When God Spoke Human
John 1:1-14
St. John’s United Church of Christ
Greeley, Colorado
December 24, 2023
Rev. Juvenal Cervantes
If I was to say to you, “I have a tree in my front yard,” your mind will immediately know what all those words mean. I say, “tree,” you think tree, but if I get more specific and I say, “we have an aspen tree in our front yard,” the image shifts a little bit, but we all go together.
If I say “I have a pine tree in my front yard” our image shifts. Or if say “I have a Christmas tree,” we all go together. Even if I say, “Family tree,” we all go together, words which mean something to us. We have a common experience with trees.
Now if I was to say this to someone who has spent all of his life in the Sahara Desert, I can say, “I have a tree in my back yard,” they may not know. But we have a common experience so that the language has common meaning and we can communicate with each other, that’s pretty convenient most of the time.
But if I say the word “God” to you, we all act as we know what that means as if it is crystal clear what that word means but in really it is not. Our culture uses the word “God” all over the place, from our fathers in government documents to documents in church liturgy. What that word refers to in each and every case is not clear to all of us. We may have heard it and used it, and sing at church, but what it refers to in our mind may be very different from what it refers to in another person’s mind and I can assure you, it’s very different from who God really is.
The image we form in our mind is quite limited. Like the proverbial six man who try to describe an elephant. John Godfrey Sags wrote about that, “The Blind Man and the Elephant,” and you may have read that in elementary school.
Six blind man describe an elephant. One feels the side of the elephant and say, “I know what the enfant is like, it is like a wall.” Another one talks hold of the trunk and says, “Oh, no, the elephant is much like a snake.” Then one grabs the tail and says, “I don’t know that you’re talking about, an elephant is like a rope.” And someone else grabs one of the legs and says, “No, elephant is like a tree.” And feels at the tusk and says, “No, I don’t know what you mean, an elephant is like a spear.” And on and on, the other one touches the elephant’s ear and says “I think an elephant is more like a fan.”
And so in the poem it says, “So the men of Indostan disputed loud and long, each in his own opinion, exceedingly though all were partly in the right, they were all in the wrong. “
So, oft in theologic wars The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance of what each other mean, and prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen!
Our language about God can be like that. No one of us can speak about God on our own, out of our own experience saying “This is definitely what God is like, what God would do, what God thinks.”
A seminary professor talked about a time when there was dispute in class and student raised his hand and expressed an opinion and said, “Well, from God’s point of view…” and the class turns to him and says, “How did you get there? How Do you get to God’s point of view?”
The gospel of John’s begins with a beautiful prologue. If you can imagine the gospel of John as a play and the stage is dark and suddenly the spotlight turns on and the narrator is standing there and out of the darkness, the narrator says:
“In the beginning was the word and the word was with God, this was in the beginning was God. All things were made by him and without him nothing was made. In him was light and light was the light of men.”
And he begins to tell the audience about his who is the word, the logos, the one who was with God when this massive universe was made. All that God was the word was. “In the beginning” Genesis one tell us of the word who exists, became flesh and dwelt among us as of the only begotten of the father, full of grace and truth.
This unimaginable God occupied the manger as a weak, vulnerable infant. Why did he do that? There must be scores and scores of reasons for Christmas Day, for the incarnation, for God becoming flesh.
A card showed a picture of a Christmas wreath with the word “season’ and on the other side a crown of thorns with the phrase, “the reason.”
Surely, He came into the world to make atonement for our sins. The Scripture is explicit about that; he came for that reason.
He came to teach us, to show us, demonstrating for us the way this human life is supposed to be lived. He did it for that reason.
But there was another reason and John’s speaks of this and it is important for us during this season. This passage from John underscores the central purpose of Jesus coming. He came to reveal to us what God is like so that we can know.
The word, the logos, came to say “God” to us in a way that we could understand so that we could never know what God is like on our own.
We might look around at the beauty of creation and as we look through the ages of science advances, the creation doesn’t become smaller to us, it becomes bigger. There’s more that we’ve known since the James Webb telescope went up than we knew before. There more when the Hubble when up than we knew before. And there is more than when Galileo focused on little on the heavens that we’ve known before.
The universe gets bigger and deeper as we understand molecules, chemicals, atoms and subatomic particles. However high you want to go, however low you want to go just gets more expansive and deeper.
We might look all of that and say, “I cannot bring myself to believe that this was some random act of time and chance. There is a creator behind all of this, it is so beautiful and so infinite, so powerful, surely there is a creator” and we might get to conclude that about God.
And we might look at the intricacies of it and conclude that the creator is more powerful and intelligent far much more than our imagination, else things could not be as they are.
And then we look around at creation and notice persons like ourselves, we might conclude that the creator is greater than the creation and if part of creation is like persons like us, than the creator self must have some personal dimension about him, a person. But beyond that we would have no way of knowing of this God who created it all, created us and we would have no way of knowing if its good or evil.
We would have no way of knowing if the God is someone that we could or would even know. There’s no way to know that just by looking at creation. At that point your ideas about God are as good as mine because at that point neither of us know what we’re talking about. Therefore, our theology, our thinking about God is only speculation, that is the best we can do.
Murphy’s law says, “If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.” There are many corollaries about that, here’s one that I heard, “Anything is possible when we don’t know what we’re talking about.”
Therefore, the only way that we could know what God is like is if God was to reveal himself to us. That’s the only way, we can know what God is truly like if God was to reveal to us.
So he did, this eternal, holy, powerful creator did the unimaginable thing, he took flesh upon himself. “The word became flesh and dwelt among us. We say ‘he incarnated himself’”. He took on flesh. He took our life; he came among us.
Verse 14 of John 1 says, “The word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
Verse 18: “Never has even seen God, God the only son who is close to the father’s heart who has made him known.”
Jesus often reaffirmed that in the upper room, the night before he was arrested, one of his disciples, Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the father, that would be enough for us.”
And Jesus said to him, “Have I been all this time and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me, has seen the father. How can you say, ‘show us the father?’ do you not believe in the father and the father is in me?”
Jesus said, “You look at me and you’ll understand all you can about God is truly like.”
On Christmas night, out of the silence, Jesus entered our world to say “God” to us, more clearly than it ever been spoken before, more fully than we would ever hear it again.
The book of Hebrews opens with this beautiful passage of this God who in various ways and in various times spoke to our forefathers in the past, has in these last days spoken to us in his son who is the exact representation of his glory. God who has spoken before though prophets and through events, now spoken fully though his son, the full revelation of God is made clear to us in Jesus Christ. That was one of the reasons he came.
When you hear a clock striking, when do you know that time it really is? Not till the last gong is sounded. You always getting closer to the truth, but you don’t know the truth until the last one has sounded.
And God spoke truthfully through the prophets through the years, but until he fully spoke himself to us in Jesus Christ, we didn’t fully understand what Jesus was like, but know we can as fully as we can get him.
A few times I’ve preached with the help of an interpreter. I would put forth my ideas, my message and a Portuguese/English interpreter would put them these into something that the people could understand. And I trusted that they did that accurately, they probably improved on several things.
In that kind of way, God, the Divine One, in a language that we could not speak as humans; we don’t speak divine, we speak human. We underhand what humans are like to a large degree.
God speaking through the prophet Isaiah said, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways. And my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”
God said, “You don’t speak divine, you don’t understand the language.” We don’t freely speak it, we babble along what we thing God is like, but the only way we can truly know someone is if they reveal themselves and in Christmas the one revealed by God, the eternal one became flesh, translated himself into human into Jesus so that we might understand what God is like.
We don’t have to wonder what God is like anymore, all we must do is look at Jesus and see. When someone says, “Well, I could never believe in a God who… fill in the blank with some atrocious thing after that, a God who does this or that,” I want to say, “Neither do I believe in a God like that, neither did Jesus!”
If you want to know that God is like, look at Jesus, what was the God that Jesus loved and served? Who was that good and beautiful God? Who is the father that Jesus served and worshipped? That what God is like.
We don’t turn to any other place, except to look at Jesus and whenever anyone tries to make claims of God, trying to partner God with their politics, trying to partner God with their position on certain issues, the questions is, “What would Jesus do? What did Jesus say? Is that what was Jesus was like?” Because that’s where God has spoken most clearly to us, he translated himself to us at Christmas.
Jesus came to reveal a heavenly father who created all things, who providentially cares for all of its creatures, who loves us more than we can possibly know, who seeks us out when we stray, who when we’re broken and when we fail, he forgives our sin, he accepts us as his beloved one. The heavenly father is near us, Jesus said, and know us thoroughly. He knows our needs before we ask, he reigns as king over the unaversive and he is king of our hearts when we yield to him.
One day the kingdoms of this earth will become the kingdoms of our God and his messiah and He will reign forever and ever, this and more, Jesus revealed to us when he said, “God” to us.
When we give thanks in Christmas, thank God for coming to die for our sins. Thank God that Jesus the word became flesh and dwelt among us so that we can understand who the father is, that’s one of the reasons he came.