Sermon from 10am Sunday Worship, 1/1/2023, by Deacon Mike Stutso, John 1:1-18
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.
Man, o man, what a mouth full and a play on our vocabulary today. It took me back to being a little dude in the Catholic school system, trying to wrap my head around God as a trinity; we even sing a song about it. How does it go, Holy, Holy, Holy, God in three persons, Holy Trinity. That’s the shortened version. Never could really understand that or how about this one; God always was, is and shall be.
Finally at the age of 67 and a lot of education efforts, I understand, but it is a difficult thing to explain to others. I say that because are we truly capable of understanding God? Are we attempting to put God in a box and analyze God so that we can say we understand God?
Theologians have been trying to help us to understand the trinity for centuries but here is a word and explanation that I find helpful. The word is “Trinitarian” and I quote “God exists as three persons but is one being, having a single divine nature, the members of the trinity are co-equal and co-eternal, one essence, nature, power, action and will”.
That is a pretty good explanation and I’m not copping out, I’m just not sure how capable we will ever be to truly understand our Creator. So, I will use one of my favorite sayings I learned from Fr. Steve, “I believe so that I can understand”.
Now when we look at the Canonical Gospels, that’s all four of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, we see that in Mark’s Gospel, the story of Jesus starts with him as an adult. Matthew and Luke Gospels go back to the birth narrative of Jesus.
Now my buddy John had to be a little different, he had to show us that Jesus went back before Genesis and the Hebrew Testament, you know with those famous words “In the beginning”. So, thank you John for making this an easy sermon for me to tackle but we’ll get through it.
I read in a commentary that the Gospel of John combines theology with poetry they used the words “Poetic Prose” meaning “verbal or written language that follows the natural flow of speech”. Well after reading it about a dozen times, I guess I can see it. The first verse “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”, has inspired theologians to write books, many of our Christian Hymns and great works of art.
Let’s look at this play on our language, we have God/Word then we have Father/Son. Very distinctive in nature but they are all the same, they are one entity: God. Now we can add one more name to the list of names that God is to complete the Trinity and that is the Holy Spirit, now we have the saying “three in one”.
So, this is how I did it, I’m not rewriting the Gospel just substituting, so I’ll take Jesus and interchange it with “Word”. So, it would go like this; in the beginning was Jesus and Jesus was with God and Jesus was God. But we are not done yet, we have the word “Light” which is Jesus/God which shines in the darkness. So, we have Jesus/God/light doing battle with darkness/Satan. So, with my studies over the years and interchanging words I can wrap my head around all this and then the reading makes total sense to me, hopefully y’all too.
To help us I’d like to quote again from a commentary about the Gospel of John. “It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this text in shaping Christian conceptions of Jesus’ divinity, the incarnation, and the Trinity. Indeed, one of John’s concerns here is to emphasize Jesus’ unmatched transcendence and authority as one who comes from the Father, John presents Jesus here as “one being with God”.
Transcendence now that a $1.50 word for you, I had to look it up. When you achieve transcendence, you have gone beyond ordinary limitations or material experiences. The word is often used to describe a spiritual or religious state.
Now we have John the Baptist, you know Jesus’ cousin who was sent by God to pave the way for Jesus. We know that the Israelites would have had a problem with all that John was saying because the Son of God, the Messiah is an eight-foot warrior capable of defeating anyone or anything and is going to deliver Israel from slavery; they consider Jesus to be just a great prophet.
Now I know that my Jewish sisters and brothers might take offence with my sermon but I’m not trying to convert or offend anyone, I am just discussing Christianity as we see it not Judaism as they see it, we all believe in the one God. So as John said he was sent to testify to the Light which we know is Jesus who is the Light and the Truth.
Because of God’s unconditional love for us, Jesus became incarnate in human form into a world that is clouded in darkness. God’s light will shine through any darkness we might have lived in then and today because Jesus is the Light and the Truth, and through Jesus we will defeat darkness. Now in vs. 10 it says, “he was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him” and then in vs. 11 it says, “and his own did not accept him”.
Here we have a world where God’s chosen people and just about everyone else did not know, recognize, accept, or understand God/The Word/Jesus. God had sent the Light to enlighten the world for both Jews and Gentiles and what happened is just about the whole world failed to accept Jesus as the Messiah, the Messenger of God. Because the world did not understand the message of salvation, they rejected The Word and crucified him. BUT all of this had to happen to fulfill Hebrew Scripture and create Christianity and the Church as we know it today.
That why we should not judge the Jews or Rome, because still today it’s easier for much of the world to prefer darkness over the Light, we live in a world that feels entitled to do, say, and hurt whoever. Even to the point of using the Bible to inflict pain to whoever is not like them.
What we should be doing is trying to clean up this mess or it just might start raining again. You remember that dude named Noah who had a big boat. Now it does give us hope when it said, “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God”. In other words, folks we will be given the keys to The Kingdom of Heaven.
I really love vs. 15: “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me”. Powerful word showing that John knew a lot more than the rest of the world, he is going back to the Hebrew Testament and Genesis. That Jesus was before time and if we believe then we will receive grace upon grace, now that’s one of the best promises I’ve ever heard.
Finally, in vs. 18 it said that “no one has ever seen God”, I know Moses didn’t but let me ask y’all something, when the disciples and all people looked into Jesus’ eyes who and what did they see?
All I know is that one day (hopefully no time soon because I just got my collar and I still have some important work to do) we all will get that chance to look upon our Creator or in the words of my favorite Christian band (MercyMe) or will I be able to see at all.
AMEN