Mike Gareh, the Treasurer of Cockshutt Church, has listened to many sermons over the years. Below he shares one of his favourites (source unknown).
John 1: 1
Words. Women speak about 8-10,000 per day. Men speak about 5-6,000 per day. And only about 500 are truly essential, which explains why at the end of the day women still have lots to say – no let’s not go down that road!
He left school at the age of 13; his parents couldn’t read or write. Despite all that he had a massive vocabulary for a man of his background. William Shakespeare had a total of 15,000 different words in his plays and a further different 7,000 words which he used in his poems, giving him a vocabulary of about 22,000 words, when the average vocabulary in Stratford in his day was less than 500.
That is even incredible by today’s standards where the most celebrated authors don’t exceed more than 7000 words.
John Milton, the poet, was an exception. He had a vocabulary of about 8,000 words.
The average English speaking citizen today has about 2,000 words in his vocabulary, and for those with a university degree, that may go up to 4,000 words.
Words are incredibly powerful things. They have the power to be misused, to be manipulated, to encourage, strengthen, inspire and to motivate. They also have the power to cut someone down or to bring life. The power to create and to destroy.
The 1st chapter of St. John’s Gospel is all about words, or rather one word; The Word.
Sometimes it doesn’t make sense. There are so many words to describe The Word.
When we realise when John was writing this, we can understand why he goes to such length and depth to explain why this Word was so important. He is writing in a time when there is a lot of writing and thought going into the meaning of life and to the foundation of the Earth. Platonism was the school of thought in common use at the time in Greek society, although Plato lived many years before this. And one of the things that these Greek philosophers were wrestling with was the concept of the All Being, the divine Order, and they didn’t know what to call it, so they settled on this term, and they said they were going to call the beginning of all things The Logos. The Logos was the beginning of it all. The Logos was what started everything. It symbolised the best in everything; the best in creative thought. It was the highest possible entity. The Logos. And this idea that the Logos was the beginning and root of all things began to gain popularity across Greece around the time when John was writing.
The Logos was the Divine Reason which caused the entire natural realm to grow and to develop. All the things they saw around them; the reason it was growing and developing was because of the Logos, meaning ,in English The Word. The Logos causes things to happen, brings things into being. Words create, change situations, and transform lives.
And when we read the passage, John very deliberately causes us to remember the very beginning of creation when many words were spoken. Genesis chapter one: and God said let there be light
And God said let there be an expanse between the waters
And God said let the water under the sky be gathered to one place
Then God said let the land produce vegetation
And God said let there be light in the sky…..
And God said….. And God said
And by 6 days this is what he created. If he had stayed silent there would have been nothing. Nothing for us to speak about.
Can you imagine, by uttering a word things happen?
The Word, the Logos was an active concept, it wasn’t shallow or empty. It meant something. When words were spoken things happened.
The word Logos suggests things happening, creative activity. In fact, in the Spanish translation of this passage, it reads – el verbo- and el verbo was with God. The word was an action as a verb is. The nearest translation the Spanish have for word is la palabra, but they chose to use el verbo.
Words are actions. But words also tell you something about who says them. They express our minds and our hearts. They allow other people inside our minds and our hearts. That’s how we begin to know each other. Our words reveal what is happening inside of us. If I say one thing and do another, you would say I was dishonest or not worthy of trust. My words impact on how others view my character. The very core of who I am is reflected in what I say. Very rarely can words be just empty words.
For instance – Will you marry me? Four words that transform lives forever.
So when John used the Logos, the Greeks were familiar with the concept. It was a pretty good philosophical statement, by which John would have impressed his Greek audience.
So when John speaks of God’s Word, he means exactly the same. God’s Word is His heart and mind revealed. And when he says – in the beginning was the Word and all things were created through Him, then the world is permeated with the Word of God – something of God’s heart and mind is revealed in everything we see in the universe. The trouble is that the world doesn’t always look like that. It isn’t always a world that makes sense. If it was just true that the Word brought everything into being, we would see order everywhere. But of course we don’t. And it doesn’t always look as though it has been made by a good and perfect God. This isn’t just true of creation; it’s true of our lives. Good things happen in our lives and then some disaster hits us, and it doesn’t make sense anymore. We wonder if there is any order. Are we at the mercy of chance events? So we live in constant fear that something may go wrong, and everything will fall apart. Now, of course John knows that. He knows because he writes that the Word is like a light that shines in darkness. He knows that the world is a deeply ambiguous place. It’s a bit like listening to a badly tuned radio. You know that there is something there, a voice that makes sense from time to time, but it seems to be drowned out by a lot of static and noise and confusion. So we live in this confused world. A world where we get caught up in repetitive habits of gossip and boasting, addicted to lying and bad habits and we simply cannot stop it. So we slowly unpick the world and pull it apart.
The next time John mentions the Word in V.14, he said – the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. This would have been a step too far for the Greek philosophers. The word that the whole universe was based on became flesh? It would seem very far fetched. Also another philosophy at the time, called Gnosticism, was in vogue. This said that any solid matter, anything physical or tangible was evil and that only spiritual things were good. So John introduces a totally new ball game. It is outside the boundaries of the philosophy of the time. Wouldn’t it have been much simpler if John had used the word Jesus. And in the beginning was Jesus, and Jesus was with God. It would have been simpler but he would have lost some of the majesty of the passage. He had decided to go head to head with the Greeks.
And so the Word became flesh. The word that expresses the heart and mind of God, the divine order, the divine logic which runs through the whole of creation. This thing that every philosopher, every seeker, every human being has searched for through the history of human kind – became flesh. What John is saying to us is that this thing that everyone has looked for is not an argument, not a philosophy, it’s not an equation, it’s not even a book. It is a person, it’s a life. it’s the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This life whose entering into this world we celebrate at Christmas. God in a pram. This life was the word made flesh. That means a whole lot of important things.
St John’s prologue tells us that you and I are not alone in the universe. We know that God is good because the word became flesh.
What was it like when the word became flesh – it was full of Grace and Truth.
What Jesus does is to reveal the heart and mind of God, because he is the Word Incarnate. So when Jesus reaches out to homeless lepers – that’s what God does. When Jesus defends a prostitute from some vigilante mob who wants to stone her – that’s what God does.
We are not defenceless against a random and cruel world.
When we mess up our lives, God doesn’t seek to punish us or destroy us, instead he comes and is alongside us, our companion.
He doesn’t stop us. He didn’t stop Adam and Eve. He didn’t stop Israel; he didn’t stop the Roman executions. He doesn’t stop us when we strike out on our own. Nor does He abandon us. He is with us. He joins us in our lostness, and gradually leads us to somewhere new and wonderful.
So the Word made flesh tells us that we are not alone and need not be afraid. We can trust God because we know his heart, because we have seen it in this one human life, Jesus of Nazareth.
John wrote – “for those who believed in Him, He gave power to become children of God”. In other words people who share in His likeness. The early Fathers of the Church said – He became man that we may become God.
So that we might learn to love like He does, humbly and perseveringly.
So He became flesh, he suffers but does not retaliate. He takes all the evil and sin of the world, yours and mine, onto himself, and breaks that cycle. And He sends his spirit to renew us he turns us from being part of the problem to being part of the answer.
At Christmas we celebrate God breaking into human life. the Word becoming flesh.
So when we take the bread and wine we might want to say – yes – I want to live that life. the word becomes flesh for us.
And once more we see the Old being fulfilled in the New, in Isaiah9:v2 – the people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.
Feature Image: Adoration of the Christ Child (Wikicommons, PD)