In The Flesh: First Sunday of Christmastide, Year A December 29, 2013 John 1.1-18

            "The fact that we have bodies," C. S. Lewis once quipped, "is the oldest joke there is." The miracle of Christmas is that God gets in on the joke.

            "In the beginning was the Word." John gets off to a great start! Any first-century Jew would recognize the riff on Genesis 1.1 and the idea of a do-over for Adam's fall. Even Greek philosophers could relate to the "word," the ultimate truth behind all visible creation, into which the wisdom-seeker desired to disappear.

            "And the Word became flesh." That sentence screeches like a phonograph needle scratched across the wax grooves of this majestic philosophical symphony.

            This idea jars the Jew and grosses out the Greek! The faithful Israelite could conceive a God manifested among men in a gold-guilt ark, safely ensconced behind purple curtains embroidered with seraphic guards. God in a skin-box draped in homespun cloth that any menstruating woman could touch at will - that was a bit much. Plotinus, a couple of centuries or so after Jesus, summed up the Greek idea when he described the search for wisdom as "the flight of the alone into the alone." The idea of that it really involved the plunge of the Together into the mass of humanity would have had Plato reaching for the Pepto-Bismol.

            God in a body, a body that for thirty-three years delivered the punch line to its own joke as it doubtless did perfectly normal things at perfectly awful times; a body whose DNA may have overdone the ears or underdone the hairline; a body bathed at birth in his mother's blood and soaked at death in his own. And this Jesus Christ in this body, John says, has "explained" in inexplicable Almighty.

            Malcolm Guite, in the poem "Descent," from his book Sounding the Seasons, has captured the contrast between the decencies of theology and philosophy on the one hand, and the intolerable grace of the Incarnation:

They sought to soar into the skies

Those classic gods of high renown

For lofty pride aspires to rise

But you came down.

You dropped down from the mountains sheer

Forsook the eagle for the dove

The other Gods demanded fear

But you gave love

Where chiselled marble seemed to freeze

Their abstract and perfected form

Compassion brought you to your knees

Your blood was warm

They called for blood in sacrifice

Their victims on an altar bled

When no one else could pay the price

You died instead

They towered above our mortal plain,

Dismissed this restless flesh with scorn,

Aloof from birth and death and pain,

But you were born.

Born to these burdens, borne by all

Born with us all ‘astride the grave’

Weak, to be with us when we fall,

And strong to save.

No Joking!

Doug