Have you noticed that the S John’s Group in our Sunday School carries this text on its banner? The text is, of course, with the academic pride proper to young scholars, in Greek; It is, no doubt, there to be admired, rather than studied. Yet in fact it seems to me, as it has done to so many commentators, to be the most profound statement possible of what Christianity is about. This is what distinguishes us from other religions. This is what gives Christianity its unique power and attraction. This is what demands our assent, the belief that a person who was God was born a man, lived thirty years or so, died and came to life again and went back to the place he had come from. This is the Good News, and it is exciting.
One of its most important features for me is, ‘in the beginning’, its initial phrase. It does not mean, as a fairy story might begin, ‘a long time ago’. It is very easy to confuse eternity in one’s mind with a long period of time, and to think of events in eternity as starting at a beginning and then happening one after the other. This is the method followed by most ancient accounts of Jesus Christ; first he was in heaven for a long time, then he became a man, then he stopped being a man and went back to heaven. I believe that way of looking at eternity is a mistake, that ‘in the beginning’ means something more like ‘fundamentally’, that eternity doesn’t have a beginning and doesn’t work with events in succession. As Charles Williams wrote, ‘In the place of the Omnipotence there is neither before nor after’. I believe that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are all everlasting facts, that wherever Jesus is, he has been, and will always be incarnate, with the experiences of his life on earth all with him, so that , originally in eternity, the crucified Christ is there, and part of the Godhead, so that those experiences are of timeless significance.
There are several other conclusions to be drawn from this attitude to eternity. First of all, if this man Jesus returned to eternity in his humanity, so can we. There is no reason why, leaving this life for eternity, we should not find ourselves, with all our experiences, always there in a closer relationship with God than we have now. Second, if this Jesus is our God, we can be certain of his interest, his fellow- feeling, and his compassion. He has always known what we were facing and what we were feeling; there is nothing in the human condition which is foreign to him, any more than there was to the Roman poet Terence whom I am quoting. You may ask why God should be bothered with the badly-behaved inhabitants of a negligible planet on the edge of a very ordinary galaxy when there must be many more interesting developments within the Universe. Of course, I do not know the answer, but I think that God is great enough to love all his creatures everywhere, and that we shall meet many new manifestations of his creativity in the life of eternity; we may even call them angels. It is difficult for us to envisage the scale of God’s reach and to accept that his world-wide care for us on Earth, however great, may be an infinitesimal part of his activity.
So much for ‘the beginning’, what about , the Word? The writer of the Fourth Gospel, in composing this introductory hymn, was impelled by many influences, not all of which can have the same effect on us. Instead of wearying you with references from Heraclitus to Gnosticism, let me just ask you what ‘the Word’ means to us today. It is clearly something, or someone, coming from God, active, powerful, and in the next verse, identified with God. It is a manifestation of the Divine nature. In particular, it conveys the idea of God’s creativity. The writer deliberately evokes the Breath of God in the first verses of Genesis. We are not going to be able to establish any difference between the Word and God, and yet we are soon told that ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’. To us, who are used to the Gospel story, this statement may seem obvious, but in fact it is a startling declaration, because it involves the scenario with which I began, the news that there is a man in the Trinity. This news is valid, however many galaxies we may suppose God to have children in, and whatever forms these children may take.
It is not our duty, though it may be our pleasure, to think about the activity of God in other worlds. It is here, in this world, that we encounter him, in the form of Jesus Christ. I have been talking about Jesus as ultimate reality, embodying the compassion of God. That compassion, being with us whatever happens, is what we call love. It is a love which inspires human beings and transforms human relationships into something reflecting the energies which move the Trinity. It is the love which, Dante said, ‘moves the Sun and the other stars’.
The assurance given us by the first words of S John’s Gospel is fundamental to our understanding of God. If Jesus Christ has always been an integral element in the nature of God, if there is a man in heaven, then we know that we have nothing to worry about, because that difficult word ‘salvation’ turns out to be a simple word meaning that Jesus Christ, who is creative love from the beginning, is for ever willing to care for us with the love that comes from understanding human problems, because he has already experienced them.
Amen
Alan Goodison