John 1:1-18 (1)

07/27/08
John 1:1-18
Hudson UMC

As you might imagine, explaining, writing about, or preaching on the Trinity is not the easiest thing in the world to do. It is a mystery of God that the greatest minds in Christian history have spent their entire lives trying to understand, in ever-clearer ways, how the three persons of the Trinity work together and better ways to explain it to the common person who does not have a lifetime to dedicate to the study of a single doctrine. During Wesley’s day, the doctrines of the Trinity and of the Incarnation, which are intimately related, were under severe attack. People just couldn’t get their minds wrapped around how three could be one and, since it was a time when intellectuals were beginning to say that anything they could not understand must not be true, the doctrine of the Trinity fell on hard times and has never fully recovered in the bulk of the theology of ordinary American Christians. The Trinity is extremely difficult to understand. One might say that it is impossible to understand fully, and yet, it is the single most ecumenically affirmed doctrine in Christianity. Nearly all the theological writing of the fourth and fifth centuries were concerned with articulating this doctrine carefully because they believed that it was what the apostles taught and that to misunderstand it is to be something other than a Christian. I do not think so highly of myself to try and embark on a comprehensive explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity. That would probably be over your heads as well as mine and might even bore you to sleep. What I want to try and do, is talk about some of the basic Trinitarian and Incarnational claims in this text and how they fundamentally make a difference in our faith in God.

The very first words in the entire Gospel of John are “In the beginning”. Now, John is not the only book in the Bible that starts with those words. If you recall, the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, the book that sets out to tell humanity who the God of the universe is, also starts with the words “In the beginning”. The whole point of these words in Genesis is to establish that there is a great chasm between that which is created and that which is uncreated. Before there was anything else, there was God. These words, “In the beginning” attempt to convey that, since everything else came after God, everything else is less than God. There is a lot of information in those three words.

All of that is to say that, when John chooses to use those very same words at the beginning of his gospel, it is not a coincidence. If you were to go up to John and say, “Hey, you know I noticed that your gospel starts the same way that Genesis does”, he would say, “I know. I planned it that way.” Those words were chosen with great care. In light of this, when John says, “In the beginning was the Word”, we ought to hear a direct comparison being made with this Word and the God of the Israelites. In fact, in order to make sure we don’t miss the point, he continues, saying, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This is an amazingly bold statement because John then goes on to draw distinctions between this Word that becomes flesh and God the Father. He tells of Jesus, the Word of God, praying to the Father as if there were some difference between them, and yet including statements from Christ’s own mouth such as “The Father and I are one” (10:30). This Word of God was both with God, implying that they are two different persons, and yet saying that the Word of God was God. This might be giving you a little bit of a headache, but don’t feel bad, because it has given people with greater minds than you or I will ever have far bigger ones. The Jewish people during Jesus’ time did not like this because it seemed like the Christians were polytheistic, meaning they worshipped more than one God, the Father and the Son and also claiming to follow the God of the Old Testament, who had made a big deal about His oneness. The oneness of God was so important that one of the most important prayers in Judaism is from Deuteronomy chapter six. “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!”

So which is it? Do Christians follow both the Father and the Son, or do they follow the one God of the Old Testament? The church has uniformly answered for two thousand years that the answer is, “both”. Again, I want to stress that this is a very intellectually challenging idea and you will very likely leave this morning feeling more confused about the Trinity than you were when you came in, but I pray that it will stimulate thought in your daily life and that you will begin to see how very relevant the Trinity is in Christianity, particularly in Methodism.

So, when we hear something that, to be perfectly honest, sounds a bit contradictory, we start to wonder if perhaps there are other solutions that satisfy our rational minds a little better. Most of the heresies of the early church that stirred up so much controversy were started by well meaning individuals who wanted to make the Christian understanding of God more palatable to people. Again, I want to stress that heresies at the time were not grounds for witch-hunts like they were in the middle ages. Heresy was a pastoral diagnosis that claimed that a particular belief was ultimately destructive and must not be taught. For example, one priest in Alexandria in the very early fourth century named Arius, taught that there indeed was only one God and that Christ was not really Him. He argued that The Word of God was the first of all the creation of God the Father. His slogan was, “There was when the Son was not.” This was a conflict that engaged the greatest theologians of the time, so we can’t go into all the details here, but think about the problems that view would cause. I mentioned a bit ago the great chasm between that which is created and that which is uncreated. This school of thought, called Arianism, put the Son of God on the side of creation rather than on that of uncreation. This might not seem like that big a deal, but it means that, however much closer Christ was to God than you or I might be, he was still infinitely far away from Him. Further, why should we listen to what he says if He is not God? If we believe the words of the prophets because they are the word of God Himself, why would we settle for this being that, despite how good he might be, is still less than God?

When we go back to the text, the problems with this view increase. If this is what John meant, why did he write, “In the beginning was the Word” and not, “In the beginning, God created the Word”? Why would John speak of the Word as being close to the Father’s heart, if it was just as separated from God as we are? No, we can’t seem to get around the fact that John considered the man who we know as Jesus of Nazareth to be something more than merely human. He considered Him to be God incarnate, God in flesh. To John, and indeed, to the entire Church, Jesus was a great human teacher, but He was also far more than this as well. Jesus was also a great Divine teacher, revealing the very heart of God to humanity because He was God in the flesh. It is popular nowadays for people to greatly respect Jesus as a moral guide and to lump Him into the same category as Mohammad, the leader of Islam, Ghandi, and many others. However, even from this passage alone, though it is confirmed over and over again throughout the New Testament, we can tell that the church thought much more highly of Christ than this. That the God of the universe, who continually stressed how much higher He is than us, would come to earth as a weeping, wailing baby, to endure the human condition, just like you and I have to, and to allow Himself to be murdered on a cross to pay the price for our sins was seen as the ultimate act of love that it was, and when people found out about it, it quite literally changed their lives forever.

As you might have figured out by now, I am not very big on visual aids, illustrations, and stories. This is not because I don’t think they can be useful, but because it is simply not the way that I naturally think. Whether you see this as being a good or a bad thing, coming up with analogies to explain the Trinity has had a long and sordid history. Just like the Trinitarian heresies, they have been put forward by well intentioned people who manage to do more harm than good. The most popular of these images is that of water. Water can be a liquid, it can be a solid as ice, and it can be a gas as water vapor, and people often say that these three states are like the three Persons of the Trinity. That sounds pretty good at first, doesn’t it? However, at any given moment, water can only exist in one of those states, never all three at once. The heresy that this illustrates is called Modalism or Sabellianism, after its first teacher. This way of reconciling the Trinity is to say that there is really only one God, but when this one God acts, we perceive Him as being either the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit, though, in reality, there are no such distinctions between them at all because they are one and the same. We in the American Church, and, sadly, in United Methodism, have all too often adopted a Modalist faith. We never come out and say it, but we imply it whenever we refer to the Trinity in terms like “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” instead of “Father, Son and Holy Spirit”. Again, this is a well-meaning attempt to get rid of male-dominated language and be more inclusive, but it has disastrous consequences.

If we call God “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” and claim that it is an expression of the Trinity, what does that mean? It seems to imply that God the Father, and He alone, creates us; that God the Son, and He alone, Redeems us, and God the Holy Spirit, and He alone, sustains us. We like this compartmentalizing, but we find that the Bible always talks about the three Persons of the Trinity being eternally involved in the same works. There is nothing that the Father does alone, nor the Son, nor the Spirit. Everything the Trinity does is carried out by each Person simultaneously. To make one example for all, let us consider creation. Look at Genesis chapter one. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” Did you catch that? All three Persons of the Trinity were involved. Yes, it is true that God the Father created the heavens and the earth, but not without the presence of the Spirit and the speaking of the Word of God. When you start looking for the Trinity, you start seeing it everywhere.

Again, if we look back at our text, we start to see Scriptural problems with this Modalist viewpoint. It makes sense of the Word being God, but it can make no sense out of the Word being with God, just like you could not make sense of the sentence, “I am with myself”. Also, later in chapter ten of the Gospel of John, when Jesus declares that He and the Father are one, Modalism jumps right in to say that there are not any differences between the Persons, but it is at a loss earlier in the same passage, when Jesus talks about His Father as being something other than Himself.

This might very well be the most you have ever thought about the Trinity, so I won’t keep blazing ahead with these complicated ideas that I am far from understanding fully. However, I hope that you have begun to have a glimpse that the Trinity is a big deal. Theologically, it means that God’s love is greater than we could ever have guessed. When the evil of sin became so rooted in humanity that no amount of self-motivation could deliver us, when there was no way out of the evil that ruled the world, God did not entrust our salvation to a mere servant, a created being with finite power, but took our burden upon Himself and became flesh just like you and me. It shows us that there is far more to Christianity than a list of things to do and a list of things to avoid. There is love that passes all knowledge, a love that not only reveals to us the difference between good and evil, but empowers us to overcome the evil in our lives and in our culture. It means that God is really not a God who is far away, but who is so very close that He took on our limitations and experienced the brokenness of this world firsthand. From a practical point of view, it means that if we are made in the image of a God who has existed since eternity past in community, we are called to live in community, to lift each other up, to let our lives interact in the most fundamental way.

When I stared Seminary, I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the Trinity. The One is Three, the Three are One; it’s really deep and nobody really understands it and that’s fine. If that is where you are at today, praise God, because not everyone settles in that easily. Though I’ve only been learning about God in a formal setting for a year, my whole perception on this fundamental doctrine has changed and I am more amazed and in love with God because of it than I have ever been before. Do I fully understand it? Of course not, but I’ve got a glimpse and it has made me hungry for more.

As you leave here this morning, whether you might have found this sermon to be difficult to listen to or if this topic completely fascinates you like it does me, I pray that you will allow yourselves to be challenged by the reality that you do not simply serve the One God, but you serve the Three-One God. I want to make a Methodist connection to all of this. John Wesley was remarkably Trinitarian. Everywhere you look in his theological writings, you find the Trinity invoked and spoken of. In fact, in his sermon On the Trinity, he makes rather a bold claim. He says, “I know not how any one can be a Christian believer till he ‘hath,’ as St. John speaks, ‘the witness in himself;’ till ‘the Spirit of God witnesses with his spirit, that he is a child of God;’ that is, in effect, till God the holy Ghost witnesses that God the Father has accepted him through the merits of God the Son: And, having this witness, he honours the Son, and the blessed Spirit, ‘even as he honours the Father.’”

Wesley believed that you could not really be a Christian if you denied the Trinity. Even if you don’t go this far with him, there is still the challenge of the universal church throughout all of Christian history which has claimed, not only the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity, but that it is the foundation of all Christian faith. Catholics believe it, Eastern Orthodox believers believe it, and all kinds of Protestants believe it. I pray that you would let this doctrine that people literally died to defend impact your thoughts and your prayers this week and forever. Let us pray.

AMEN