December 1998 Issue

As we pause in this moment, this "time between the times," we look to the future. Paul put it well, "... one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." (Phil. 2:13,14) Of course that does not mean we ignore that which is behind. It is precisely the awareness of what God has done that enables us to face the future. Christmas reminds us that God is faithful, that the promises are remembered and fulfilled, that we can look to the future with confidence. How essential is this awareness of God's providence and care. Without it we would forever cower in the fear of the unknown of tomorrow.

For just when it seems that we can "take a deep breath," the danger swoops down upon us. "Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him" (Mt. 2:13) Refugees! Strangers in a strange land! Pain in the midst of blessing! "What on earth is God doing?" What, indeed! The question can be posed in two ways. It can be spoken as an expression of exasperation; "What on earth is God doing!?" And it can be spoken as a word of searching, a word of faith, a word of expectation; "What, on earth, is God doing? The inflection makes all the difference.

Refugees? Yes. But not refugees from God's plan and purpose, rather those who trust as we move into the unknown. "Out of Egypt have I called my son." When the times of pain, frustration, and sorrow come in the New Year -- and they will surely come -- we are strengthened in the conviction that in Egypt, in our world of strangeness, in our time of being refugees, nothing can "separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Rom. 8:39) Indeed, God is with us in the very experience of suffering even as in the experiences of joy. Isaiah puts it clearly, "In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old." (63:9) And the Psalmist reassures us that "... the Lord is gracious and merciful ... and is ever mindful of his covenant." (Ps. 111:4,5)

It is this covenant that is fulfilled in the Christmas season; it is this covenant that gives the assurance for the New Year that is ahead. The writer of Hebrews puts it clearly that ..."(Christ) had to be made like his brethren in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make expiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted." (2:17,18) In our Egypts, God's grace, love and mercy transcend the pain.

This is truly a pastoral word for this time -- and for all time. We have often said that "nothing is as over as Christmas!" Alas! But the fact is that the true meaning of Christmas is never over! All the things that are here today will be here tomorrow as well, the hopes, the fears, the guilt, the suffering, the joys and the sorrows. And yet, in another sense, everything will be different. "Behold, I make all things new." (Rev. 21:5) The constant renewal of our experience of the presence of God is that which never passes away.

Of course we know that as pastors. And, of course, the people entrusted to us know that. At the same time, we also know all too well that when the cloud passes between us and the sun the shadows can grow dark and our faith can waiver. How many times do we fear the future because it is unknown; even more painfully, how many times do we fear the future because it is known and we are not certain that we will be able to face up to that which looms on the horizon. So it is that we stand on the Eve of another year which gathers up all the hopes and fears that are part and parcel of our past to which we cannot return but which moves with us into the future.

As pastors we take stock of ourselves and our ministries. There are things we would have done differently, or wish we had. The nagging doubts tug at our elbows, the "what if's" beset us. Edgar Grider's painful question, "Can I Make It One More Year?" (John Knox Press, Atlanta) haunts us. We are care givers, of course, but is it possible as the New Year begins for us to own the fact that we need care in order to give care. We have dealt this month with our care for those intrusted to us, and that is appropriate. On this final Sunday of the year, it is well to include ourselves as those who need care, who can bear the burdens of others only when we have experienced having our burdens borne by our own pastors. This may be the most difficult part of our ministry; many have reminded us that care givers resist receiving care -- and even more, resist asking for care. Who is your pastor pastorum? It is a question for us all as we move toward tomorrow.

Our shared faith in the God of history strengthens us to walk toward tomorrow in the full assurance that "The Lord God, the Omnipotent, reigneth!" And in God's good time, we will be called out of our Egypts, knowing that although one crisis has passed there will be others with which we have to strive. It is the past that both haunts us and reassures us; haunts us in the remembrance of those which we have done we ought not to have done, and left undone those things which we ought to have done; reassures us in the promise that God is faithful and is able to transform our days and years in such a way that God's glory is made manifest in us and in the lives of those entrusted to us.

This is the confidence that beckons us into tomorrow with a song in our hearts and a grateful prayer of thanksgiving on our lips. Because we have been sustained we know that "The fear (awe) of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; a good understanding have all those who practice it." And we can join the Psalmist in saying, "His praise endures forever!" (Ps. 111:10)

In the darkest times of World War II in the city of London, the King went on the air to bring a New Year's message to his beleaguered people. In the process he quoted a poem unknown to most of us, but one which affirmed the kind of faith that brings us to tomorrow.

I said to a man who stood at the gate

of the year

Give me a light that I may tread

safely into the unknown.

And he said, "Go out into the night

and put your hand into the Hand

of God.

That will be to you better than a

light, and safer than a known

way." (Author unknown)

William B. Oglesby, Jr. (deceased)

John 1: 1-18

It is a very strenuous experience to try to read this prologue of John's Gospel. The writer is stretching to comprehend the loftiest of themes--the most ultimate of realities that transcend and govern our lives--themes so lofty that they defy comprehension. He wants us to see things that cannot be seen, to know what cannot be known. We struggle to keep up, to see beyond our horizons to whatever it is the writer wants his images to be pointing to. Oh, of course, we do understand it--the poetry is beautiful, the cadences familiar, the theme of Incarnation so basic--yet we also put down the text--or try reading through it yet again--with the haunting awareness that there is meaning there, crucial meaning, which still eludes us.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell birth stories. John will use narrative, too, and sacramentally powerful images from everyday life (water, wine, bread, shepherd, grapevine ...). But here he ventures more abstract images (Word, light ...) that point to realities more remote than we, and perhaps he, can readily grasp.

Then dawns the insight that our struggle with the text, rather than alienating us from it, puts us right inside the very experience it writes about -- the religious hunger -- the human plight of living haunted by the awareness that there is a solid transcendent reality ("Word," "true light," "glory," "grace," "truth," "fullness," "God") to which we owe our very being, to which we must and can look for our fulfillment/well-being/salvation ("power to become children of God"), which is positively accessible to us ("in the world," "came to his own home," "dwelt among us"), yet from which we are profoundly alienated.

This week -- New Year's Eve, the Sunday after Christmas -- may catch us especially vulnerable to this haunted sense of a crucial "More" to our life which eludes us. Advent and Christmas have given us momentary glimpses of a peace and meaning and focus and wholeness and joy for which we hunger. But now a week later the glimpses fade and the hunger persists. (The church which was filled last week and alive with joy will be far from filled today, either with people or with enthusiasm.) The onset of a new year raises hopes again about a new life that sheds some of the debris that besets us and aspires to more rootedness and momentum and zest. But we are cynical/realistic about that, too, especially about the "resolutions" with which we hope to accomplish the new life. This may be the season when we are especially attuned to both the light and the darkness, to the promises and also to the alienation from those promises which John makes so vivid in verse 11.

Our daily lives yield parables aplenty to help us recognize this religious hunger/faith -- the deeply inbred intuition that we are related -- intimately and savingly -- to an ultimate and embracing Reality, a life-giving Word that is before and above anything else, a "true light that enlightens," but in a relationship that remains veiled and elusive.

It's like trying to arrange the seven Scrabble letters before us into a compellingly winning word; we look at the particular set of letters before us and just intuitively "know" that they make a word, but we can't quite say what it is. It's like trying to recall a word or a name or a dream that seems very important, but just won't quite come to the tongue. It's like trying to assemble a Christmas toy or appliance; we trust that all the pieces fit together and that the instructions make sense -- and it is important to us that this be so! But, for now, we can't quite see how.

It's like knowing there is a kind of open and loving and joyful relationship with our children which we are meant to have -- we know it in our hearts even if we don't have Bill Cosby and Roseanne to portray it -- but it seems to stay just out of reach. ("Maybe when they are a little older," we say.) It's like knowing clearly that peace and justice can prevail in our world, but they don't. It's like knowing what the church community could be like, like knowing what intimacy and trust in marriage is supposed to be like, like knowing what fulfillment work, or retirement, should bring, but doesn't. We are intended for the Promised Land but separated from it by Wilderness, created to live in Eden, but separated from it by a fallenness we feel keenly and cannot fully name. The airplane on which we have reserved seats is taking off without us. We are left at the gate. The true light that enlightens everyone was in the world, yet the world knew him not. (vv.9,10)

Yet John not only reminds us of our profound predicament, but speaks to it, for God has spoken to it. That dismaying gap has been bridged, if we would but notice. God has made the move of choosing to meet us on our side of the gap. The Word came to dwell among us. We don't have to make the impossible leap of vaulting the gap ourselves. God does not stand above and beyond beckoning impatiently for us to make the right move -- that was the time of the Law which was issued from the mountain-top (v.17) -- but has brought the fatherly bosom to us, in the person of the Son (v.18). The Reality and embrace for which we long is no longer to be found outside of our own living experience, but within it. We are not to move away from our experience, as dismal and limited as it may seem, but into it, as it is, because that is where God has chosen to be.

In our living parables: When the elusive word or name or dream won't come to the tongue, if we stop concentrating on the "gap," on the fact that we can't say the word, if we relax our frantic and frustrating efforts to make ourselves overcome that gap, if we yield and trust that the word is already in us and wants to be spoken, then it happens. If we stop looking at the Scrabble letters for what they are not (if we stop measuring our lives by the Law) and therefore can relax our own efforts to make them transcend themselves, to be something they are not (if we stop trying to live our lives to satisfy the Law), if we can trust that the letters already contain the solution, that they want to spell it out for us (if we live by the "grace and truth" that has chosen to dwell within our chaotic lives), then suddenly we do see the word within.

So too with spouse and children and work and all our other flawed relationships: They become what they graciously are intended to be not by trying to make them less dark and flawed than they are, but by looking squarely at the ways they are dark -- accept them as they are, as God has -- and by letting the light shine in that darkness (v.5) In Jesus Christ God has not turned aside from the darkness, nor demands that we somehow escape it on our own into some remote realm of light, but has entered into it. If we are at odds with children or spouse or work, then we face that oddness with them and let that moment of sharing become the intimacy which it is. "We are really disappointing (frustrating or angering) each other over this," we confess, and the answer "Yes, we are" becomes literally an affirmation of new found identity and intimacy: Yes, we are.

Confessing our bewilderment with a text, we find a oneness with it and a more relaxed readiness to let it speak its own meaning.

Confessing our bewilderment with our own lives and the alienation we feel from the intentions of our sovereign Creator, we are more ready to recognize the grace, truth, and power to become children of God which has already been lodged in our lives by God's decision to enter into those lives in the person of Jesus Christ.

James E. Dittes

Yale Divinity School

John 1:1-18

In the 16th century icon of St. John the Evangelist from the Moscow school, which belongs to the left leaf of a Russian "royal door," the writer of the Fourth Gospel is shown seated on a rock in a cavern in the desert. John is depicted as an old man with an exceptionally high forehead, symbolizing scholarship, and dark brooding eyes that see beyond the seen. Draped in dark blue, he turns, listening in the desert silence to the divine voice speaking the divine word.

Prochorus the scribe, robed in deep red, sits opposite John, and writes in letters of fire, "In the beginning was the Word ..." As the words are spoken and written down, the Fourth Gospel gives voice and visibility to a profoundly new understanding of the mysterious and inexhaustible vision of Jesus Christ. It is a vision taking in a wider world than that of the other gospel writers, sparking the ordinariness of the historical person, and enclosing within it the untold immensity and endlessness of the divine being.

In John's vision, Jesus Christ is all Sound, all Space, and the ultimate of everything known and unknown. Origen describes the Fourth Gospel as the principal one; and he claims, "but no one may seize its meaning who has not leaned on Jesus' bosom"

Unfamiliar, restless, strangely provocative, the gospel of John is not only a remarkably creative and significant piece of writing, but it is also a challenge as it addresses the ultimate problem of all religious and philosophical inquiry of what is superficial or precious, impermanent or eternal.

The eagle is the symbol of John's gospel. John's thought and vision soar as the eagle soars, poised between earth and heaven, surveying one with wider understanding, and experiencing the other with brighter vision. Yet it contains the essence of Asian vision, expanding slowly like most Asian teachings, giving scope and space for the inquiring or contemplative mind. John presents Jesus Christ in a way in which no one else does. Jesus Christ; the whole cycle of sin and the manifestation of evil; the statement of truth; redemption and saving grace. John defines and expounds all these in original and scintillating terms.

As a theological and historical document, the Fourth Gospel is surprising in its diversity, unsurpassed in its originality, and intensely alive in its daring word images of power and faith. John's insights regarding Jesus Christ as historical person and divine presence, are perhaps the most mature, dynamic, and profound statements ever made. In the opening verses of the Fourth Gospel, John celebrates this revelation of God the Father through his son Jesus Christ; and Jesus Christ is the mediator of all creation; for, "He was in the beginning with God."

"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." This is revelation that stuns the mind and the imagination with its uniqueness and power, establishing irrevocably the authority and reality of Jesus Christ as god and man. The WORD in the beginning is justified in the life and person of Jesus Christ, and the Oneness of God as Trinity is undeniably established.

"He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him" Here is the mastery of purpose and amazing vision in the first chapter of this extraordinary gospel. A tiny disc of eighteen tiny verses contains the essence and mystery of the Incarnation, and both the historical and divine truth of Jesus Christ; they also establish without question the reality and presence of God, administered and realized in Jesus Christ.

John writes with poetic wonder, and an endlessly radiating power of truth. There is a transforming miracle at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel (as Jesus first changes water into wedding wine), and the greatest transforming miracle at the end as he rises from the darkness of death.

Surrounding the words of several chapters of the Fourth Gospel, and particularly in the first chapter, is an aura of mystery and light. Light, which is the daily experience of human beings, becomes for John an illustration of our need for another kind of light: the illuminating power of knowledge and faith, that can reveal our darkness and transform our drabness into spiritual radiance.

All primitive cultures are concerned with the concept of light as knowledge that overcomes ignorance, fear, and sin. In almost all the creation myths of the world, the process of creation begins with illumination; and light is the source of both revelation and discernment. John's creator figure is the being of inexhaustible light, creating and sustaining all life endlessly.

God, the supremely wise ineffable body of bliss is radiant being, containing and contained in God's own divine illumination; and light, God's light, is the pervasive and dynamic force in all human life, providing the passage from obscurity to insight. John's Gospel is a many layered gospel of light. It does not yield easily to critical historical investigation. It teases the stolid inquiry, and provides little of tangible reasonable debate or conclusion. The moral and religious instructions of the synoptic gospels is hardly visible in the fourth; instead are powerful word images, descriptions, discourses, debates, and provocative observations. "For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." John presents vividly the difference between the old wisdom and the new; the difference as law is measured up against grace, and as vengeance dissolves into compassion.

Here is a new vision of God, and a new understanding of God through Jesus Christ; as wrath changes to disappointment, and protective concern evolves into redeeming love. It is the new understanding of the Law as Love.

"No one has ever seen God; the only Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known." This verse reveals, testifies, and summarizes the extraordinary form and content of this unique gospel.

In the Genesis beginning, God's word creates all temporal form and substance. In the John beginning, God's word reveals God's own form and presence.

Nalini Jayasuriya