First Sunday after Christmas Sermon

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

This is what’s known as the “Prologue to John,” the opening chapter of the last canonical gospel to be written about Jesus, well after the actual events of his life and death and resurrection. Scholars date it to somewhere between the years 90 to 100 ad or so. That means it was written with the wisdom of over 60 years of the early church reflecting on the big question, “Who is Jesus?”

This gospel is traditionally believed to have been written by John, Jesus’ disciple. It would have made him a very young man at the time of Jesus’ ministry, and a very old man at the time of the gospel’s writing. That’s why, in the history of Christian art, it’s always easy to pick out John – he’s the really young-looking disciple.

But, in hearing this prologue to John, with its enormous depiction of Jesus as the Word through whom all creation came into being, it begs the question, “How did John know this to be true of Jesus?” I mean, it’s one thing to report on Jesus’ activities: what he did, what he taught, what happened to him. And all four gospels do that. But it’s something quite different to make claims like these about Jesus’ “eternal identity,” what is sometimes called, “the Cosmic Christ.” Where did John get this insight? Because this doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing Jesus was saying of himself during his actual ministry. So where did it come from?

Well, so far as I can tell, there are a few options, that might overlap with each other:

Maybe Jesus’ teaching did include things like this, but most people just overlooked it. They were so focused on what they expected of the Messiah, that any “cosmic” sensibility of his discourse just flew right past them. But not John. Maybe he actually heard it and took it in.

Or, I wonder if this kind of teaching came from Jesus during that time between his resurrection and ascension – when clearly Jesus was revealed as something far more than a prophet and a healer. After all, there were forty on earth after Easter when he kept making periodic appearances with the disciples. And, clearly, he was changed by the resurrection. So it stands to reason that what he taught might also have changed. And, surely, the disciples would be receptive to hearing and trying to understand, “Who are you?”

Or this bigger insight about Jesus’ identity might have come later than that through a more mystical way – through prayer and the Spirit’s guidance. It’s clear, historically, that the growth of the church in its first generation was significantly accompanied by more charismatic and miraculous events than our generation of the church is experiencing. Healings, prophecies fulfilled, and whatnot were a significant part of what gave the church credibility in the claims it made.

This was certainly the case with the apostle Paul whose teaching on Christ is totally consistent with this cosmic sensibility of Jesus’ identity. Paul never knew Christ in the flesh. His conversion came later, through a totally mystical event in which he perceived Jesus speaking directly to him, in such a convincing way that he went from being a persecutor of the church to becoming its chief evangelist and theologian.

And all this speculation is simply to say, within the first generation of the church, the theology around Jesus – and a fuller understanding of who he was – was growing exponentially, through a combination of memories and reflections from eye witnesses who were in relationship with him and through a Holy Spirit guided process of learning and through the experience of the early church doing the work of the church in Jesus’ name. It had to have been something like becoming a parent: The moment that baby pops out, you are a full-fledged mom or dad. And, as the years go by, you figure out what that means. You become a mom or dad in a much fuller, wiser, more confident way. The Church was the body of Christ from its inception. And it became the body of Christ as it lived out Christ’s ministry. And that included this deepening wisdom of who their Christ was.

And the complexity of the Jesus they were continuing to discover continues to be true and useful and needful for us…

We need a Christ of mission, such as the Jesus we see in the stories of his ministry. We need to see Jesus showing us how God values us as physical creatures in this physical world: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, loving the outcast – all of these tangible expressions of love that are absolutely necessary to us as embodied people. And we need all the relational aspects of ministry that Jesus also shows: how to live as reconciled people in community together – in which forgiveness is allowed to become the strongest force to overcome evil and estrangement. And the incarnate Jesus does all this for us – teaching us and modeling for us the divine priority for this breadth of love that is tangible and relational.

But we also need more. We need this Cosmic Christ. The spiritual yearnings of our hearts crave union with a God who is so much bigger than what religions so often peddle – those punctilious gods with their moral codes and rules of obedience, rooted in legalism. The heart never craves such a god. It merely fears such a god. And upon such fears the church has often taken advantage of people, wresting from them their money and compliance.

But the heart knows otherwise. It wants to worship. It wants to perceive a God of glory from whom all creation derives, a God who is beauty itself – such that everything we delight in throughout creation becomes a witness of the Creator whose likeness it bears. We want this God to be so big as to hold the whole cosmos in his embrace. And we want this God to be so intimate as to hold each of us in our finiteness with the tenderness and devotion and love of a mother’s embrace. And we want this same God to be in us, one with us, as necessary to us and our existence as are the waters flowing perpetually through us and all living things. The heart craves such a God for it was made by such a God.

And it is just such a God that the church has come to believe and hope in, through the ministry of Christ who revealed for us the heart of God – a revelation of God’s love meeting us where we are, yet vast beyond all reckoning.

And it is the fulness of such a God that the wisdom of our creeds directs us:

We believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth

We believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God

We believe in God the Holy Spirit.

For in our creeds we perceive that the nature of God is to be a community of oneness – that the godhead itself is pure love manifested in a perpetual indwelling of the other. And if this how God exists, and if it is from such a God that we were created, then we, too, were made for such perpetual, indwelling love. This is the pure reality of all existence…including our own.

And, when in our lives and circumstances, we experience other than that, when we experience friction and division and isolation, Jesus the Son – Emmanuel, God with us – shows us that forgiveness is the power that restores us to perfect union. That is what he did for us all. Jesus forgave us our sins to restore us to unity – to be one with each other and one with God. And Jesus extends that same privilege to us – that same force and tool – that we would also forgive and in so doing, become partners with God in restoring this Creation to its rightful place of peaceful union.

And it is into such a faith and ministry as this that we commit ourselves in baptism. Through the sacrament of baptism, we affirm: this is who we believe God to be; this is the God in whom we are restored in perfect union through Christ; and this is the God whose way of being we choose to emulate in how we will live our lives.

We won’t do perfectly. That’s not the point. But in baptism, and whenever we renewal our baptismal covenant, or when we stand as sponsors for a child being baptized, we are committing ourselves to God and to a pursuit of God through godly living.

The way of Christ is trustworthy and true. It is worth giving ourselves to and re-giving ourselves to. In this world of division and fear and trivial devotions, the way of Christ is substance and worth. It is life-giving and purposeful. It is the heart of God, our Creator. It is love, welcoming us in: “You are mine and I am yours, you in me and I in you. Your doubts, your sins, your struggles – they are no match for my reality, my grace, and my commitment to you and to all I have made, this day and forever.”

For, “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”