They say we should not judge a book by its cover. But I definitely judge books by their opening lines. I can think of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens; or “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; or the haunting “Call me Ishmael” from Moby Dick by Herman Melville. A good opening line serves as a hook to lure the reader into the story that is about to unfold.
In this regard, the Gospel of John has one of the most memorable and evocative opening lines in all of literature, calling to mind a history of writing that had then spanned over a millennium, reaching back into the recesses of the past to give birth to new hope. The opening of John’s Gospel is easily one of the most recognizable lines in all of scripture.
“In the beginning,” begins John. In the Greek it is actually only two words Ἐν ἀρχῇ (en arche) without the definite article ‘the’. If we think this is a mundane way to begin a book of such importance, we need to remind ourselves of the first line of the Old Testament. The first thing we read in Genesis is בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית (b-reshit), also two words without the definite article. John has mirrored his beginning on the beginning of Genesis, making a shocking move that any Jewish reader or reader accustomed to Genesis would have considered bold and grand for the manner in which it evoked the original creation account, hinting that the rest of the book would contain a description of another creation. And indeed, John does not disappoint. If we read his Gospel from start to finish we will be able to see not just the echoes of a new creation, but actual evidences of it in the language he uses in his Gospel.
But for today, I wish to focus on the poignant start to verse 14. “And the Word became flesh.” It is Advent, after all, and tomorrow we will be meeting again to celebrate the birth of the one called Jesus. I want to focus on the implications of what I’m calling the embodiment of the word and what it entails for us today.
My reflections on this probably began unconsciously way back in 1992. I had left India to do a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering. At that time, I wasn’t a believer. I was an atheist. But during my first semester in Austin, living by myself for the first time, I found myself plagued by questions of meaning and purpose. What was this life all about? Why are we here? I was then steeped in writings of the likes of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Aldous Huxley, all of whom deny the existence of any spiritual reality.
However, none of these humanist authors could give a satisfactory answer to my questions. And so I began my quest for answers outside the realm of humanism. Fortunately for me, the University of Texas, Austin, has a massive library and I found myself in the enormous section on religion very soon. Fortunately, for you, I will not bore you with my exploits on the fourth floor of the Perry-Castañeda Library. I only wish to tell you of something I observed.
When it came to the bible, there were stacks and stacks of translations in every language imaginable – and some beyond imagination. But when it came to the Vedas or the Quran, there were very few translations. When I say very few, I mean, five or fewer versions. And almost without exception the translations were in English. When I asked the librarian about this, he said that they had everything that was available!
Why this discrepancy? Why so many versions of the bible in so many languages, while the scripture of other religions have so few? I think I have found the answer.
But before we get to that, let me take you to Mumbai, December 1993. I had just finished my fourth term at Austin and had returned to India for Christmas. I was in my friend’s car with three of my friends. This was just over a year after I had begun to believe in Jesus and was attempting to communicate the gospel to them. And one of them, I do not remember who, asked, “Why should my salvation be dependent on someone who lived 2000 years ago?” I did not have an answer then and didn’t have an answer for many years. But over the course of the next few years, I did come across an answer. But before we can get to that, let us consider the implications of my friend’s question.
Who is Jesus? He lived 20 centuries ago in a time much different from the one in which we live. He was born in the Roman province of Judea at a place quite far from where we live. He grew up speaking Aramaic and Hebrew and perhaps some Greek, but didn’t know English or Kannada or Tamil or Malayalam. And he was a Jew, not an Indian.
With all these differences, why is it that my salvation was dependent on him? On what grounds do I claim that the fate of everyone who once lived and everyone who now lives and everyone who someday will live depends on a single life that spanned only about 30 years? Isn’t this arrogance of the highest order? Is this not simply the reason why there is so much intolerance in the world? Isn’t it the case that there is so much division in the world because such exclusive claims can only lead to exclusion of those who are different?
According to the Quran, Allah is so far above our corporeal existence that to even imagine that he could become one of us is blasphemy. According to Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, he manifests himself repeatedly whenever human societies become irreversibly corrupt. To a Muslim, something like the incarnation is a massive category mistake for God just cannot become corporeal. To a Hindu, incarnation is something that happens over and over again and believing it to happen only once is a falsehood.
The Muslim and the Hindu have no problems. One says that incarnation is not possible, so she does not have to answer any questions about specificity. The other says it happens over and over, so he also is spared from having to answer questions about particularity. But we who believe this happened just once have a problem on our hands.
We could ask, “Why did it have to be among the Jews and not Indians? What’s so special about the Jews?” Valid questions. But the thing is that, if God had chosen to work through Indians, those who are not Indian could ask, “Why did it have to be among the Indians and not us? What’s so special about the Indians?”
Or we could ask, “Why did it have to be during the Roman Empire and not during the British Raj in India? What’s so special about that time period?” Once again, valid questions. But once again we reach the same conclusion. No matter what time period God chose to work in, those not in that time period could ask what was so special about the chosen time period.
For each aspect of specificity we will reach the same kind of conclusion. By choosing to be this, God chooses to not be that! Ironically, when I have faced objections about the specificity of the Christian story about Jesus, I have never even once encountered what I would consider the most serious exclusion. I have had objections to Jesus’ being a Jew and to his being born two millennia ago and at time even to his not speaking our languages.
But never even once has anyone said, “Jesus was a man. Why not a woman?” That is, I have heard this, but never with any seriousness. It is always said as a kind of throwaway comment that really means that the person is just going to make objections rather than listen to reason. But by being born as a man, Jesus automatically was born not as a woman nor as an androgyne.
So we Christians are faced with a multi-faceted particularity when we speak about Jesus. He was a first century Jewish peasant male and not a twenty-first century Indian middle-class female. How could God work like this? And why did God work like this? By focusing on all of Jesus’ particularities, has God not excluded the vast majority of humans? Does the specificity of Jesus not simply introduce barriers – temporal, geographic, linguistic, cultural and gender – that make it difficult for people to relate to him?
And yet, here we are. None of us can speak Aramaic or Hebrew. None of us would know how to survive in first century Palestine. None of us obeys the Torah. And more than half of us are not male. And yet, here we are, singing our praises to this first century Jewish man, discovering every day that we are a part of God’s family. How did this happen?
Later, during his meeting with Nicodemus, Jesus would say, “For God loved the world to this extent that he sent his Son.” Writing about fifteen years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Paul tells the Christians at Galatia, “I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” At the very foundation of our faith is the claim that God is love and that his sending of his Son is an expression of that love.
But love is not some ethereal thing. Love is highly specific. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either deceived or lying. What do I mean? Have you seen advertisements? Any good advertisement tells you a story – a story involving the characters in the advertisement. Most likely, you do not know the characters. But the situations they portray are situations that you can relate to, situations you dream of, or situations you dread.
And so a link is formed between you and the characters in the story. The link depends on empathy and compassion, perhaps even greed and envy at times. But a good advertisement will always try to make you connect with the characters in the story.
In like manner, love is the invitation to a shared story. The story shared between a child and a parent is different from that shared by siblings, which in turn is different from the one shared by childhood friends or the one shared by spouses. The people involved and the relationship that defines their connection to each other determine the flavor and music of the love between them. I have two daughters. And while I love them with equal intensity, I love them in different ways for each of them is different. It would be unloving of me to relate to both of them identically, for they are different.
But they are different precisely because they are embodied in different ways. What do I mean? Being embodied means living with the skills and limitations of the body that I have. Being embodied means finding some things easy and other things impossible. Being embodied means having specific dreams and dreads and particular wishes and worries. And anyone who loves me is faced with these dreams and dreads, wishes and worries, for these are what define me.
And so to experience the love of humans in all its embodied and messy glory, God too had to become human. You see, as long as God was distant and incorporeal, he was pretty much unknown. That’s why John tells us, “No one has seen God.” God is the ultimate unknowable entity, the one who is wholly other and therefore the one we may desire to relate to but that we would grope in the darkness attempting to do so.
John begins his Gospel with a grand overarching view of things, the way things were before God began to create. There was God and the Word. And whatever we may say about the wonderful poetry of the first few verses of John’s Gospel and the intriguing themes he introduces the reader to, we must concede that we really have no way of relating to most of the first few verses.
John introduces us to the Word, the remarkable concepts of life, light, and darkness. But really we have no inroads to understanding exactly what it is that John would have us glean from the beginning verses of his Gospel. They are, if we are honest with ourselves, opaque. And indeed, if we deceive ourselves and begin to think that we understand what John is writing about, John hammers home the devastating point – No one has seen God.
But John does not leave us groping in the darkness. Thankfully! Rather, he tells us, “The Word became flesh.” What was unknowable was now knowable. What was ethereal was now corporeal. What was hidden was now revealed.
“The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.” In a glorious act of divine love, the divine Word became one of us. He did not become humanity. Rather, he became a human. And since he became a human, he had to have particularity – a people group, a culture, a native language, and an era. It could not be otherwise. He had to be located within space and time just as every human is. Although God is present everywhere and present at all times, the simple fact of the matter is that we cannot truly love such a God who is everywhere and everywhen for we know only how to love in and through and with the particulars that constitute a human.
And John tells us, “We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” In the context of John’s Gospel, the primary demonstration of Jesus’ glory is his crucifixion. But all through his Gospel we see signs of this glory. And so I don’t think John would object to our seeing Jesus’ glory in the events of Christmas.
But what kind of glory does a helpless baby have? What kind of majesty do we see in a crying infant who needs to be fed and changed and bathed? What is the grace communicated through a feeding trough for animals? And what truth do the lowing cattle speak to us? We sing about all of these aspects of Jesus’ birth in our carols. But do we really take to heart what they imply? Do we really understand and comprehend how the universe changed as a result?
In the Christmas event we see God becoming human, becoming a human baby, utterly and totally vulnerable, completely dependent on Mary and Joseph and any other caregivers Jesus may have had. The one whom John has said created everything will soon be a creature. The one who was omnipresent will soon fill only a manger. The one who was omniscient will soon only be able to babble. Why? Why did God do this? Why did God make himself so completely vulnerable to us?
Simply because that is the very nature of love. To love another and to be open to the other’s love is to make yourself vulnerable to the other person. That person should be in a position to hurt you. That person should be in a position to completely unravel you. Otherwise, it is not truly love. If you are not completely vulnerable to the other, it is not love.
And so God, in order to demonstrate the extent to which he loves us, became completely vulnerable to us. He placed himself in the hands of Mary and Joseph and his other caregivers, trusting them to flee to Egypt when news about Herod’s retribution reached them, and returning to Nazareth some years later when Herod had died.
In the Christmas event God said to us, “Here I am. Completely weak. I am risking everything in the hope that I could experience the love of the humans I have created. And so I have become one of you. Here I am. How will you respond?”
You see, Jesus’ glory, especially in the Gospel of John, is most acutely made visible through his vulnerability. John begins in the grandest way possible with his words about the eternal, divine Word of God.
But then when he says, “And the Word became flesh” he introduces us to the unique power of the one true God. This God, in Jesus redefines power in terms of the vulnerability of love. He redefines authority in terms of service and redefines glory in terms of obedience and weakness.
When we read, “And the Word became flesh” we must never forget that there was a time when this enfleshed Word was helpless. When we sing about how our God is stronger and more powerful than the false gods, we dare not exclude this helplessness and vulnerability and weakness from our definition of divine strength. Otherwise, we show ourselves to be those who have been offended by the scandal of embodiment.
If you recall, I earlier asked about two things. Why should the fate of everyone who ever lived depend on the 30 odd year lifespan of a first century Jewish man? And why are there so many translations of the bible compared to the scriptures of other languages? The answer to both of these questions is the same.
Unlike Islam, in which God remains at a distance from our messy lives, and unlike Hinduism, in which God repeatedly intervenes with a show of strength, the Christian faith shows us that God has gotten involved in our messy lives and that he has dealt with all the issues once and for all. And he has done this through the power of love, not the love of power. In Jesus we hear God say, “Give me your worst and I will absorb it in my love and bring new life and new creation.” How can we then be offended by the scandal of embodiment?