“En arche en ho logos” – a sermon

Sermon by Jamie Howison on Galatians 4:4-7 and John 1:1-14

Merry Christmas everybody, on this, the 1st Sunday in Christmastide. Tonight we read a kind of nativity story from the Gospel according to John; one very different from what was proclaimed on Christmas Eve from the Gospel according to Luke, and equally different from the story we’ll read next Sunday from the Gospel according to Matthew. Both Luke and Matthew give us very linear stories; narratives that sing with familiarity:

• In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered… [and] the time came for Mary to deliver her child… and in that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.

• In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’

Pictures spring to mind when we hear those words, whether we see classic paintings of the scenes, the creche we have set out in our homes, or even those old-fashioned Sunday School pageants—all tinsel wings, beards and bathrobes.

John’s kind of nativity story doesn’t evoke any such things, because as is so typical of the Gospel according to John, he chooses to focus his camera differently. There’s an old saying about John, that his gospel is like a pool that’s safe for a child to paddle in, but deep enough for an elephant to swim in, which is another way of saying that if you read John just once, you’ll have a good sense of the Jesus he wants to tell you about, but read John a hundred times and you’ll keep stumbling across something new.

As the poet Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” which is what John is doing here in his nativity story, the Prologue to his telling of the Gospel. En arche en ho logos. “In the beginning was the Word,” John proclaims as he begins the prologue. En arche—“In the beginning”—which is precisely the way the way the book of Genesis begins; in the Greek Septuagint version which was the most commonly read version in Jesus’ times, the first two words of Genesis are identical to the first two in John— En arche—and no 1st Century Jewish reader or listener would fail to see that. John is aligning his poetic prologue with the poetry of the first creation story in Genesis, and he wants that noticed.

In fact, in the view of N.T. Wright, John wants us to hear the parallels between the whole of his gospel story and that six-day creation narrative. “Genesis 1,” comments Bishop Wright, “declares that the God who made the world is the heaven-and-earth God, the working-through-humans-in-the-world God.” The first chapter of Genesis is a gradual, day by day build toward the creation of humans, who are “in the image of God,” and entrusted with a role of profound responsibility for the good creation. And so Bishop Wright continues,

With this vision of Genesis before us, we understand both the beginning and the climax of John’s gospel: in the beginning, en arche, bereshith—that’s the Hebrew for “in the beginning”—in the beginning was the Word… and the Word became flesh. And in the end [on what Wright calls “the ultimate sixth day”] when the light has shone in the gathering darkness and the darkness has tried to extinguish it, the final word echoes Genesis once more: tetelestai, it is finished. The work is accomplished.

There follows the rest of the seventh day, the rest in the tomb, before the first day of the new week when Mary Magdalene comes to the garden and discovers that new creation has begun. John is writing a new Genesis…

John is writing a new Genesis, and he packs into this Prologue—this slant-told nativity story—several of the essentials of his theological and poetic vision.

In proclaiming that from the very beginning, “the Word was with God, the Word was God, and that all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being,” John is pushing us into a sophisticated theology of Jesus Christ that will eventually crystalize in the doctrine of the Trinity. The Christ didn’t happen into the world in 4 BCE in Bethlehem when Jesus was born, but rather has been from the very beginning. No, what happens in Bethlehem is that “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” It is the birth in time of the timeless Son of God, it is God-with-us. Or, in the paraphrase from Eugene Peterson in The Message,

The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.

Yet, John knows that when the Word moved into the neighbourhood not everyone was happy about it, which is why Jesus ended up arrested, tried in the mock courts of both the temple authorities and the Empire, and executed as a political criminal.

But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of humankind, but of God.

Which is something echoed in our reading tonight from Paul’s letter to the Galatians:

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

That’s what both Paul and John most need to tell us this Christmas season—one marked for so many by heaviness, loss, disappointment, and grief—that because of the birth of the Christ—because the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood—we have been adopted as daughters and sons of God and named as brothers and sisters of Jesus. With Spirit-infused hearts we can cry out to God as children cry out to a parent: Abba! Father! And we can—we should, we must—do that especially on the hardest days, in the loneliest seasons, on the longest nights.

You see Christmastide doesn’t merely mark the birth of Jesus, it celebrates the rebirth of us all. And it insistently points beyond our own day to the horizon of all of time and history when the re-creation of the heavens and the earth—the new Creation to which John’s “new Genesis” ultimately points is brought about in its fullness.

I can think of no better way to bring this sermon to a close than by reading you a poem by Richard Wilbur, called “A Christmas Hymn.” The words will be familiar to some of you, as it appears on Steve Bell’s album, A Feast of Seasons, and we’ve sung it here a few times over the years. Like the Prologue to the Gospel according to John, Wilbur’s poem points well beyond Bethlehem, to the very re-creation of all things:

A stable-lamp is lighted
Whose glow shall wake the sky;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
And straw like gold shall shine;
A barn shall harbor heaven,
A stall become a shrine.

This child through David’s city
Shall ride in triumph by;
The palm shall strew its branches,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
Though heavy, dull, and dumb,
And lie within the roadway
To pave his kingdom come.

Yet he shall be forsaken,
And yielded up to die;
The sky shall groan and darken,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry
For stony hearts of men:
God’s blood upon the spearhead,
God’s love refused again.

But now, as at the ending,
The low is lifted high;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry
In praises of the child
By whose descent among us
The worlds are reconciled.

Amen.