So Why Does God Self-Select "Us" as God's Pronoun? Also, the Origin of Father and Son?

John 1: 6-14                                                    February 1, 2021

⁶There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

            So here is the transition from Creator to Creation.  And the Word became flesh.  The Word, that was with God and was God in verse one.  The Word, through whom all things were made.  The Word, who brought life into being, who brought the light into the darkness.  I have named him Jesus from the very beginning.  John has not, because John has been building up to this.  Here is the ministry of Jesus.

            Jesus because flesh and lived among us.  That shall be the bulk of the gospel account, Jesus as flesh ‘among us’.  And now the witness of John, the gospel writer, of the disciples, “we have seen his glory”-eyewitness account-“as of a father’s only son” who is “full of grace and truth”. 

            “…as a father’s only son…”  I think John here is establishing the human metaphor to describe the relationship of God and the Word.  They are equated, but they are also distinct.  The Father and the Son, this is how God reveals God’s…what is the word?  Essence? Structure? Or is it more basic than that?  To structure it in time and space, where we humans are bound, was there a discussion that went something like,

“Okay, we are God and created the hairless monkeys…how do we explain what they can never comprehend?  Their brainbox is a fine bit of creation, but it has its limits, no matter what they believe,  What, in their relationship, can we use to explain what we are?  Because, in the human language, if we are to give them a pronoun to describe us, it will be ‘we’ and ‘us’.  What about husband and wife?  Well, they are going to screw up that with their sins.  Father and Son…they are going to be gender limited in their perceptions of authority, but that is what we have to work with, and in the progression of revelation, they should catch up that gender hierarchy is the result of sin and they can, in the Holy Spirit, overcome it.  Until then, we will have to work double time on them through the Spirit so they don’t get caught in thinking that the Father is some old white guy up in heaven and the Son is some blond, blue eyed Scandinavian suddenly born in the Middle East…”

            Yes, I know God loves us, this whole Gospel is an accounting of that.  But given how we humans are, I cannot help but think that if there is some kind of divine expression of frustration, we humans were enough to make the Lord express it.

            What I see John establishing is how it is we, as humans, as those who have believed in His Name and been given power to become children of God, how then we can understand not only our relationship with the Creator, but the Creator’s self-understanding, expressed to us hairless monkeys (for any Young Earth Creationists reading this, consider this to be anthropomorphizing satire of how God would consider the pinnacle of God’s creation-in light of the reality that we fell from grace). 

            But the takeaway is not trying to label the relationship of God and the Word, but on the content of that relationship, that content which is there for us, “grace and truth”. 

            These two sections, vss. 1-5 and 6-14, they form the introduction to John’s Gospel.  He takes us from the Word that was ‘in the beginning’ to the Word ‘made flesh’.  Transcendent power to imminent relationship.  That means God all-powerful to God down close and personal.  Tomorrow will be a summary before we move forward with the next verses on Wednesday.

Sidebar: Dividing up the verses in mini 'chapters', this is what I am doing, not what John has done.  As the Greek has no punctuation, neither does it have chapter and verse.  This is a human construct to facilitate quoting…chapter and verse…  As with anything, we do the best we can, depending on the Spirit of God to lead us.

Pastor Pete

No, Even If John Goes There, I am Not Going Into the Biology of Being Born Once in the Flesh and Born Again From God

John 1: 6-14                                                    January 29, 2021

⁶There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

            There is this thing in English grammar called the dependent clause.  It depends on another for its meaning.  Verse 13 is all dependent on what comes at the end of verse 12.  To consider this meaningfully, we should be looking at “…he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.  If we take out the dependent clauses, the whole sentence rewrites to this: “Jesus gave power to those who received and believed in his name to become children of God, who were born…of God.”

            John’s point is what is NOT involved in this birth (or rebirth).  Three things it is not:

1.      Of blood

2.      Of the will of the flesh

3.      Of the will of man (humanity)

This language of the second birth is elsewhere in John.  When we get to chapter 3, Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus who goes rather nauseatingly literal about being born again.  Can he reenter his mother’s womb? 

            The first dependent clause, ‘of blood’, is the literal consideration of birth.  I suppose I should consider whether or not this is a ‘family blog post’ so if anyone reading this does not know to what I refer, go ask your parents. 

            The second dependent clause, ‘of the will of the flesh’ comes a little too close to ‘birds and bees’ type of discussions so I will not go into that except to say it is in regards to pregnancy.  Will of the flesh…close enough.

            The third dependent clause, ‘of the will of man’, I added humanity after.  The will of humanity, to me, implies the choice to become pregnant.  The will of the flesh is, biology.  This is a decision to get…biological… 

            I make a distinction between man and humanity in the light of the present day.  I was raised in an era where I could understand “man” to mean humanity.  But in light of the ongoing political battles over reproductive health, over the control of women’s bodies, over an unfortunately loud minority in the Christian church misinterpreting Scripture to claim male domination of the family and the culture, I feel I must make this distinction.

            What I read in this third dependent clause is a decision to have a child.  So to paraphrase this verse, “…children of God, who were born, not of the physical act of birth, not of the condition of pregnancy in humans, not in the decision of humans to have a child, but of God.”  Each dependent clause is a step wider in the process of having a child.

            There is to be found in the New Testament a division between flesh and spirit, designating things of the sinful world versus things of heaven.  We were born first physically, but in Jesus, we are born spiritually.  From this derives the expression ‘born again’, translated in the New Revised Standard Edition as ‘born from above’.  ‘From above’ indicates from heaven, from the spiritual opposed to ‘from below’, here on sinful earth.  However, I am jumping WAY ahead.  We shall consider that phrasing and its modern implications to conversion and the church when we get there.

            What John is saying here is that for those who receive Jesus and believe in him, Jesus grants the power to be born of God to become children of God.  The emphasis is on the distinction of this birth from that of the physical, human world.  It is more personal than language about being adopted into God’s family.

CHALLENGE MADE: I made the statement that it is a misinterpretation of Scripture to claim biblical warrant for male dominant behavior.  This defies a bunch of specifically referenced Pauline passages about husbands and wives, it defies the entire corpus of the Old Testament in terms of gender roles and authority, if defies almost two thousand years of general church acknowledgement.  That’s a lot of defiance.  This from a man who was raised in the quadrant of the church that bought into this old interpretive framework.

            I could write an extended autobiographical narrative to outline my interactions with spiritual sanctioned biblical interpretations supporting male domination theory.  That is WAY beyond the scope of this work.  It is one of my presuppositions that at creation, there was gender equality.  In the Fall, we were cursed with gender inequality.  On the path to salvation, as we come to Day of Jesus’ return, good Christians are working to undo that curse. 

Doth Mother Know You Weareth Her Drapes?

John 1: 6-14                                                    January 28, 2021

⁶There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

            These are the saved, those whose names are written in the Book of Life (see Revelations for more), who accept Jesus as Lord and Savior and Friend, however we want to refer to a christian 'believer'.  John makes it a two-step process for the human, and then a response from the divine.  First, Jesus is received, then his name is believed in.  From there, they receive power to become children of God.  To receive Jesus, that is hearing about him, from early church-going days, or in the culture (which is not my first choice for a true rendering of who Jesus is), or somewhere.  There is a point of contact, one that may be good, bad, or indifferent on the part of the human.  On Jesus’ part, it is always in the light.

            So, to those who received him and then believed in his name, that is a huge appeal to hindsight.  The story of the gospel is going to lay out what it means to believe in Jesus, in what he did for us.  At this point, it says ‘believed in his name’.  There are two observations I would make.  The first is that John has not yet named Jesus.  He won’t till like verse 17.  I have named him and used his name throughout because I am not trying to foreshadow, but understand.  But there is a wider biblical connection to the name of Jesus. 

            I am terrible at memory verses.  Always have been.  I accept the guilt and shame of all those who would tell me I need to know more.  I have a better memory for content then for chapter and verse.  But one of the passages that I do know, chapter and verse, are Philippians 2: 5-11 (although I usually start in Philippians 3, then flip back).  These are verses 9-11: ⁹ Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, ¹⁰ so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹ and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

            There is a theological stream in the bible around the name of God and, in turn, the name of Jesus.  When I say a theological stream, I mean a series of connected pieces in the bible that we can bring together when thinking about God.  Moses at the burning bush, he asked the name of God and he got the response “I am what I am”, although that has been translated a few different ways.  The Hebrew rendering of the Name of God throughout the Old Testament is marked so that it will be pronounced “Adonai”, which means Lord, because God’s name is too holy for the lips of humanity.

            I do not know enough about this theological stream around the name of God to say more than it is a Bible thing and it is one of significance.  It is a subject that I want to look into more.  I am not going to right now because that is not what I am seeking to do with John.  This blog is me drawing together the elements of the faith I have been raised in as I read the Gospel.  But one of the objectives has been met, to identify what makes me want to know more.

            So, those who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.  So, the rule of oppositions.  The children of God as opposed to what?  To recall some King James language, ‘children of perdition’.  There is a duality in the Christian faith, those who are saved from their sins and those who are not.  Those who are saved, part of the order of salvation is adoption, to become children of God.  This seems to be a promotion over our simple created status.  But, on the other side, are those not saved, punished for their sins.  Perdition is a two dollar word that here is a synonym for hell, or the Bad Place.

            So, from our point of view, this is the way of becoming a Christian.  We receive Jesus, we believe in Jesus, Jesus in turn gives us power to become Children of God.  I say the human point of view, because there is a divine point of view that we have touched on and can look at when it comes more centrally to our gospel reading.  We received, we believed, we were adopted.

            And I am going to stop there.  Yes, the sentence runs through the next verse, but these sentences are so filled with meaning, and I want to make these posts of some kind of tolerable length.  Besides which, sentences in English do not correspond directly with the original Greek.  But that, neighbors, is a sidebar.

Sidebar: So the structure of the English language is governed by word order and punctuation to bring meaning to what is said and what is written.  There are rules for how we do language that are gathered under the title of “Grammar”.  Greek, not so much.  Punctuation does not exist.  Word order is not the thing that it is for us.  Rather, the grammar is built upon suffixes, the ends of words, that change depending on what they mean.  So, in English we might say things like “I pray” or “You pray”.  The meaning in Greek is given by the word for prayer and then a change in the ending.  When pronouns become a sticking point in the English translation, the Greek is generally better, with their suffixes, in tracking what is about whom.

Clarification: King James language…the King James translation of the bible was the first, almost universally, accepted English translation of the bible, under the reign of, you guessed it, King James.  It comes from the same time period where Shakespeare was writing his plays.  While Shakespeare wrote in the everyday speech of his time, we have come to venerate the plays so much that Shakespearean English has taken on something of a highbrow nature when it is spoken today (especially when we throw around ‘thee’ and ‘thou’).  Nerding once again, Iron Man to Thor in Avengers 1, “Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?”  The King James version of the bible has the same kind of language.  I read where Shakespeare was theorized as having actually translated the Bible into English as well as doing all the play writing.  There are more conservative portions of the Christian church where the KJV, the King James Version, is THE version of Scripture.  Kids who go to private Christian schools where they learn from the KJV have been observed to have excellent understanding of Shakespeare when they have gone to public colleges.

Lots of stuff today…Pastor Pete

With the Benefit of Hindsight: Any Single Moment in the Gospel Draws on the Whole Life and Ministry of Jesus

John 1: 6-14                                                    January 27, 2021

⁶There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth

            Where did we come from?  Jesus came into the world that He brought into being, but he was unknown to them.  Where are we going?  To consider what is given to those who ‘believed in His name’.  Where are we?  Jesus came to what was ‘his own’, and ‘his own people did not accept him.’

            In a novel, when an author takes the compositional risk of foreshadowing, they are deliberately hinting at what is to come.  The gospel is not a novel.  Neither is it a historical work, at least not by modern standards.  What John is sharing comes from the benefit of hindsight, from where he is in the moment of writing in the light of Jesus' entire ministry and its aftermath, and reflecting back.  For me, that provides context to this sentence.

            Coming into it is a universal, the world, came into being through Jesus, and the world did not know him.  Now it narrows to ‘his people’.  He is Jewish and, aside from a few minor excursions, his entire ministry was amongst the Jews.  Galilee to Jerusalem and back again, with some side trips into the ‘questionable’ region of Samaria and, as I said, a couple of side trips.  He went to Tyre, on the coast of the Mediterranean north of the Promised Land, and to the Decapolis, a region of ten cities, “Deca…” means Ten and “…polis” means City, a Greek settled region to the north and east of the Sea of Galilee.

            All this is to say that Jesus came as the Messiah, he came first to the Jews.  They were his own people.  In the end, his own people did not accept him.  The ministry of Jesus did not renew the Jewish faith as a whole to the acceptance that God’s Messiah had come.  Instead, it led to a split within Judaism as Jesus’ teachings passed out and along to the Gentile world, and we became the Christian religion.  John lived long enough to see this split (see the sidebar), and, as he shares this sentence, it is an application of hindsight.  Jesus’ message was universally available, but not universally accepted.  Along with that message came the consequences, which will be reflected in tomorrow’s sentence.

Side Bar: John.  So we have touched on the reality that we have names attached to the Gospels but we do not have ‘autographs’.  Nowhere does it say, “I, John, am bringing you the gathered recollections of the Savior…”  So, scholars have argued (and it is arguable whether these arguments are for the sake of advancing our understanding of the Bible or these arguments are for the sake of arguing…), again scholars have argued about pretty much every name attached to the writing of a Biblical book. 

            One argument that is used against authorship (as in "John did not write John") is an analysis of the internal structure of the book.  For example, there are ‘clues’ inside the Gospel of John that it was written later than anyone who could have had insider knowledge of what the geography of Jerusalem and the Promised Land looked like.  This works around the historical ‘barrier’ of 70 AD.  In 70 AD (or CE), the Jewish revolt started, which destroyed the City and the Temple and much of the Promised Land.  On the strength of his victory, Titus was elevated to Emperor afterward.  So the argument goes that when we read the Gospels, we can date them by what they know or do not know about Jerusalem before the Revolt.

            Against this, consider John the Apostle.  He was the youngest of Jesus’ disciples, tradition puts him born around 6 AD.  He is also the only one who did not die the martyr’s death, but lived to an exceptionally ripe old age for that time period.  Wikipedia reflects the general acceptance that he died in his 90’s, somewhere around 100 AD (or CE).  He also lived out the end of his life in exile on the island of Patmos (his location according to the Book of Revelations-the last of the New Testament).  So he lived both sides of the Jewish Revolt.  He knew the City before and he knew the City afterward.  So his knowledge base, if the author, is in line with the content of the gospel.

Nomenclature: AD and CE.  'Anno Domino', Latin for 'Year of our Lord' versus CE, 'Common Era'.  These are years measured after the birth of Jesus.  Their counterparts are BC and BCE, 'Before Christ' and 'Before the Common Era'.  AD and BC emerge from the Christian tradition, measured from and acknowledging the birth of Christ as the start of the calendar (Judaism and Islam both have different starting years).  CE and BCE are an attempt to ‘de-Christianize’ the calendar, renaming it the "Common Era".  As this calendar has emerged as the 'standard' for the world, removing religious references is an accommodation (which I consider proper and respectful) to the reality that not everyone believes what we believe.   

Setting the Stage for a New Entry into the "Religious" Marketplace

John 1: 6-14                                                    January 26, 2021

⁶There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth

            This sentence forms an interesting bridge between what comes before and what comes after.  Before, the true light…was coming into the world.  The true light is Jesus.  Now we are told ‘he was in the world’.  And if anticipating the game of pronouns that can make reading the Bible intriguing, “He” who was in the world, it was “him” that the world came into being through.  So Jesus, not John.  John testifies to the light, but is not the light.

            So why say the true light was coming but that he was in the world?  I would suggest mission and man.  Jesus entered the world at His birth, which we celebrate at Christmas.  But aside from his birth, the wise men, his presentation at the temple at eight days, and his return to the temple at age 12, we do not have much, if anything, about Jesus before His baptism by John, before the Holy Spirit came down upon him.  So the man, Jesus, was in the world, but the mission, to be the true light, that was starting here with the recounting of the gospel. 

            “He” who is the true light, his power is reaffirmed as that which brought the world into being.  Yet, the world did not know him.  This is the first of two limitations to his introduction to the world.  He was not known and then, in the next sentence, he was not accepted by his own people.  What I find helps in considering the bible is looking to the opposites.  What does that mean?  It means if the gospel writer is telling us the world did not know him, that is as opposed to what?  It is opposed to Jesus coming in the power and glory of the Almighty?  That entry of Jesus into the world smacks of the pomp and circumstance of the Second Coming.  The first coming was far more subdued. 

            This may be laid down to explain why those hearing the good news of Jesus Christ for the first time had never heard of him before.  There is a great explanation of the religious system in the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus.  It was not that the Romans were religious exactly so much as superstitious.  Their empire took over so many nations with so many gods and systems of belief, that to absorb them into the empire, Rome took over their beliefs as well.  There was a good deal of trying to line up the other religions with their own.  The two dollar word for that is they sought to ‘syncretize’ the different religions, merge them, find equivalents in them. 

            This kind of accommodation occurred in Jerusalem as well.  On the one hand, the Jews had only One God, whom we know as God the Father in our trinitarian understanding of the Lord.  On the other, the Roman emperor was considered a god and, therefore, to be worshipped by all the peoples of the Empire.  The bargain that was struck with the Jews is that daily, a sacrifice was made in the temple for the emperor.  On the Jewish side, this was an acknowledgement of their human overlord as inferior to their God, because he was, through the priests, offering sacrifice to the Lord.  On the Roman side, a sacrifice was being made in the Emperor’s name in the holiest site in the Jewish faith.  They were politically savvy enough to call this satisfactory in acknowledging the godhood of the Emperor.

            The other option to this religious-political bargain was a full scale military invasion.  That would happen in 70 AD, where the Jewish rebellion’s official beginning was marked by the cessation of sacrifice to the emperor in Jerusalem.

            The religion that built around Jesus began as one strain of thought within Judaism.  When this religion separated from Judaism, when it became identified as something separate, his origin story was shared.  He comes from before creation, his power is that all came into being through him, he is the manifestation of the Creator God now entering the world as the ‘true light’.  An assumption made about ancient religions that I agree with is that it was presumed their gods had an indefinite lineage or traced their 'beginning' to some creative event in the distant past. 

            This introduction by the gospel writer is, in part, establishing the deity of Jesus “despite” his late appearance in the religious record.

 

Sidebar: “…the world came into being through him…” is an interesting grammatical form to tell us he created the world.  He ‘created’ is an active verb form in the third person in the past tense.  It has been accomplished.  (First person is “I created”, second person is “you created”).   “Came into being” is the “ ‘simple past tense and past participle’ of come into being.”, according to wordhippo.com.

            Yes, they are synonymous, but there is something in the expression ‘came into being’ that has a different spin, for me, than ‘created’.  This is the danger of over-thinking in biblical study.  For me, to create something is to make something new-there is a random quality to it.  For the nerds out there, consider Vision, at the end of the second Avengers movie, a ‘new life form’ in the MCU, something unexpected.  For something to come into being, this phrasing implies, for me, that its being is already known.  God knew what was going to be made when God made it.  It was something completely expected.  As was the fall of humanity, as was humanity’s renewal in Jesus as the light of the world.

            It is a small twist of phrase, but one that shows where human language is trying to grasp the power and intent of God.  No small feat. 

Pastor Pete

One Does Not Need to Know the Origin of Darkness in our Lives to Appreciate the Light of Christ

 

John 1: 6-14                                                    January 25, 2021

⁶There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

            The true light.  That which John is testifying to.  That which John is not.  The entire opening retelling of the creation is to come to that descriptor of Jesus, the Light.  If you know John’s message as it is generally known, as he is going to tell it, he quotes from Isaiah, to make straight the path in the wilderness.  He will say that he comes before another whose sandals he is not fit to tie.  This is because he identifies Jesus as so much more, as the Light.  We are going to begin to see that testimony coming in verse 19, when the story moves to direct observation of John’s activity.

            What is happening here is that the story of John's gospel is being given its context.  This is the broad ministry of Jesus.  The true light was coming into the world, that which would enlighten everyone.  Again, this presumes the darkness.  When there is a need for a light, it is because things are dark.  And if the light is for everyone, the darkness is upon everyone. 

            It is from my own knowledge of Scripture, being raised in the church and being sent to Christian school for most of my life, that I know there is a very highly developed sense of what the origins of this darkness is, from the fall of humanity through and original sin.  The readers of the gospel of John of a Jewish background would have that knowledge.

            That is an assumption that is commonly made, and one I subscribe to, because of the Roman occupation of the Promised Land, of Israel.  The reasoning goes that there was a political occupation, therefore the heritage and the identity of the Jewish people were found in their religious and cultural roots, that which they would have been taught.  Thus, beyond having the Temple leadership mentioned in the bible, the priests and scribes, there is the group called the “Pharisees”, religious teachers in positions of leadership because of what they taught.  Especially outside Jerusalem, the center of Jewish life and learning was the synagogue, where the learned would come and teach from the Hebrew Bible, what I know as the Old Testament.

            This assumption may also be made about early church folks using the gospel.  Another assumption that is made, and another I subscribe to, is that in the earliest church, the gospel stories were an oral tradition.  As missionaries went out, as recorded in Acts, their first groups were small groups in the cities and communities they visited.  There seems to have been a pattern of development in the early church.

            At first, she was a part of the Jewish tradition.  Jesus was Jewish, he preached and proclaimed within the Jewish tradition.  So, the earliest missionaries began at the local synagogue in the communities where they visited.  Unlike today, where houses of faith seem to be segmented to appeal to their own members, it appears things were different in that age.  Acts speaks of a group of people called ‘the devout’, non-Jews who found great appeal in the truth of the Jewish faith.  But because it seems that the Christian faith is the one that perfected the notion of conversion, there was no easy path to ‘Jewishness’ in the synagogue.

            So, it seems, that the message of Jesus’ followers found great appeal in the devout, because outreach to Gentiles was part of the work.  And the barriers to membership of the Jewish faith were not in place.  Eventually, Jesus’ followers would separate from the synagogue, and “Christianity” would become its own faith.  It is reasonable to me that this was the impetus to begin writing down the spoken stories of Jesus’ life and teachings.

            In so doing, the understanding of ‘darkness’-well, the need for the light unto everyone-could have changed.  The idea of ‘everyone’ could be John making Jesus’ work inclusive of Jew and Gentile.  But it opens up a new thought for me.

            People who have no background in Genesis or the creation story or original sin, all these things I have been talking about, I hope it would provide a useful backdrop in how the whole Bible interconnects and focuses on Jesus.  But when John is the starting point for someone coming into the faith, knowing all this background is not necessary.  Recognizing the darkness into which the light of Jesus shines, this is a self-identification.  We live in a sinful world is not just a generic abstraction about everyone.  There is darkness in the life of the individual and the light of Christ shines in. 

            It is fine to know where the darkness comes from, but that is not the point John is making.  The assumption is that the reader sees the darkness in their own life.  Through that darkness, they find hope, they find light in Jesus.  It is light for everyone because everyone lives in the darkness of their own life.

            And unlike all those other promises to feel better or to be better, Jesus is the true light.

Pastor Peter

The Dangers of Presuming to Be the Light, or, Evicting Jesus from the Right Hand of God

John 1: 6-14                                                    January 22, 2021

⁶There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

            So there is a song called “Cult of Personality” released back in the late 80’s by the band Living Colour.  As I was reading our sentence of the day, that song began to echo in my mind.  I had to look up the name and its release on Wikipedia.  I was going to look up the lyrics for something profound to throw in, but that required more work than Wikipedia, so let me include their comment: The title comes from a psychological phenomenon called cult of personality, and the lyrics contain many political references.  Truth be told, I do not use Wikipedia for real research, but as a pointer toward research possibilities except when it comes to pop culture references.

            What has any of this to do with our sentence?  It strike me this is placed here precisely to warn against a cult of personality forming around John the baptizer.  This is particularly important in light of how John conducted his ministry.  He was not simply preaching repentance, but baptizing repentance.  He was the one who was taking people to a new phase of their spiritual lives.  Looking to him as a divine presence was a very human next step.

            How do I know that is a very human next step?  Crop circles.  Wait…what?  Remember crop circles?  Geometric designs showing up first and mostly in fields in the South of England back in the 1980’s and 90’s (and still today).  A scientist who analyzed them said the grain was bent over so precisely because of a highly advanced microwave beaming tool.  So?  Well, people came to these sites and they lay down in the circles, because they were convinced these were a connection to the transcendent.  It was a spiritual experience to touch something greater than themselves.  It was that footage that convinced the hoaxers to finally step forward and admit their scam.  Their highly advanced microwave beaming tool?  A board with ropes on either end so they could walk and knock down the crops to make their designs.

            What is the point of that?  The point is that people are in need, sometimes in desperate need, of something or someone to believe in.  It is easy to marginalize folks of this mindset, but that does them a grave disservice.  These are people in need of something, and it was something real that John was bringing with him. 

            He was testifying to the light, he was pointing the way to Jesus.  He was pointing the way to the real transcendent power in this world.  But when someone, and it may be us, does this powerfully, it is so easy for the world to tempt us into believing that we ourselves have some kind of divinity within us.  It is like the crackpots who claimed to kill in the Lord’s Name.  We know that ‘voices in the head’ are most often caused by mental illness.  I say ‘most often’ because I cannot presume to discount the ways of the Lord.  Because this kind of revelation is in the Bible.  The example that jumps to mind is the Lord speaking to Joseph about Mary before the birth of Jesus.  But we do have a way of checking these kinds of phenomena.  Does the voice someone hears speak in line with the revelation we have already received from God?  Does this proclamation line up with the truth of the Bible?  It did for Joseph.  John’s testimony too lined up with what the Scriptures taught.  It is not definitive proof, but, to paraphrase Scripture, we walk by faith and not by proof.

            They were NOT the light.  That is so important to understand.  Because trying to take credit for the light as a human being is an incredible temptation.  “I am the one that saved… or I am the one that knows the truth… or I am the chosen one…”  How many cults out there have open books and open doors to all their teachings?  How many seek to take their members for every penny that they can to learn the ‘secret teachings’?  How many people watched Leah Remini? 

            Those people existed at the time the Gospel was written.  They existed in the time of Jesus. They exist today.  But Jesus is the Light.  That’s what we need to take away from this passage, that’s what we need to guard against the pretenders.  That’s where our salvation comes from.

Pastor Peter Hofstra