the nature of God. With this verse we assume that God is a language or Word User and that creation is an insightful human experience because we have language. If God is a Language User, then the fact that human life is meaningfully constituted by language means that having language is a chief reflected image of the divine upon our lives.
People might be understood as existing on a continuum of language use ability. Human life is fully language-ified, or Word-ified. The world has been completely choreographed by language. We live on this language continuum. As infants and babies we are on one end of the continuum being lost in the void of reactionary instincts as our adults encode our lives with the values and meanings which they place upon us. And eventually we become active users of the precoding products which we have received from our cultures. We learn to organize the instinctual desires which drive us from birth in language-channelled ways.
The importance of word creating our lives was poignantly illustrated in perhaps one of the greatest biographical stories of our time, the story of Helen Keller. Helen had early lost her sight and hearing, and she was viewed by her parents as a poor soul lost in the void of instinct and desire without any meaning. Enter Ann Sullivan, the heroic miracle worker. Ann Sullivan found a way to activate the language ability of Helen, by associating sign language letters formed in her hands as she ran water over them. Suddenly Helen's life was created by activating her language ability.
All things came into being through Him, the Word, the Christ. Can we appreciate how profound it is that knowing the existence of anything is co-extensive with the accompanying language experience of it?
This verse is a return to the creation story, which in fact is the primordial birthing story of the Christ. The author of John was saying that the Christ, the Word, predated the Bethlehem event. The author of John who wrote after the Pauline confession that Christ was all and in all, saw that Christ as the Word was the poetic coherence of Christ being all and in all. The father of Credal orthodoxy, Athanasius, used this verse to explicate how Christ was present within the creation story. According to the book of Genesis, God is a Language User. God spoke and said, Let there be Light. Athanasius said that the Word which the Father spoke was Christ, via the John 1:1 insight, and then the Spirit moved over the abyss to make the differentiated order evident. Certainly one can see the creation story as figurative of how each baby comes to be oriented into the world of language though which one comes to know that one exists among many other existing things revealed by their names given through language.
If our lives are created by us having language, then how can we best know how to speak, write, and comport our body language in the very best of moral, ethical, and just behaviors? How can we best know how to live our worded lives?
What does the Johannine writer say about this? And the Word became flesh and lived among us. What would God look like in a human worded life so that humanity could have a par exemplar of how to best live? Jesus Christ is confessed to be what divinity would best look like within a human being from birth to death and beyond death. Jesus Christ is Word made flesh, God with us completely in being human and such complete identity of the divine with the human experience provides us with direction toward which we are to live in loving God and our neighbor as ourselves.
The Word is still able to be made flesh in your life and mine today. We are to let the example of Christ as Word, be made flesh in all our language products today, in our speaking, writing, and in our body language.
Let us endeavor to enable the Christ-Word become made flesh again and again and again, as we seek to live creatively in love, justice, kindness, peace, and faith in our lives today. Amen.
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