When Word Becomes Flesh

An old sermon on Incarnation while I'm on vacation

Words often lack flesh. Preachers and spiritual teachers are notorious for words that ring inspirational but are nevertheless hollow. Love and light, hope and resurrection spring from clergy and Christian lips so easily but often lack connection to gritty earthy reality. One writer I appreciate named Molly Baskette has a phrase for such disembodied language: she calls it swirly talk. Talk that swirls and even gives us an emotional jolt but doesn’t mean anything. Politicians are notorious for swirly talk, never more so than when on the campaign trail, persuading and promising voters and donors what they want to hear, not necessarily what they believe or intend to achieve. Intellectuals often speak words without flesh, too, circling in a conversation that fewer and fewer people can understand. There’s also the heartbreaking and righteous anger that arises when a public figure’s walk does not align with their talk. The gaping disjunction between word and deed can then become tragedy. When I first preached this sermon, a high-ranking Episcopal bishop in Baltimore, Maryland hit and killed a cyclist and initially drove away—an anti-Good-Samaritan warning.

In the Greek culture and philosophy of the Gospel writer John’s day, words lacked flesh, too. John writes that: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1).

John’s use of “Word,” in Greek Logos, has a context—it’s a word that in the philosophical schools of John’s time evoked a universal mind or reason that helped fashion and order the universe. Logos was “thought itself,” Heraclitus wrote, the eternal divine cause of all that is. Logos was the rational Craftsman, as Plato and his followers called it, who established intelligent organization out of pre-existent chaos. But to the Greek philosophers, Word or Logos always remained very abstract. Word or Logos was a principle, an idea, a debate, but certainly not a person. And the cumulative effect of identifying Word with universal reason was to distance Divinity from Flesh. Because in the Greek worldview, too often flesh and bodies and sex and food were at odds with soul and spirit.

Even though it is probably my favorite gospel, sometimes it can feel that the Gospel writer John’s words are too abstract and disconnected from daily life. Jesus in John’s Gospel is a heavenly being birthed from the realm of light, sent from above to enlighten the people in darkness below. The book has little character development, and the Jesus of John’s Gospel is not a storyteller; he’s a mystical lecturer more likely to wax eloquent about bread from heaven than he is to eat bread with his friends. John’s gospel is all about symbol: he gives us seven miraculous signs intended to demonstrate God’s glory shining through Jesus as Christ. John’s Jesus dares to claim oneness with God; he claims to be the way, the truth, and the life, and he doesn’t keep his messianic identity under wraps, as he does in the other Gospels. Jesus in John’s Gospel does not sweat blood and weep tears in Gethsemani for fear of death; he says, rather abstractly, “Father, the hour has come, glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you” (17:1). If you’ve been in the church for a lifetime like I have, that can come across as classic swirly talk. Is Jesus in John’s Gospel engaged in life? Is he resistant to injustice? Is he human?

John’s language veers towards the ethereal, but the humanity of flesh and blood, bone and water still pulse through his Gospel. John proclaims in his chapter one prologue, which some scholars think was an early Christian hymn, that the Word has become flesh and lived among us. As bible translator Eugene Peterson put it, “The Word has become flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” The cosmic Word who participated in ordering the universe has come near, has broken through the supposed separation of matter and spirit, and has thrown in divine lot with humanity. This Word Jesus Christ even enjoys a good glass of wine, as we learn from his first sign or miracle in chapter two, turning water into wine at the Cana wedding. This Word Jesus Christ spits in the dirt and heals a blind man. He tells a man who was not able to walk for thirty-eight years to walk—and he does. He weeps at the loss of his friend Lazarus and then calls him forth from the dead. This Word Jesus Christ is the only Jesus of the gospels to get down on his knees and wash his disciples’ dusty, grimy feet. This Word Jesus Christ roasts fish on the beach after the resurrection.

John’s prologue, then, is a hymn that holds together what became known in the Christian tradition as the great mystery of incarnation. It’s the mystery that in Jesus Christ, somehow flesh and Word are joined together. That God is somehow in-carnate, made into and revealed from this very stuff of earth—as writer Cole Arthur Riley puts it, “this here flesh.”

Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash

In the Western church following Augustine, we lost this mystery. We became obsessed with original sin, the nature of flesh as damned, and we put Jesus the divine man up on a saving pedestal of worship while we bemoaned our sinful human inadequacies. The Eastern Church didn’t have this problem: Orthodox and Coptic Christians have a much more positive anthropology. Incarnation, for Eastern Christians, is salvation itself, because God become human reveals to the world the intrinsic spark and potential of divinity that exists in all of us and all creation (not only in Jesus). Through the cosmic principle of Incarnation, God’s Word that spoke creation into existence has been named through Christianity as personal, intimate, and—as one contemplative community heralds through their name—“closer than breath.”

It’s a struggle sometimes for Words to find Flesh, whether we’re reading John’s Gospel or seeking to embody authentic faith today. Despite the growing disaffiliation with religion, it’s still rather easy to be a Christian in the United States, where I live. We can claim to follow the crucified, penniless Rabbi from Nazareth without putting anything on the line, without undergoing a revolution of consciousness, lifestyle, politics and heart. We can go to church without joining a movement. We can sing and pray and serve and believe without being transformed by love, without the Word becoming flesh in us.

I hear the challenge as twofold: 1) to deepen our experience of God through spiritual practices and 2) to deepen our personal commitment to a wider mission. It’s not enough study the Bible. The Word made Flesh invites us to encounter it in our being. It’s not enough to say prayers. The Word made Flesh desires for us to breathe such intimacy with God that we pray without ceasing. It’s not enough to go to a church building once a week for worship. The Word made Flesh stretches us to become church for each other in our relationships, so that Sunday morning is an overflow of a worshipping reality that already exists. It’s not enough to have opinions about social injustices. The Word Made Flesh requires that we throw as much of our energy as possible into stopping them, while allowing the stories of people who suffer to break our hearts.

May we participate in actualizing Christ here and now. May we become the hands, feet, heart, head, nose, ears, eyes, and body of God. May we become people who know divinity in our bones.