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 apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. ...And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.
These words from the first chapter of John have always intrigued me, especially when they are read during the seasons of Advent through Epiphany. I think they fascinate me by the suggestion that Jesus and language--or communication--are inextricably bound up in one another. For someone who loves language the way I do, this association is powerful; this words bespeak something vital about the role of language in expressing who God is, what God says, and how God says it. Perhaps in Jesus--and, by extension, in language--we encounter something otherwise elusive about God, and something staggering about the Incarnation. Just a few verses later, John says that “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.”
“In the beginning was the Logos,” Greek for “word”: synonymous with discourse, reason, speech, thought, principle, or apparent truth. John casts Jesus as all of these things, and he cannot be ignorant of the philosophical connotations of the word, which the Greeks used first to refer to human rationality. We are led to understand that Jesus makes all that is, make sense: that he communicates reality, that he is the very mind of God explained to us. “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has exegesato Him,” John asserts, recognizing Jesus’ unique explanatory power. Jesus exegetes God in a way nothing else can--not creation, not any other human being, not even God himself. This may cast other instances of theophany in a new light, suggesting that when God wrestles with Jacob, or shows Moses or Elijah his back, that there is something still in the way of God fully communicating with people. Perhaps it is God’s holiness--he instructs Elijah to hide himself and Elijah hides his face with his cloak--or God’s blinding purity. Other times, he seems to hide in a cloak of anonymity, where the visited person only wonders aloud, after a time, if he has been in the presence of God. In either case, there is an overwhelming sense of God’s “otherness” that seems to prevent direct communication, even when God is speaking with a person he has chosen to speak with. Jesus, then, speaks God’s mind to us in a way that transcends or overcomes that “otherness.” Even when we don’t comprehend him, Jesus is the most direct link to the thoughts of the God the Father.
The implications of this abound, but I want to focus specifically on what Jesus can explain to us about our experience of God, about how we read and understand Scripture, how we live its truth in the context of community, and about how our rational minds come to understand the basis of our faith. Let organize this discussion by saying that for me, God is mediated through four authoritative sources that coincide with what is dubbed John Wesley’s “Quadrilateral”: Scripture, Reason, Tradition, Experience. Writing words on a page, or even speaking them, do not make them a reality. Similarly, crafting a logical argument, doing something out of habit or to gain approval, or relying exclusively on one’s own experiences without referencing experts hardly guarantees accuracy or benefit. Similarly, each of these legs has inherent liabilities, but together, they check and balance one another to produce a sturdy platform for faith.
No comments:
Post a Comment