In the beginning was
the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…and the Word became
flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory. John 1.1 & 14
You may have wondered whether I have slipped a season or two
– those are words which we often hear at Christmas, the final reading at
traditional carol services, the reading which opens Midnight Mass, as a tiny
light is brought into the darkened church.
They’re the opening words of John’s Gospel. Like all the
best opening words they give us a clue about what the rest of the book will be
about. “It is a truth universally
acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in
want of a wife.” You don’t need to know the plot of Pride and Prejudice to know that we are in for a story about a rich
young man’s journey towards the married state. “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities, set during the
French Revolution starts with a clear signal that we are in for a roller-coaster
ride of triumph and tragedy.
John’s Gospel begins with words that tell us equally clearly
what we are going to be hearing about – the key themes he wants us to keep in
mind. This is going to be a story about the Word, about God speaking to us. But
this word won’t be written on a page; it is going to be expressed through
flesh, and in that flesh we will see God’s glory. God is going to speak through a human being,
through the whole of his life, all the physical stuff that all human people go
through – being born, growing, eating, sleeping, rejoicing, suffering, dying.
We will see Jesus sharing a wedding feast at Cana, thirsty at a well in Samaria, asking a woman
for a drink because he hasn’t got a bucket, being anointed just before his
death. We will see Jesus caring for the flesh of others too, healing the sick,
feeding the hungry, washing feet. And, ultimately we will see Jesus’ flesh
beaten and crucified, Jesus’ flesh, the flesh of the Word made flesh, dying and
being laid in a stone cold tomb, while his disciples, afraid for their own
flesh, hide away.
Today’s Gospel reading comes from what was originally the
very end of John’s Gospel – another chapter, a sort of extended P.S. was added
very early on – but it was meant to end here, with Jesus, standing among this
disciples, God’s Word having the last word, a glorious word, stronger than
death, but a word which is still very
definitely flesh, the same flesh as they had seen crucified. Jesus still bears
the marks of the nails and the wound of the spear in his side. He isn’t some
incorporeal ghost, a wispy spirit, or a figment of their imagination. He is a body,
a flesh and blood body. I can’t explain that, but it is what the story insists
on. His wounds haven’t been airbrushed away. So his resurrection isn’t about
transcending the limitations of the flesh. It is a glorification of that flesh,
a declaration that - just as it is - wounded and battered, flesh that has
literally been to hell and back, this is flesh which is full of God’s glory.
“The Word became flesh
and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory”. That doesn’t just refer to
the baby lying in the manger, shining in the darkness of Christmas nigh – in
fact John doesn’t tell any birth stories of Jesus, so it probably doesn’t refer
to that at all. It is really about this moment, when a wounded Jesus stands
before his friends , in flesh which has suffered and died, and been raised from death.
Whatever else we might draw from the story of the resurrection
we are meant to draw the message that bodies are blessed, that God, in his
glory, chose to dwell in them, just as they are, wounded, beaten, scarred. Our
bodies are not prisons for our spirits – however much they may sometimes feel
like that. They aren’t a second best, from which death will set us free. Our
flesh, our day to day bodily existence, just as it is, can be a message of
God’s glory, of God’s love.
But to be that, our flesh, like Jesus’, needs to be filled
with God’s life. Jesus breathes on the frightened disciples in that locked room.
“Receive the Holy Spirit” he says – there’s no waiting for the Day of Pentecost
for the coming of the Spirit in John’s story. The Spirit is given right now, to
this bunch of stunned disciples , who aren’t ready for it in any sense, who are
conscious at this moment only of their own failure and misery. Fine friends
they turned out to be, deserting Jesus just when he needed them most. But it is
into their frail flesh that God’s Spirit is breathed.
The Gospel writer surely means us to remember the story from
the book of Genesis of the creation of Adam. God makes a creature out of mud.
It’s fine. It’s God’s handiwork, but it’s lifeless. So God leans over and
breathes into it his own breath – his Spirit – the words are interchangeable in
Hebrew - and the creature stirs and sits
up and lives. Adam becomes a living being, a “nephesh” in Hebrew, the living
being that God intends him to be, a combination of God-created flesh and
God-breathed Spirit. Both are essential, both are blessed - and both are holy.
The story of Jesus isn’t the story of a comic book
superhero, who swoops down with his special powers to save the day. It is a
story of a flesh and blood person, who shows us how much God loves our flesh
and blood, in all its wonder and its woundedness, in all the joy and sorrow
that comes to it as we are born, grow, grow old and die.
That’s a vital message for us to take in, for ourselves and
for others.
The ancient Greeks, whose thought world shaped the thinking
of John’s first readers, still shapes our world. In Greek, the word for
beautiful – kalos – is the same as
the word for good. To be beautiful was to be good; to be good was to be
beautiful. We have never really moved on from that; heroes and heroines in
films are still rarely ugly. Young people obsessively post selfies online,
trying to produce the best version of themselves, anxiously watching for their
peers to “like” the pictures they’ve posted. Older people fight the signs of
aging. Many of us really don’t much like our bodies. “Keep
young and beautiful; it’s your duty to be beautiful . Keep young and beautiful if
you want to be loved,” says the old
song. Well, no, not in God’s eyes. The resurrection shows us that God loves us,
wounds and all, warts and all. God uses us wounds and all, warts and all. God’s
glory can shine from us, wounds and all, warts and all. In fact, it is the
wounds and the warts which are the most powerful testimony of his life at work
in us, the times of failure and weakness in which his glory is most powerfully
seen.
The Easter story isn’t just about the resurrection of Jesus’
lifeless body from the grave; it is also about the resurrection that comes to
his disciples when he appears to them. Jesus isn’t the only one in this story
who has known death. His disciples are stuck in the death of hope,
so fearful of what might happen next that they daren’t even stir from the room
where they are hiding. Jesus may have been held fast in the tomb by the stone
across its entrance, but they have locked themselves in a tomb of their own, in
a sort of living death. They need the breath of life to be breathed into them
just as much as Jesus did if they are going to get up and go out into the world
to become living Words themselves, ways in which God can speak to others and
tell them that God loves them.
We often need the same, as we huddle in our own locked rooms
– the locked rooms of depression or anxiety or hopelessness. And we pray today
especially, of course, for our brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka, whose church
services have been cancelled, and who have been told to worship at home
instead, literally shut in their rooms for fear of those who might harm them.
We pray that they will feel the breath of God giving peace to their wounded
souls and bodies as they read this story today.
An ancient Christian writer called Irenaeus famously said “The
glory of God is a human being, fully alive.” The resurrection of Jesus doesn’t just show us
God’s glory in him; it shows us the glory that can shine from all our frail and
battered flesh if we will let him breathe his life into us and raise us from our
deaths.
I started with the beginning of John’s Gospel. I will finish
with its original end, the words that end today’s reading, John’s prayer that
we may know, and show, the glorious life of God.
Now Jesus did many
other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this
book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the
Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his
name. Amen
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