Materials
Gospel
of John, #2
When
God Moved Into The Neighborhood
John 1:14
by R. Todd Bouldin
It is among the most shocking and yet hopeful
words of Scripture: The Word became flesh and lived among us. That
person, the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, was not as we thought He
would be. He was not angry, vengeful or capricious. When God became
a human being, He was full of grace and truth. John says that from
His fullness we have all received grace compiled upon grace. Grace
from every angle and perspective. Law came through Moses. But grace
and truth came through Jesus, the Christ. Grace and truth here are
not philosophical categories; they're not laws of life; they're not
concepts to be understood; they're not ethics to be valued; they're
not organizational values to be implemented. Grace and truth are imbedded
in a Person – in Jesus, the Christ. Grace and truth are in our
presence, and they are here not as doctrines to accept but a Person
to be known.
Prayer
When God takes up residence in our world, you might expect it to be
in a permanent building, namely, the great temple on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem.
That's what the Hebrew Scriptures lead us to believe. Psalm 135:21,
for example: "Blessed be the Lord from Zion, He who dwells in
Jerusalem." And Psalm 132:13: "The Lord has chosen Zion;
He has desired it for His habitation." Isaiah writes, "Sing
praises to the Lord who dwells in Zion." In fact, Jews who lived
in Egypt, Greece and Rome traveled as often as they could to Jerusalem
because they believed that the Temple was God's principal residence
on earth. They could study God in their far-off cities, but they could
meet God only in Jerusalem. They could pray to God in their synagogues,
but they could sacrifice to God only in Jerusalem, because the temple
was God's permanent address.
Yet before Solomon built the temple in Jerusalem the Hebrews worshiped
for three hundred years in a tent. It was called the tabernacle, and
it was designed for people on the move. The tabernacle was built out
of cloth, and the cloth was hung on poles that could be taken apart,
slung over people's shoulders, and carried across the desert to be
reassembled wherever they found an oasis. So, long before there
was a temple in Jerusalem, God lived in a tent.
The temple is symbolic of a settled God, a God who never makes house
calls. The tabernacle speaks of a God who lives with people where
they live, and who goes with them wherever they go. Which is the true
God, the temple God or the tabernacle God? Is God stationary, or mobile?
John has an answer for us. "The Word became flesh," he writes,
"and [literally] tented among us." That means that you don't
have to go anywhere special to find God, because God comes to you
right where you are. Eugene Peterson translates verse 14 like this:
"The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood."
Or as a little girl said once, “Some people couldn’t hear
God’s inside whisper, so He sent Jesus to tell them out loud.”
There is a palace in Rome where a great painting is pained on the
ceiling of the dome, over 100 feet high. To look upon the painting
from the floor, the painting seems to be covered over with a fog,
difficult to see. But in the center of the dome room, there is a huge
mirror which reflects upon the ceiling and reveals the picture painted
high above. By looking in the mirror, you can see the picture with
great clarity. Jesus is the mirror of God, and in Him we see the clear
picture of the Father. What is communicated is that God is Jesus-like.
Notice, John did not say that God's Word became a human, or even a
man, but “flesh”. Flesh is such an earthy term. The last
word we were expecting from God is that He would become flesh. Frankly,
what we were hoping is that He would tell us something that would
deliver us from our own struggles with the flesh. The church has always
been tempted to tell people exactly that. But God did not come to
rescue us from the flesh but to redeem us in the flesh. In
this way, God breaks the sacred / secular barrier, and He claims again
that all the earth and even humans belong to Him. God did not come
to remove us from the world but to help us live fully in this world.
The reformer Martin Luther, commenting on this text about the logos
made flesh, said that there always have been people who can't stand
an embodied God. The Gnostics were among the first who taught that
the God who dwelt in the heavens could not become a human being, into
Plato’s “world of forms”. Perfection could not enter
imperfection, the sacred could not invade the secular, heaven and
earth could not meet. People throughout the ages have dismissed the
divinity of Christ because, at least for some, these people want to
have a spiritual God. But John confronts such tendencies to divide
up the world into heaven and earth, the sacred and the secular. He
says that God entered the world, and He became flesh and blood in
Jesus.
One of the first heresies to break out in the early church was Docetism.
If the Gnostics could not accept the divinity of Christ, the Docetists
could not believe that God could come in the form of human flesh.
Because to say that God became flesh is to claim that our hope will
have to be found in this life and not in the life to come. And to
that objection, the Apostle John, says, "Right. That is exactly
right." Just as Christ was with God at the beginning of creation,
pushing aside the darkness and chaos to create light and beauty, so
was He with us, in the flesh, pushing the dark chaos of our own making.
It is the only Word that can save us.
The term, "lived among us" or as some of our translations
say "dwelled among us" is fascinating. In the Greek, the
word is skenoun which is a derivative of the Hebrew word
shekinah, as in God's shekinah glory. In the Old
Testament, it was only the High Priest who could enter the Tent of
Meeting, or later the Holy of Holies in the Temple, to encounter the
shekinah glory of God. But John is telling us that Jesus
Christ is now the meeting place, the tabernacle that dwells among
us, where all mortal flesh can encounter God's glory. That is why
you can now live a life that isn’t just humdrum, boring and
flawed. Your life can be filled with glory, the glory of God.
The ancients believed that if an ordinary person like you or me ever
saw the glory of God it would kill them, because it meant that God
was coming to judge them for their sins. But the Word we get on God
from Jesus is that He has come not to judge you but to save you. "We
beheld His glory, the glory as of the father's son," and it did
not kill us! In Jesus Christ, you know that God is not out to get
you! That was never what your suffering, or your broken heart, or
the chaos in our society was about. The world is dark because we have
made it so, not God. Yes, God knows our sins, and frailty, and that
is exactly why we were given a Savior.
But remember, God's Word to us is a Savior in the Flesh. He walked
our roads in life. He felt our hunger and our loneliness. He cried
the tears of those who grieve deeply. He knew all about injustice
and betrayal. Jesus was a man of sorrows, well acquainted with our
grief. But He was also well acquainted with our joy. He had friends
He dearly loved. He delighted in children, and dinner parties, and
wedding receptions with lots of wine. He loved most of all to introduce
people to the healing power of God. In Jesus, you have a Savior who
knows all about the highs and lows of your life because He lived it
all.
But the Son of God did not come into the world just to keep us company.
He came to bring us back home to the Father. While He was here, He
brought two gifts with Him that will help us find our way, grace and
truth. The truth is that we have lost our way trying to find a little
glory on our own. Along the way we committed sins of commission and
sins of omission. We hurt others and we hurt ourselves. The world
is dark today, because we have each turned out the lights. We deserve
exactly the world we have created for ourselves, and that is the truth.
But the grace is that God will not give us what we deserve. He insists
on giving us what we need -- forgiveness. These gifts of grace and
truth are interrelated. We cannot have one without the other.
The truth is too much to bear without the grace. The grace is sheer
pettiness without encountering the truth. The more grace we receive,
the easier it is to handle the truth. The better we get at telling
the truth, the more delicious grace we receive. And grace is our only
ticket back home to the Father.
Every way that you looked at Jesus you saw both grace and truth playing
together, transforming the world in the most surprising of ways. We
thought that grace was distinct from truth – that one can not
be truthful and also graceful; but in Jesus, you see grace and
truth connected, thriving, dancing in a perfect rhythm.
Now grace without truth is a wonderful, warm and fuzzy thing. It's
sentimental. It can be romanticized. It can be trivialized. It's what
Bonhoeffer called a cheap grace. But truth without grace can also
be a problem. It's condemning. It's attacking. It's like a hammer.
It's predatory. It's impersonal. It is always on a mission to correct
what is wrong. I'm going to get you with the truth that I know and
use it against you. But that’s not the kind of truth we receive
in Jesus Christ. It is truth balanced by grace, truth covered in a
veneer of sheer mercy.
One of the ways this is all put together is with the word “fullness”.
The Gnostics used to declare that they had the full wisdom of God,
the full knowledge of God. They used this word klaroma a lot. We are
in touch with “the fullness”. But John takes that Gnostic
word and turns it again, saying, no, only Jesus has the fullness.
In that fullness it's not as if He's filled up one time and that's
it. But the fullness has to do with Jesus being overflowing with grace
and truth. It just keeps pouring out of Him. It's like a wellspring
from the inside flowing out to the people around Him. More than enough
for everyone, not just filled but overflowing, constantly new and
renewing. That's the kind of grace that the church must exercise and
exude. We don't want to run out of grace, or out of truth. Our world
needs both.
The Word of God has become flesh. God has spoken out loud. Can you
hear the Word? It is near you, today in your presence, full of grace,
and full of truth. To all who receive Him, He gives power to become
the children of God.
February 19, 2006
» Back to
top |
Bulletin
Class Materials
Resources
Sermons
Spiritual Life
 |
