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Differences in John's Gospel

1/29/2023

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

Last week, at “in-person” church (which I was, unfortunately, unable to record) we read and discussed the opening verses of the Gospel according to John, comparing the New Revised Standard version with The Message version. The first is considered one of the best translations for accuracy and scholarship, the second is a storyteller’s version.

I like to use this compare/contrast method when reading scripture because I find that comparing two (or more) versions of the readings double my understanding of the subject matter.

The verses we read, verses 1 through 18 of chapter one, are often referred to as The Prologue, because they take us back to the very beginning and set us up for the rest of the Gospel. Most of us are at least somewhat familiar with the opening two lines:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

Today I want to focus just on verse one. The Message gives us this verse like this: “The Word was first, the Word present to God, God present to the Word,” and here is our first major difference between John’s gospel and the other three gospels.

In this gospel, when it speaks of the word, “Word” is capitalized, suggesting that in this particular usage it means more than simply the spoken word. This “Word” is translated in the Greek in which it was written, as Logos, or the principle of cosmic reason – God’s interaction between the divine thought and the material world.

This is a personalization similar to the use of Wisdom or Sophia (the Greek word for Wisdom) in the Wisdom writings of the Old Testament. In Proverbs, chapter 8, Wisdom (or Sophia) stands at the city gates and cries out to the people to heed her teachings for...

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
    the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
    at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
    when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
    before the hills, I was brought forth,
when he had not yet made earth and fields
    or the world’s first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there... vv. 22-27a

So when the writer of John’s Gospel uses the language of “In the beginning” to place Logos at “the beginning” it is no more than the Wisdom writer used with Sophia/Wisdom. What is different is the clear identification with the man, Jesus.

The three synoptic Gospels, whether they begin with a birth narrative or a baptism all begin with a fully human Jesus whose divine nature is slowly revealed as time goes along. Yes, the infancy narratives appear to have their public notice of Jesus’ “specialness,” but the reality seems to be that no one remembers these things beyond the moment. It is not until adulthood that people begin to notice that this man Jesus is something different, or that he has something to share with us.

John’s gospel is alone in proclaiming that divine nature from the very beginning – from before the beginning -- In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This assurance of Jesus’ divine nature shapes John’s gospel account in a different manner than those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. There is a difference between the Son of God, and God, the Son.

John does not have a year in the three year common lectionary as do Matthew, Mark, and Luke, so readings from John are used in all three years primarily at Easter season and in Lent, with a scattering during Advent. The next time we are reading anything from John’s Gospel, listen for that difference. When we find a reading from John, pay attention and see where you hear a slightly different Jesus being presented to us.

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Jesus and John - Epiphany 3

1/15/2023

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Luke 3:7-17 (‘The Message’ translation)

When crowds of people came out for baptism because it was the popular thing to do, John exploded: “Brood of snakes! What do you think you’re doing slithering down here to the river? Do you think a little water on your snakeskins is going to deflect God’s judgment? It’s your life that must change, not your skin. And don’t think you can pull rank by claiming Abraham as ‘father.’ Being a child of Abraham is neither here nor there—children of Abraham are a dime a dozen. God can make children from stones if he wants. What counts is your life. Is it green and blossoming? Because if it’s deadwood, it goes on the fire.”

The crowd asked him, “Then what are we supposed to do?” “If you have two coats, give one away,” he said. “Do the same with your food.”

Tax men also came to be baptized and said, “Teacher, what should we do?” He told them, “No more extortion—collect only what is required by law.”

Soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?” He told them, “No shakedowns, no blackmail—and be content with your rations.”

The interest of the people by now was building. They were all beginning to wonder, “Could this John be the Messiah?” But John intervened: “I’m baptizing you here in the river. The main character in this drama, to whom I’m a mere stagehand, will ignite the kingdom life, a fire, the Holy Spirit within you, changing you from the inside out.....

Last week we read the readings for Epiphany and we discussed the revelation of the en-flesh-ment of divinity in the human person of the child Jesus. Today’s reading telling of the baptism of the adult Jesus is simply a continuation of the same story – notwithstanding that 30 or so human years passed between the two episodes. We are still talking about the very same thing – revelation.

For thirty or so years from the visit of the magi Jesus lived an entirely normal life for his time and place. For thirty years he rose in the morning and did whatever it was he did and then went to bed again at night – just like everyone else around him. At least we assume he did.

Based on the fact that he attracted no attention -- no one ever mentioned him in the writings of the time – and the only link we get to those quiet years - except the one brief story when he was twelve – comes in the next chapter of Luke after Jesus’ first speaking appearance when he read from Isaiah in the local synagogue and the people were suddenly astonished to hear how well he spoke, and they asked themselves “Isn’t this Joseph’s son, the one we’ve known since he was a youngster?”

It would appear that until his baptism in the Jordan, no one had ever paid a whole lot of attention to him. No one expected great things from him. He was just a guy, like any other guy.

But then, one day, he had been drawn into the desert to hear the new preacher, John, who was preaching fire and brimstone and calling the people to repentance – calling them to be baptized and washed from their sin – and to hurry up about it because one was coming who was going to clean up God’s world by tossing out the trash and burning it.

This is a continuation of the epiphany story – it really is. I want to begin to share it here with a bit of poetry from storyteller/poet John Shea. This bit is from a long story-poem titled, “The Man Who Was a Lamp”...

Jesus came out of John, as surely as he came out of Mary.
John was the desert soil in which the flower of Jesus grew.
John was the voice in the wilderness who taught Jesus to hear the voice from the sky.
John would push sinners beneath the water and Jesus would resurrect them on the waves.
John was the fast who prepared for Jesus, the feast.
No man was ever less a shepherd than John -- yet he was loved by one.
If you are surprised that Jesus came from John, imagine John’s prophetic puzzlement when the predicted “wrath to come” came and he said, “Let’s eat!”
John expected an ax to the root of the tree and instead he found a gardener hoeing around it.
He dreamt of a man with a winnowing fan and a fire, and along came a singing seed scatterer.
He welcomed wrathful verdicts, then found a bridegroom on the bench.
When John said, “There is one among you whom you do not know,” he surely spoke from experience. *

John knew someone was coming, but he, no more than any of the rest of us, knew who that “someone” would turn out to be. John expected pretty much the opposite of what he ended up getting. Like most of the Jews of the time, John expected a king or a general – they all desperately wanted a king-slash-general to lead them to battle their way to independence again – and what they got was ... a guy. John looked for wrath, and what he found was someone inviting us all to a meal.

And Jesus? What was Jesus expecting that day, out there in the desert? Did he really expect that voice claiming him as Beloved Son? Or was he as surprised as everyone else? As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it: ”Jesus goes into the waters of the Jordan a carpenter, and comes out a Messiah.” He went into the water a private person and came out God’s person. The voice from the heart of God makes it clear – at least to those with ears to hear – who this Jesus guy is. “You are my beloved Son, with you I am very pleased.” These words come from the Hebrew Scriptures – describing the promised Messiah. Those who heard them would surely have recognized their reference.

One question that has come down through the centuries, is “why was Jesus baptized?” He clearly had no sin of which to repent, so what was the point? And here again, I’m going back to Barbara Brown Taylor, because she has the best answer I think I’ve ever read:

“It is as big a mystery as the Christmas mystery of the incarnation. Why did he become human when he could have stayed God? Why was he baptized with us when he could have stayed on the banks of the Jordan and supervised? Why does he come to us where we are, over and over again, when he could save himself the grief, the pain, the death, by insisting that we come to him where he is?
Because he loves us, that’s why, and because he is, unbelievably, pleased with us, and because he has come to lead us through the waters of life and death into life eternal. It has never been his style to shout directions to us from some safe place of his own. He has always led us from within our midst, joining us in the water, in the mud, in the skin to show us how it is done.” **

And that, I believe is our answer. We remind ourselves of these stories every year because this guy Jesus works for us – because he has always loved us enough to do the hard work of showing up where we are. When he was a baby God revealed him as Divine, and then did it again in the adult Jesus. Divine he is, but he’s always led us from within our midst -- to show us how – and why it is done.

We are human ... and we are loved ... and our part of this is to accept it. Accept it and believe it and try our best to follow the way of Jesus, and live that way ourselves.

* John Shea, Starlight: Beholding the Christmas Miracle All Year Long, (c) 1992
** Barbara Brown Taylor, Mixed Blessings, (c) 1986

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"Sometimes the Long Way Around" -- Epiphany 2023

1/8/2023

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Matthew 2:1-12
After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”
When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:

“‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.’”

Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”

After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

Today we should be reading the story of the Baptism of the Lord, but today is also, technically, the 1st Sunday after Epiphany, as Epiphany, an un-moveable feast, is always celebrated on January 6th, and I have chosen to discuss it this year rather than the Baptism.

The secular definition of epiphany according to Merriam-Webster, is “a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something.” Within the church world then, epiphany describes the revelation – the sudden realization by humans -- of the Divine incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ.

We all know that these magi were really astrologer/kings who traveled across the desert on camels; that there were three of them (we even know their names: Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar); and that they brought three gifts.

But how do we know these things? The only part of what I just said that is ever mentioned in scripture is the part about there being three gifts – that is part of today’s opening reading – the rest is not. We are never told how many magi there were – we only assume there were three because there were three gifts. There could have been two or half a dozen – we are never told.

And we most certainly don’t know their names or their countries of origin. Why? Because these twelve verses of today’s reading from Matthew are all there is in the entire Bible that tells this about this event. This is it. Twelve verses, no more.

Everything else is just story – story that makes no claim to be history. It’s all just fiction or, at best, good-sounding guesses. We call them astrologers because they tell Herod they are following a star belonging to the newly-born king and the most common numbers of astrologists were probably Zoroastrians from Persia – to the east. A good guess but hardly definitive. The people of almost every nearby culture of that time were followers of the stars, and Israel/Judah was almost in the Mediterranean Sea so that left an awful lot of “east” to the other side.

As far as their names go, that is pure fiction.

But that is exactly what is wonderful about this story. The story isn’t really about these main characters. They are important simply as witnesses to this epiphany – not because of who they are but because of what goes on around them.

The details of this story are supplied so sparsely that it leaves a lot of blank space to be filled by human imagination – all without causing any damage to the revelation. And human minds have filled in so many of the blanks with such wonderful imaginative detail that the story has been told over and over and over again in all its many forms.

These re-tellings give us a broad cast of individuals. Sometimes the main characters are kings, sometimes they are peasants. Sometimes they are naïve, sometimes they are wise. Often times they are completely unaware of the bigger story happening around them. Sometimes their choices are right and sometimes they are mistaken. They are, in fact, just people trying to get by –just like us. Their presence here helps us see ourselves in this story of God interacting with humankind.

“Amahl and the Night Visitors”; Henry Van Dyke’s “The Story of the Other Wise Man”; T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi”; Langston Hughes’s lovely poem, “Carol of the Brown King,” -- these are just a few of the poems, novels, operas and short-stories with their different locales and scenarios – each so beautiful in their own way -- so different in detail and yet all so powerful at emphasizing the important fact of the changes one child’s birth made in our world.

To end with one more take on this versatile story I want to quote from the Epiphany reading from our Week of Compassion Advent Devotional. This last quote is from Caroline Hamilton-Arnold,

“The story of the Magi is messy; but we discover new grace in the Christmas story. God is present even in our failings, inviting us into a new dream for the world, pointing in new directions, prompting us to take the long was around.”

That’s one of the things I’ve always loved best about this story – that the magi, realizing they’ve made a mistake in initially trusting Herod, end up turning around and going home by a totally different route – not the easiest, but the longer, more difficult route -- in order to avoid him and correct the error they made in trusting him in the first place. This story tells us that we too – when we need to -- can correct our mis-steps and start over in a new direction. It’s been done before.

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"TIME FOR EVERYTHING" -- New Year's Day, 2023

1/1/2023

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Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to harvest,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up seeking,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

Today is New Year’s Day. Right now we’re still in Christmas season and next Sunday we will celebrate Epiphany, but today is an unusual day in that the lectionary offers us a choice of three different liturgies for this one Sunday.

The first offering is simply referred to as the First Sunday after Christmas Day. The gospel story here occurs right after the visit of the Magi – the three Kings – when an angel appears to Joseph in his dream and warns him to gather up his wife and son and run to Egypt to escape the killing wrath of Herod, who wants to murder this “new born king” that he sees as a dangerous rival. This is where we find the story of the “Slaughter of the Innocents.”

Mary, Joseph, and the child will then remain in Egypt until they hear of the death of Herod, at which time they will return to Joseph’s home in Nazareth, where Jesus will grow to adulthood.

The second choice given for this Sunday is the day dedicated to the Holy Name of Jesus. The purpose of this liturgy would be to remind us that this newly born child is no ordinary child, but the one by whose name we will all be blessed, the sick shall be healed, the lowly raised up...all through the power of this name. This child is born with a name and a purpose and carries this gift from God all his life.

The third choice, and the one I chose for this week, is simply that it is New Year’s Day. And therefore, it is a good day to focus on the knowledge that in Jesus, with the coming of this new-born child, there is the coming of a new thing. As we are told in Revelations, “...the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’" New Year’s Day is a time to look into our lives and see what and how we are doing, and if we are truly watching and listening for God’s new things.

Our reading for this day comes from Ecclesiastes, which is one of the Old Testament books classified as Wisdom literature. The author is unnamed except to be referred to as “the preacher,” (ekklēsiastēs, in Greek.) This writer is also named as the king who is the son of David -- who could only be Solomon – and yet the writer never claims that name.

Whoever the author might be, his advice can best be encapsulated as “enjoy the good things that God provides while one has them to enjoy (because they likely won’t last).” But first one has to look honestly into what God has given us, before we can truly enjoy them.

The author begins our reading for today by reminding us that "There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens", following this intro with a listing of 14 paired opposites – each of which is made up of two actions or attributes that pretty much make up life in this world.

It would be fairly easy to just read through the lists without giving it any particularly deep thought – I know this is so because that’s how I have always read it--but one point, I think, is especially worth considering here. Because of the way the words are presented, the paired words come across sounding almost as if we are presented with a choice between one or the other -- life or death, for instance. But if we pay attention we realize that the connecting word isn’t OR, it’s always AND. ‘There is a time to be born AND a time to die; a time to mourn AND a time to dance.’ In the fourteen paired statements we are given twenty-eight words or concepts that will, to some extent, each turn out to be part of every person’s human experience.

How could we ever know joy if there were no sorrow? How could we begin to understand love if there were never any such thing as hatred?

Another part I find extremely interesting in this reading is that there is no moral judgment given. Most of what we study in scripture revolves around what is “right” and what is “wrong”---there is none of that here. There is simply a statement of fact--these things are part of the human experience. If there is a question—and I don’t think there is one from the writing itself—then maybe we can ask one for ourselves; something like “How am I doing in this life I’ve been given?”

Certainly, we could cover several Sunday’s worth of discussions on some of these, such as a time to kill, a time to hate, a time for war, but, whether we like it or not, these are part of the human experience—ugly, unfortunate parts, but parts, nonetheless. Some of these can happen to us, remember, not always by us, and sometimes they are done by others supposedly acting in our name.

God has given us life, and this life is nowhere guaranteed to be all sunshine and butterflies. There is weeping and there is grieving–-but there is also laughter and loving and planting for the future. Our job here in God’s world, is to live the good times with joy and gratitude---and to face the bad times with as much grace and fortitude as we can—knowing God is with us, not judging us, but simply loving us through it all.

So, go out each day into this life God has made for us. GOD, the maker of all, has created this world and given it to us to live in, to use, and to enjoy! That is no small thing! Don’t take it for granted. Live this life; care for each other; be aware of every precious moment.

God blesses us, today and always...

Happy New Year to us all!

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Differences in John's Gospel

Jesus and John - Epiphany 3

"Sometimes the Long Way Around" -- Epiphany 2023

"TIME FOR EVERYTHING" -- New Year's Day, 2023

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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