"It's Alive!"

John 1:1-14.

I.

            There is a set of questions that every human being has to answer.  And we begin to answer those questions for ourselves almost as soon as we are born; maybe even before we are born.  At that age we don’t answer consciously in words, but our body and our heart and our mind give us an answer very early, and it shapes our whole future. 

            The questions have to do with whether the world is a safe place.  We want to know if we will be taken care of.  Will we find love?  Do we belong here?

            These are questions that we are actually answering every day and every minute of every day of our lives.  Just about everything we do is an expression and a reflection of how we have chosen to answer those questions.  What we have for breakfast, what we teach our children, what books we read, what we buy, how we vote, the kind of language we use… everything we do betrays our answer.

            Unfortunately, we all answer those questions negatively.  We all conclude very early that the world is not a safe place for us, and we have to figure out how to make it safe in order for us to survive.

            It is not the fault of our parents or our family or our community.  We simply find ourselves thrown into a world in which we are cold, hungry, and lonely – at least in comparison to where we were before we were born.  And immediately upon birth, if not before, our minds start building defense and offense mechanisms to equip us for survival in a world that we perceive to be different, alien, and not particularly friendly.  It is like we have been ejected from paradise and crash-landed in, if not hell, then certainly on some much less beneficent planet.

            Our trust has been shattered; and it will take most of us many decades to recover that full trust in the world, in God, in other people, if we ever do.  John writes his gospel to show what God has done to restore our trust, our faith.  He wants us to know that the world doesn’t have to be the way we think it is.  In fact, it is not a hostile, indifferent, violent place, a place where we have to fight for everything we get, a place where we have to develop elaborate strategies to get what we need.

            The fact that we live this way means that we unintentionally generate exactly that kind of world.  We engage in fearful behavior that creates a fearsome situation where there was none before.  It is our inaccurate view of the world, and the fear, anger, and shame that this fosters in our own souls, that move us to build institutions, perform actions, use words, and develop elaborate rationalizations that spawn a world characterized by violence, inequality, injustice, selfishness, addiction, sorrow, and death, built on the exploitation of the earth and other people.

II.

            And that would have been that: people would follow a tragic delusion, thereby unnecessarily falling into a nasty, brutish, and short existence, until finally being snuffed out by trying to live by a false understanding of the world.  Humans would careen from disaster to catastrophe, millions would suffer and die unnecessary deaths, and eventually they might even poison the whole planet.

            But sometime in his life John met someone.  He met a man who shared with him and others the truth that not only does it not have to be this way, but the real world as God made it is not the world we make for ourselves and choose to live in.  This man lived a life that was so attuned to God, and his words and actions were so powerful and miraculous, that John and others left everything and followed him as his disciples.

            The man pointed out right there in their own Jewish Scriptures, and then embodied in his own way of life, the truth that the world really is a safe and blessed place, charged with the goodness and joy of the Creator.  He said and showed that people could live according to that truth, and in so doing they would be so resonant with God and God’s will that it is not an exaggeration to say that they would become God’s children and never actually even really die.

            When the authorities hounded and finally killed him, not even that was able to stop his mission, because God raised him from death in a new form that could never die!  And now people who trust in him and obey his commandments – living lives of non-violence, justice, healing, and witnessing to God’s love – also share in his resurrection.  The darkness of death cannot hold them; they dwell forever in the light and Presence of God.

            Of course, the man that John met was Jesus.  In Jesus, John and the other disciples saw God.  There was no other way to put it.  God’s Presence and nature was communicated to them through Jesus so fully and profoundly that they understood him to actually be God’s living Word, God’s actual self-communication to the world, God’s complete revelation of God’s nature and essence, as love.  And by learning to see God in him, they also learned to see God in themselves and in others.  Indeed, they started seeing God everywhere, in the whole creation!

            This was not something John could keep to himself.  None of the disciples could.  It is explosive good news that changes everything.  People need to hear it and be saved from their delusion and turn to the truth, the light, the Word, the Presence of God.  Their lives and the life of everyone depended on it.  So John collected and wrote down and distributed stories about Jesus that revealed who he was, who God is, who we are, and how we can share in his way, truth, and life.

III. 

            But before diving right into the stories, John adds a prologue.  It may even have been an early hymn of John’s community of disciples.  Hearers of these stories needed to know in advance exactly who they were about.  Jesus Christ is none other than God’s very Word, come into our flesh as the Savior of the world.

            When John says those famous words, “In the beginning was the Word,” he is simply pointing out that, in the book of Genesis, God creates the universe by speaking.  God’s Word “is God“ in action.  The Word creates what it says by saying it.  And the Word says everything.  Nothing happened, nothing came into being, that this Word did not say.

            So the world and everything in it comes from God as a product of God’s self-expression.  It is not an accident.  It is not random.  The world is made on purpose.  And that recognition means that there has to be some point to our existence.

            Not only that, but everything that comes into being through the Word is life.  The universe is therefore in some sense alive.  It moves and changes, it vibrates and shimmers and hums with the Word and Breath by which it was created.  It interacts, it exchanges, it grows and develops, it processes and evolves.  Nothing that God creates is inert and dead.  All of matter and energy shine and glow with the business and purpose of life.   

            In this living creation God’s light is shining in and through everything and everyone.  Human beings are made to be conscious of and know this fundamental reality and truth about themselves. 

            So when John says, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it,” he means that the Word that creates life and light is invincible.  It is stronger than the darkness of disordered chaos.  It’s victory and triumph is inevitable.  The universe is not about the disorder and inertia of the darkness; life and light always advance, the Word always wins in the end. 

            So, contrary to our limited perceptions and weak reason, we humans are not aliens in the universe.  We are made of what the universe is made of, which is light.  We are the universe, conscious and self-reflective.  We are alive because the whole place is alive.  We can no more die than can the universe can somehow expire.  Everything is connected.  Right down to the atoms and molecules of our bodies, we were spoken into existence by the Creator.  God’s Word shapes and forms us as human beings.  We are not alone but part of the extended family of matter and life.  We’re all in this together.

IV.

            All that may seem like abstract philosophy, or wishful thinking… until we realize that wherever the text says “the Word” it means Jesus Christ.  John is not saying all this because he read about it.  He learned it by direct experience of an actual person through and in whom he perceived and knew this truth.  John met the true light personally; he met the Word of God coming into the world.  

            God comes to us in Jesus Christ.  God does not relinquish us to drift into oblivion, having to slog our way along on the earth subject to lies and falsehoods about the way the world really is.  We are not finally given up to the violence, injustice, and inequalities of whatever corrupt empire happens to be dominating the earth.  We are given hope in the truth that God comes to us.

            People didn’t recognize him, and they still don’t recognize who or what they truly are.  Even when our true nature as light stares us in the face we don’t get it.  It looks alien, threatening, disruptive, and wild.  The Spirit of the Creator infuses the world, but we don’t perceive it.  The Word of the Creator comes to his own people, but people do not accept him. 

            But then John affirms this mystery that some people do get it.  They do awaken to the truth of all this, and receive, welcome, and accept the light and life of God.  Some folks come to believe or trust in him when he comes to them.

            This requires a receptivity, an openness, a willingness to be changed.  People who already have everything they want and need tend not to be receptive.  It is those who know they have nothing to lose, who are not being well-served by the status quo, these are folks who are receptive.  These are the people who are willing to entertain an alternative.  Desperate people, people who have hit bottom, people who have nowhere else to turn, these are the ones who are ready to receive a different answer than the ones they have been getting from the authorities in this world.

            This receptivity is built into us from the fact that the Creator’s breath already permeates us simply because we are made by God, made of light.  We already have within us the ability to receive what we already are.  We just have to relax our defenses and look to the light God has placed within us.

            Later, Jesus himself will point out that all true receptivity is receptivity to God.  To be truly open is to be open to God.  Everything else we have concocted in the imagination of our own hearts.

V.

            Finally, John gives us his key insight that “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”  The Word doesn’t just create light and life; the Word goes further and becomes flesh, he takes on our mortal, human body, he takes on our material, physical nature, even to the point of sharing our death, and showing it to be a doorway to life.

            Because he takes on our mortal life, we are empowered to take on his divine life of self-giving and love.  By our receptivity to the flow of God’s light coming into our lives and world, and our shining of that light into the world in our obedience of his commandments, we rise above the darkness, the fear, the anger, and the shame, and we express and reflect God’s love.  We actually become partakers of the divine nature itself. 

            We become children of God, who are born of God.  We become who we were created to be.  And in us creation becomes what it was created to be: a place of light and life, growth and beauty, giving and peace, justice and freedom.

            That is the urgency of John’s message.  People do not have to be on a one-way path to extinction.  We do not have to be alone and enemies of each other.  We do not have to walk in the way of falsehood and delusion.  In Jesus Christ, we can be who we already are, we can be who God created us to be, we can live in joy and goodness, and we can be a blessing to the earth and to each other.

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