Not Grasping It

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
12.16.07; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Reading: John 1:1-14

I know we’re all busy preparing for all of our holiday parties, and many of us are behind on our gift giving . We’re also stressed out at work as we move towards the end of the year, or stressed out at school as finals come crashing down on top of us, but there’s something I’m not sure many of us remember.

We’re moving towards a time in the Christian worship year when we celebrate of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Yeah, I know, I know, it’s easy to forget with all the twinkling lights and the stress that shimmers bright as sun-struck tinsel in our lives. But somewhere in the frenzy, there’s supposed to be a remembrance of the birth of a real live person, Yeshua ben Yoseph, Joshua son of Joseph.

So who was this person? Today, as we together have read and sung our way through the great story of Scripture, we’ve moved from those first stories of creation through the proclamations of the prophets, through to the Gospel’s telling of the story of Christ’s birth. But...just who is he? Who is this tiny little child, born to a humble family in the boondocks of an ancient empire?

People struggle with how to grasp Jesus, how to understand who he was and what he did. If you saw the movie Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, you might remember a short scene in which Ricky Bobby, a talented but impossibly stupid driver on the NASCAR circuit, attempts to bless a family meal in the name of the Baby Jesus. This starts up a discussion at the table about how you can pray to...and think about..Jesus. Ricky, in his epic simplicity, preferred to pray in the name of the little baby Jesus, because not only was the little eight-pound six ounce Baby Jesus tiny and cuddly, but he was also simultaneously omnipotent. His best friend and sidekick, the equally daft NASCAR driver Cal Naughton, Jr., had other ideas about Jesus:



We all have different ways of grasping who Jesus is and what he meant to the world. Some of those ways are...more different than others.

At the end of today’s readings, though, there came that soaring and poetic excerpt from the opening chapter of the Gospel of John. That tells us something different about who he was, something that goes well beyond the images of mangers and donkeys and wise men and flocks by night that tend to have the lock on our mental image of Jesus this holiday season.

John’s story goes back to the beginning. Not to the beginning of Jesus’s ministry in Judea, which is where the Gospel of Mark begins. Not to the story of the beginning of his life, which is where the Gospels of Matthew and Luke open their story. For his opening of the tale, John goes way back, back, back to the dawning of time and creation itself.

Jesus is there described not as a prophet or an infant or even as a future king. The first verse of John’s prologue lays it all out. You’ve heard it read in the English, but hear it in it’s original language, the Greek in which it was written:

En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos en pros ton theon, kai theos en ho logos.

He’s described as the Word, not just the kind of word you speak or write, but the logos, the creative power and living Word of God, God’s own self-expression, the power that made the universe and that sustains all things. When you go back to that prologue, to that first verse, it read a little differently in the language in which it was first written. If you read it literally, it proclaims: “And the Word was with God, and God was the Word.” The Word and God are woven up together, different yet the same.

In that simple but challenging opening is the sum of all of John’s story of Jesus. In Christ, in this basic act, in this tiny child, the One who created all things is entering into our world. Changing it. Changing us. For over 2000 years we have struggled to understand him. For two millenia we have found countless stumbling and sometimes silly ways of hiding who he was under the darkness of our own selfishness, our own cultural bias, our own hatreds.

But that truth, that world transforming truth, that truth will not be overcome, no matter how deep the darkness might seem.