John 1:1-18

07/10/11 John 1:1-18 Spencer GUMC

Jesus Christ is the answer. Jesus Christ is the incarnation of the Word of God, the incarnation of God, the ultimate gift of God to human beings, the one through whom we come to the Father, the one who laid down his life for us that we might be delivered from our flesh of sin and reconciled to God, once and for all. Jesus Christ is the full and final word of God to humanity and the full and final word of humanity to God, the great high priest and the ultimate sacrifice; offerer and offering. By being who he is, Christ is the absolute hinge that holds our faith together, the linchpin upon which everything hangs. It is because Jesus is who he is that we believe what we believe. It is truly because of this God made flesh that we call ourselves "Christians."

This is my first opportunity to share the word of God with this congregation as a whole, so I wanted to spend this morning sharing with you some of the things that are absolutely pivotal to who I am and to what I believe. One of the things you need to know is that I absolutely love to study theology. I get really excited about what people have said about God over the centuries and I love to see how our ideas today have developed from those in the past. Sometimes that development has been good and faithful; sometimes it makes me scratch my head and wonder what on earth we were thinking. I emphasized theological studies in seminary, taking every theology course I could sign up for and even doing some independent studies so I could go beyond what the school offered. Over the past four years especially, I have read thousands of pages and written dozens of papers, largely about what other people have believed.

The reason why I bring this up is because I want you to know that I take the task of thinking hard about God and what God has done very seriously. With all that said, I want to try to lay out for you, in only one sentence, what my theology is. Here it is: Jesus...really. What I mean by this is that I try to make Jesus the center of absolutely everything; everything I say, everything I do, and even everything I think. When I try to make sense out of some issue, I do my best to always go back to Jesus and see what I have to learn from him about it. This sounds simple, but I have found that, if we really take it seriously, if we really let Jesus be the source of all our thinking about God, about humanity, and about the relation between the two, it has astonishing consequences.

I want to give a somewhat complicated illustration of what I mean from the world of science. When Albert Einstein published his theory of Special Relativity in 1905, it caused something of a sensation. It seemed to throw out all kinds of ideas that scientists had held so dear for so long; it seemed so counter-intuitive from the way they had been used to seeing things. Just about everyone who I've ever known who has tried to understand Relativity Theory, including myself, has had a hard time because it seems, at first glance, to be extremely complicated. However, it only seems complicated. It is actually very simple.

The reason why Relativity Theory is simple is because it is largely based on one central conviction: The speed of light is constant for all observers. That is, when light is observed, regardless of whether you are moving or standing still, light always seems to be traveling about 186,000 miles per second in relation to you. Now, that doesn't sound all that revolutionary when you first hear it, but what happens when we take it seriously? Let's say you are on a train and you fire a bullet in the direction of the train, how fast is the bullet going? Well, it's going the speed of the train plus the speed of the bullet. However, let's say the train is going into a tunnel, so they turn the light on. How fast is the light going? We want to say that it is going 186,000 miles per second plus the speed of the train, but we would be wrong. The light is still only observed as going the original 186,000 miles per second. Nothing in the universe travels faster than the speed of light. This one basic conviction forces us to redefine concepts, like space and time, that we used to think were obvious and understand them in terms of light.

It is not altogether different with the utter centrality of Christ. To say that Christ is the center and source of all our understanding of God, humanity, and the relation between the two does not sound all that revolutionary at first. In fact, it sounds pretty ordinary. And yet, when we take it seriously, it transforms our understanding of things like good and evil, power, love, mercy, compassion, and many other things that we thought we had a pretty good grasp on before. In fact, if we make up our minds to make Jesus Christ, whom the church has proclaimed since the very beginning to be truly God and worthy of worship and is declared in the great creeds to be of one and the same being as God the Father, the ultimate standard about what we believe about God and allow all our convictions to stand or fall based on how well the conform, not to what one leader or another says, but to who Christ is, we find that there are many things that seemed so difficult before that are revealed to be obvious in light of Christ.

For almost all of my Christian life, I have considered the first passage in John to be one of the most outstanding and beautiful passages of the good news of Jesus Christ. John tells us that this Word of God, this one who was with God and who is God is the one who came among us as Jesus Christ. In Christ, God himself has come to meet us. When we hear the words of Christ, we hear the very words of God; when we see the works of Christ, they are the very works of God in our midst. When we look into the face of Christ, we see the face of God, a face that we have never seen anywhere else and we could not have seen in any other way.

In Christ, we do not only hear that God loves us, we see it in concrete majesty. We see that Jesus is not just another prophet, just another human teacher with some kind of link to God, but God in flesh, God with us. In Jesus, we do not experience God in man but God as man. We see the Lord of all, who created the universe with a word from his lips, who, as the Psalmist says, laughs in unconcern when the nations unite to rage against him, who does not need us in order to be God, coming among us, sharing in our broken condition, and being willing even to die for us and our salvation. It is something so astonishing that Charles Wesley could write: "'Tis mystery all, the Immortal dies! Who can explore his strange design? In vain the firstborn seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. 'Tis mercy all! Let earth adore; let angel minds inquire no more."

But what kind of world did God enter into? We are told that, when Jesus came, he did not come into a foreign world, a world that had no connection to God, but a world that he himself had created, that he had moulded and shaped long before he came in human flesh. With the birth of Christ, the Creator entered into his creation, took creatureliness upon his own eternal self, and joined us in our hurting world.

It would seem that, if God himself were to come among his people, in the world that he created, it would be a cause for great rejoicing, that everyone from all over the world would be so excited that God himself had come that they would give him their loyalty, as grateful people who were being visited by their God. However, no such thing was the case. When Jesus was born, some shepherds visited, some rulers from other nations brought him gifts but, in general, not many people took notice. The Lord of the universe entered our world of space and time, not in a palace, but in a stable, with a feeding trough for a bed. The people of God, who had been marked out for hundreds of years as God's people in a special way, who knew him better than any others, practically ignored him. It is as John tells us at the beginning of his gospel, "He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him."

If we wanted to, we could be filled with nothing but regret because the people rejected God when he came among them. And yet, our primary emotion when we hear of Christ being born in a stable is not regret but joy. The joy we feel is not because there is no regret. It is not as though we can pretend that it would not have been better if the people showed more compassion and hospitality toward that young woman in labor, the bearer of God in their midst. We are not joyful because it is somehow a good thing that God's own people did not accept him. Rather, we rejoice that, in spite of the mistreatment that Christ suffered at the hands of his own people, in spite of the trials he went through, in spite of the betrayal and abandoning at the hands of his closest friends, God did not keep away, but came among us anyway.

I don't know about you, but the things in the Bible that are most amazing to me are not the miracles. It isn't particularly amazing to me that Jesus can heal the sick, calm the sea, and even raise the dead. If Jesus really is God among us, the Creator personally entering his creation, those are precisely the kinds of things that we would expect him to be able to do. What is more amazing to me is that Jesus is so unlike us in the way he shows compassion.

For example, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman by the side of a well and, in the middle of their conversation, exposes her sinful lifestyle, revealing to her that she is an adulterer and even he, a perfect strangers, knows it. That is hardly what most of us would call particularly compassionate ministry. And yet, what do we read? We read that she goes off and tells all her neighbors and the people who live in her town and says, "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?" When Jesus confronts the woman with her sin, she wants to tell everyone about it because it is the best news she has ever heard.

Why is this? I am more and more convinced that, if Jesus had not pressed the woman, had not exposed her for who she had been and what she had done, she would never have been able to take his forgiveness seriously. She would always have been able to say, "Well, that's a nice thing to say, but he doesn't really know me or what I've done. I can't really be forgiven." As it was, Jesus revealed that his word of forgiveness was not being directed to someone that he thought didn't need it, but to one who had sinned mightily. Jesus knew just what kind of sin the woman was guilty of and forgave her anyway.

That is what John means when he says that, in spite of the fact that the people we would expect to accept Jesus did not do so, he gave everyone who does receive him "power to become children of God, who" are "born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of a husband, but of God." That is why we are told that "we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth." That kind of radical forgiveness and transformation that we receive in Christ is why John declares that "From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace."

The last verse of our passage for this morning is so very important. It has changed my life and my whole way of thinking and I truly believe that it can transform the lives and thinking of others as well. "No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known." If we want to know the answer to the question, "How do we come to know God?" Here is our answer. We do not need to go up to the top of a mountain to find God, we do not need to hide in a cave to await enlightenment. We do not need to speculate based on our own feelings or cultural convictions about who God is and what God does. God the only Son, Jesus Christ, who is close to the Father's heart, has made God known. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we are made to know God because of what Christ has done for us and our salvation.

God has come among us, God has drawn near. It is the very most amazing thing in the whole history of the world and it has the power to transform lives. God is always greater than we can imagine, but God has refused to remain a total mystery to us. God has had compassion on us weak and broken human beings and has graced this world of ours by entering into it. God has revealed himself in Christ in a way that only he could do, has stepped down to be among us, to speak our language, to eat with us, to live with us, and to save us from ourselves and from the evil that so often surrounds us. Let us now and always focus on the amazing gift of God, Jesus Christ, where the giver and the gift are one. God has spoken, his Word has been made flesh. Let us listen to it with open eyes and ears. Let us pray.

AMEN