Why Follow Jesus?

John 1.1-18.  (January 5, 2015)

I.

            Why follow Jesus? 

            Why be a disciple of Jesus Christ?  Why place your trust in him?  Why associate with other people seeking to be disciples of Jesus?  Why would we want to encourage others to join is in following Jesus?  Why is this more important than anything else in our lives?  Why is following Jesus a matter of life and death for us, and for everyone, and for the whole creation? 

            The Gospel of John is written to answer this basic set of questions.  It begins with the same words with which the whole Bible begins: “In the beginning.”  But the Bible isn’t offering speculation about some point in history.  This is not a scientific study of where matter and energy originated.  We are not trying to satisfy our curiosity here.  “In the beginning” refers to the basic foundational principles and realities and truth on which everything else is founded.  What is at the bottom of it all on which we can absolutely rely?  What is everything made of?  What am I made of?  Who am I, and what is my relationship to everything else?

            These are important questions.  They are the most important questions.  We all answer them for ourselves even if we’re not conscious of it.  Everyone alive has answered these questions.  We all have a basic understanding of who we are, what the world is, and what our relationship to the world is.  Each of us has an understand of what is “in the beginning.”

            Unfortunately, most of us proceed in life as if “in the beginning” was what we actually experienced in our beginning, our birth, when we were flushed out of self-sufficient climate-controlled paradise into a cold world where we were radically vulnerable, dependent, and needy.  Which means that what most of us have in the beginning is some sense of what we lost, what we don’t have, what we didn’t get, what we aren’t getting, what we need, what we lack.  And this happens no matter how perfect and attentive our parents were.

            Seeing the world as a dangerous, unsafe, threatening place, we will act accordingly mainly out of fear.  We will see and treat others as competitors and enemies.  We will try and grab as much as we can for ourselves by any means necessary because it could all get taken away.  We will connive and manipulate our world and the people in it in order to get what we need: food, shelter, comfort, affection, appreciation, respect, offspring, power, money, fame, whatever…. 

            Because we think this way, various other forces in our lives start to presume to fill up that emptiness and provide for those needs we experienced in our beginning.  It starts out with our ego generating our personality as a means of coping with and managing life in a hostile or indifferent world.  After that, we develop other institutions to depend on, like the State and the Market.  We depend on family, tribe, race, nation; we develop religious and philosophical loyalties.  And we come to rely and trust in those things in order to survive.

            Our existence collapses into the selfishness and violence, injustice and inequality, suffering and grief that now characterize the world as we know it.  

II.

            That’s the world the author of the gospel of John lives in as well.  In 2000 years not much has really changed except that now our ability to wreak havoc on the planet and people is exponentially greater.  And that is why following Jesus today is far more urgent than ever before in human history.

            The tragedy is that we got off on the wrong foot when we decided how to answer the question about what happened “in the beginning.”  If we decide that in the beginning was a disaster, and we spend our lives in emergency/crisis mode, trying to knit back together a shattered mess, then we will live like humans mostly live now.

            But what if we had a better understanding of what really happens “in the beginning”?  What if we were able to realize the truth, that our beginning was not a tragic loss leaving a giant hole that we have to fill by hook or by crook?  What if we are able to imagine instead that “in the beginning” is a loving Creator’s act of magnificent, spectacular, infinite blessing?  We have not been dumped into a desert of competition and scarcity, but we have emerged into a beautiful garden containing more than enough for everyone to live happy and satisfied lives.

            That is what the Bible says in Genesis.  In the beginning God starts talking and as God talks things happen.  The universe is made, ordered, set in motion, fully stocked, and blessed.  Human beings are spoken into existence as part of this precipitation or crystallization of God’s communication.  The universe is the living embodiment of God’s Word and breath, and we are born nestled and cherished and profoundly held by God in the supportive web of everything that God says.

            That story, however beautiful and true, is too abstract and theoretical for humans to completely get it.  Some do.  And the Hebrew Scriptures recount their stories.  But human fear and violence spawned a world of darkness and death that even twisted these good stories into fodder for their own greed, injustice, inequality, and ignorance.  By the time of Jesus the blessed and God-breathed Torah was thoroughly perverted into a tool for oppression by religious, economic, and political elites.

            God’s Word kept proceeding into the world, not just as crystallized in creation or in words written on papyrus, vellum, or paper.  The Word had to become uniquely present with, within, and among human beings; the Word had to become “flesh.”  The wall of separation between humans and God had to be dissolved.  God had to get into the twisted, distorted human heart. 

III. 

            When the text says that the Word became “flesh”, it doesn’t just mean that the Word became a material, living, human body, that the Word became the same meat, cells, sinews, tissue, organs, of which we are made.  It means that of course… but it could be argued that Genesis is at least implying that as well. When God speaks people into being the Word is also “becoming” human beings, just as the Word had already become animals, birds, fish, plants, earth, stars, moon, sun, and light.  But it means more than that.

            The gospel uses the loaded term, “flesh” for a reason.  The Apostle Paul uses the same word to talk about the force in human life that draws us away from God.  He says we may follow the Spirit, or breath, of God, or we may continue to be pushed away from God by the demands of our “flesh”.

            This has led to a great deal of destructive error over the centuries, where people thought God hated our material bodies, which had therefore to be punished.  But that’s not what “flesh” means at all.  

            “Flesh” is more like our word, “ego.”  Flesh is the power of selfishness, self-centeredness, self-righteousness, and self-sufficiency, that expresses our primal fear and sours into the violence and inequalities that characterizes sinful human existence.  Yes there is a physical element to it which is expressed in terms of sins like gluttony and lust.  But the power of the flesh is deeper than this; it is what leads us to such destructive behaviors.

            God is already present in us simply because we are part of the good creation.  But there is a part of us that we have shoved God out of, where we have attempted to build our own personalities without God, relying only on ourselves.  That is our ego, or our “flesh.” 

            That’s what God becomes in John 1.  It is imperative for God to become flesh because the power of the flesh – that is, these human, ego-centric, personality-driven, hyper-selfish, acquisitive, extractive, objectifying, destructive impulses – were, and are, in danger of wrecking the creation entirely.  This whole manufactured edifice of the flesh in our souls is the root cause of all the suffering in the world. 

            One of the great mottos of the early church is that “God saves what God becomes.”  God, in order to save creation, had to become a part of creation; indeed, God had to become that part of creation that was like a virus, infecting, distorting, and killing everything in its path, beginning with its hosts: us.  This is what Paul means when he says in 2 Corinthians, “God caused the one who knew no sin to be sin for our sake so that through him we might become the righteousness of God.”

            “The Word became flesh.”  “Those who believed in his name, he authorized to become God’s children.”   Another great motto of the early church is that, in Christ, “God became human so that human beings might become God.”  He became what we are so that we might become what he is.

IV.

            Because God takes on and becomes sin and flesh, God becomes visible.  “We have seen his glory.”  “It is God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, [who] has made God known.”  The light dawns in the darkness.  Life sprouts in the realm of death.  If human sinfulness was like a virus infecting creation, Christ is like a virus infecting that virus.  He brings God’s radiant light into our darkest places.  He brings God’s breath of new life into our most decrepit, rotten, decomposed, and destructive places.  And he transforms them because he is the Word of God’s creativity.

            We know from the other gospels that Jesus’ early life was anything but safe and comfortable.  In one gospel he is born in a stable; in another he has a king sending soldiers to kill him!  Yet he emerges into adulthood “full of grace and truth” because he understands who his real Father is.  He knows his life to be grounded far deeper than these tumultuous circumstances of his birth and infancy.  He knows he comes from God; he knows God is his Father. 

            This means he can inhabit our sin/flesh, he can take on our ego-centricity, and not be perverted by it.  It does not disfigure him.  It does not make him turn to violence or selfishness.  Knowing that God is his Father, God is his beginning, means that he knows no fear of anything earthly.  And knowing no fear, he does not react to threats with destructive actions.

            A key verse here is where it says that “those who did welcome him, those who believed in his name, he authorized to become God's children, born not from blood, nor from human desire or passion, but born from God.”  Trusting in him, following him, believing in him, means realizing that God is also our Father.  It is something we pray every day.  And yet we are so slow to realize the significance of what we are saying.

            Because if we really understand and know that the Creator God is our Father, our origin, our beginning, our Source… then we have no fear either.  Fear is driven out of us by the perfect love of God.  We become, not rejects from paradise who have to fight for every scrap of goodness, but new, unique expressions in the good creation of God’s goodness and love.

            As God sent him, so he sends us.  As he loved us so we are to love one another.  Now we bear the Word of creativity into a sterile world.  Now we shine the light of knowledge into a world of ignorance.  Now, into a world that careening into death, life blooms and grows in us and through us. 

V.

            And he gives us a calling, which we will hear in the rest of the gospel, which is to be the Word, light, and life in our world, in his name.  Why follow Jesus?  Because to follow anything or anyone else is the path of death and darkness.  Because following him is the path of true joy, in which our fear is banished and our suffering overcome.  Because to follow him is to become who we truly are as God created us.  Because to follow him is to live in a world that is literally made of God’s light and love.

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