The Beginning Word of God

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. —John 1:1

No single word in English conveys the meaning of the Greek word that is most often translated “the Word.” It means something like the ultimate truth, the foundation of all things, the source of all life beyond which there is nothing greater. If we were to search for the center point of the center of what it means for life to be life, then we would be talking about “the Word.”  

This one sentence claims to speak about the most significant reality of existence.Yet, the claim of this sentence is absolutely absurd if we think about. It refers to the ultimate center of the center as demonstrated through the life of a historical figure named Jesus Christ. To us, as the recipients of 2000 years of talk about Jesus, this claim does not scream with problems. However, when these words were written, it referred to a man, one who was born out of wedlock, from a country with no government, who held no position of influence, and his movement resulted in his death. He did not start a school like Socrates or leave behind writings like Aristotle. He did not invent a great tool, did not discover a medical remedy, did not construct great buildings, did not found a city-state, did not lead a great country. To say that any man is the center of the center of foundation of the universe would cause others to think you are off your rocker. But to make this was not even worthy of following from a human point of view.

We have twenty centuries of Godtalk where we have figured out how we can say that Jesus was God, ways that diminishes the absolute absurdity of this sentence. We have made Jesus more palatable because we imagined him as an ideal being who walked around floating three feet above the ground. Yes, he lived as a human being but he was not really one of us, we image. He did not stink, struggle, or step like we do. If this person was God, then he carried with him a portion of the divine that lifted him above the fray of the day to day that. It’s much easier to imaging Jesus as a guru who possessed a divine secret that he hid from common people and lived him out of the common fray.

However, just the opposite is the case, and there was no better person to give witness to this than his best friend John who wrote these words. John smelled his stink, saw him struggle, and stepped with him through the day-to-day challenges. If there was a person who might have trouble writing what he wrote, it would be John because he had access to Jesus that no other had. Yet more than any other New Testament writer, John alludes to Jesus’ divine status in the most concrete ways.

John saw in Jesus what many cannot. He looked through the surface appearance of Jesus’ humanity to see God at work at a deeper level. There he did not find a divine nature of ultimate power and control but one of love. In the actions of Jesus, he saw a God who is willing to stoop in self-sacrifice for others to the greatest extreme possible to show us what God is like and what we are worth. The actions of this ultimate foundation to the universe show a God who is so powerful that he can enter into human existence and demonstrate the meaning of the center of the center. All while remaining God. 

For the longest time, I assumed that the only way to know God is to elevate myself into some kind of spiritual state, to come out of human existence and escape to a religious level. In fact, this is what the religious of Jesus’ time thought, and it’s what every religion in the history has taught in some form or fashion. God is up there behind some kind of wall, hidden from our world. Supposedly, if we want to know God’s mind, God’s Word, we have to rise up to see it. But Jesus breaks this mindset and comes into our world. Not only that, he comes into human history as the very bottom rung of existence and experiences the cruelest of deaths. He went from being the source of all of creation to the lowest of the low. 

This is the Word. This is the ultimate foundation of all things. This is the source from which all truth, goodness, and beauty flows. God comes to us and shows us what the ground of all being is like. 

And this one reality shatters … 

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