From the Daily Lectionary for Monday in the Ninth Week after Pentecost
John 1:1-18
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. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
Upon our completion of reading Matthew’s Gospel, the lectionary moves us into the Gospel of John. The radical difference in theology, style, and context between this Gospel and the other three cannot be overstated. John is the latest of the four Gospels, written somewhere around the end of the first century, and most likely edited and rewritten in the first two decades of the second century. For the early church fathers this Gospel was highly controversial, and almost didn’t get included in the official canon of scripture; and yet, as to the evolving theology of the church, it had the most influence. It was controversial for several reasons. First, the community of John was deemed by some to be gnostic, a cultic belief system whose followers claimed to have esoteric and exclusive knowledge of the divine. Gnosticism was considered to be a heresy by the early church. Gnosticism embraced a highly dualistic interpretation of the world, a clear divide between good and evil; who’s in and who’s out. Some gnostic communities believed there were two gods, one good, one evil. But perhaps the greatest controversy for the early patriarchs was the claim in this Gospel that Jesus was God. In none of the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, was this claim made. Jesus was proclaimed to be the messiah, the anointed, the Son, the Son of Man, but never was he equated with God.
Despite this overt discrepancy, or perhaps because of it, the arguments in the early church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries centered on the idea that Jesus was both human and divine… that his humanity was of the “same substance” as the divine. The most famous of combatants in this argument were Arius and Athanasius, two bishops in the fourth century in Antioch and Alexandria, respectively. At the risk of over-simplifying, Arius argued that Jesus was “like” God, whereas Athanasius argued that Jesus was the “same” as God. Athanasius’ argument won the day and became doctrine. I suspect the Synoptic writers would have been appalled.
So why was John’s Gospel so influential? First, it employs the language of the Greek philosophical academy, the tried and true means of education in the Mediterranean world. That made its discourse cosmopolitan, credible, authoritative. The language derives from Platonic thought; which at its heart sees the physical world as sign and symbol of things divine. The “fleshly” life and ministry of Jesus is emblematic of the life of God; and for this Gospel writer that concept extends to the community of followers as well; that loving one’s neighbor (befriending, as John puts it) is God-like. It was as if the Jesus Movement met, at last, with the philosophical language that could do it justice.
The point of all this is that in early Christianity there were many voices as to what the life and ministry of Jesus meant, and means. But the bottom line to the whole of scripture is that we are made for love, and that love is of God, the “light of the world” to use John’s words…. There are infinite ways to make that so, and to be sure, the heart of our faith doesn’t depend so much on theological eloquence, as it does on our enlightened action; our willingness to love. That is something with which all theologians worth their salt can agree.
A Prayer for Theologians (BCP p. 248)
O God, by your Holy Spirit you give to some the word of wisdom, to others the word of knowledge, and to others the word of faith: We praise your Name for the gifts of grace manifested in your teachers and theologians, and we pray that your church may never be destitute of such gifts; through Jesus Christ our savior, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
