Wisdom, Word, and Wonder
On this eighth day of Christmas, and at the dawn of a new year, I’d like to look back a few centuries. Instead of the 20 you might expect, though, I’d like to go back an additional thousand years.
Why not concentrate on the nativity story, you might ask. Because John chose not to do so when he wrote his gospel. Rather than starting with John the Baptist, like Mark, or Joseph, like Matthew, or Mary’s relatives, like Luke, John went back to the beginning. In fact, only Luke tells us about baby Jesus in a manger. Sometimes, the gospel writers offer unique emphases or perspectives on the life of Jesus, and I imagine that is because they wanted us to understand certain things about him.
John, who wrote his gospel decades after his colleagues, wanted to point out where Jesus came from in today’s passage. And he went way back when doing so, to the beginning of all things! Jesus was the Word, Jesus was the light, and all life came to be through him. Jesus was God. And since he was there at the beginning, he is part of the Alpha.
John must have thought this wasn’t made clear in the other gospels, so he is explicit in his writing. And to add to his authority, he uses language that would have been familiar to his Jewish readers. Compare the beginning of John to Proverbs 8, which says,
The LORD created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
…
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
…
then I was beside him, like a master worker
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.
The subject of that passage is Wisdom, ḥāḵ-māh (חָ֭כְמָה) in Hebrew. Much of the Hebrew scripture mentions wisdom; in fact, Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes are referred to as books of wisdom. Wisdom is often written of as a feminine attribute, and speaks to the way things work, how we should view the world, and an important consideration when making decisions.
John adopts language from Proverbs 8 when writing about Jesus, with a significant difference being that Jesus was not created in the way wisdom was. Yes, wisdom was there at the time of creation, but Jesus was there at the time of creation . . . and is also God.
Only after that is established does John speak of Jesus as a human, as becoming flesh and living among us. David MacLeod’s translation of John’s Greek is “He pitched His tent among us,” (MacLeod, 76–77), while Eugene Peterson’s Message translation is “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” Either way, Jesus is the living embodiment of God’s Word, Logos (Λόγος) in Greek. Some writings from around the time Jesus was born link wisdom and word (Reinhartz, loc. 43349), so John’s doing the same a few years later makes sense. And you might say that the Incarnation not only resulted in the Word dwelling among us, but God’s wisdom being revealed as well.
MacLeod says the Incarnation answers some critical questions. (MacLeod, 77–80) The first, “What is God really like?,” is answered in the person of Jesus. Jesus is himself a revelation, the Word become flesh.
“Does God know and understand the human plight?” Yes, he dwelt among us. “He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death.” (MacLeod, 77–78)
“Does God really care?” “Does life really matter?” The fact that Jesus came to live among us answers these questions.
Jesus can relate to us. You might have seen a commercial from the ad campaign “He Gets Us,” which reminds us of that. Life matters, and you matter to God. We might not always know or accept God’s Word, as John wrote, but the Incarnation was part of God’s plan from the beginning, and its effects are inevitable.
Where today’s passage from John perhaps emphasizes the “God” in “God with Us,” you might say Luke’s emphasizes the “with Us.” Like John, his gospel included things he wanted to highlight because he perceived a lack of them in the other accounts of Jesus’ life. In fact, his gospel begins by saying he wants to provide an “orderly account” of matters, which is kind of a slam toward the other gospel writers. (It also makes me wonder if we shouldn’t claim Luke as the first Presbyterian since he expresses a preference for orderliness.)
Luke emphasizes the more immediate context of Jesus’ birth. As Robert Brawley writes, “Augustus’s might, contrasted with peasants caught homeless at childbirth . . . [forces] a journey that matches divine purposes for Jesus to be born in David’s city.” (Brawley, loc. 41696) In today’s scripture passage, Luke writes of shepherds who come to see Jesus. And these weren’t even the top-tier sheep stewards by the standards of the day; these were what Adam Hamilton refers to as “night-shift shepherds” who might have even lived in the fields alongside the sheep in their care. Luke makes a point of saying the angel appeared to *them*, as opposed to Augustus, other government officials, or religious authorities. And the shepherds not only receive the angel’s message, but they become messengers themselves. This continued a precedent dating to some of our earliest spiritual ancestors, in which God’s word is shared through unlikely voices.
Jesus himself was an unlikely messenger, “but as the Word of God made flesh, he is also the message. He comes to reveal God, but he does this primarily through self-disclosure, by revealing himself.” (Powell, 334)
Jesus demonstrates that God is a God for all of creation, not just for those with power and influence. In fact, the kin-dom of God lifts up those who don’t enjoy such privilege. As Reuben Turbi Luka writes, “in the incarnation, God put a smile on the faces of the indigent of society and restored hope to the hopeless.” (Luka, 208) This theme comes up throughout Luke, from Mary’s Magnificat, in which the lowly are lifted, to the story of the poor widow and her two copper coins.
The Incarnation, the coming of God-with-us, occurred where it did and when it did among whom it did because that was in accordance with God’s plan. God wanted all people to know what God is like, that God understands the human plight, and that God cares. Not only that, but God has special concern for the marginalized, the poor, the hungry, the immigrant, the homeless — because in the person of Jesus, God was all of those things.
In today’s scripture passages, John and Luke present us with different perspectives on the Incarnation. We also took a peek at Proverbs and what it says about wisdom, which was there with Jesus at the beginning of all things. And we didn’t even get into what you’ll find in Matthew, Mark, or Paul’s writings, which further broaden our understanding of who Jesus is and what his birth means.
You can get wrapped up in the different theologies, or the biblical scholarship that helps us understand the language and context surrounding Jesus, but at some point — at least for me — I need to set the words aside and leave space for wonder. I can say that Jesus was God wearing human skin, but I don’t claim to understand how that worked, or what exactly John meant by “The Word,” or precisely where Jesus Christ ends and God the Creator begins, or what the Holy Spirit has to do with the Wisdom we read about in Proverbs 8. I could try to articulate it for you, but I would likely do a lousy job and would end up theologizing myself into a corner.
Perhaps what matters most is what we take from the gospels and this season, and what it means to us as 2023 unfolds. How do we live differently knowing that Jesus has been around since the beginning, and that his birth was announced to — of all people — the local night shift shepherds?
I like Howard Thurman’s suggestions, which appear in his poem “When the song of the angels is stilled.”
When the song of the angels is stilled
when the star in the sky is gone
when the kings and princes are home
when the shepherds are back with their flocks
the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost
to heal the broken
to feed the hungry
to release the prisoner
to rebuild the nations
to bring peace among the people
to make music in the heart. (Thurman)
We don’t need a firm grasp on the theological implications expressed by the gospel writers to be Jesus-followers. We need only continue the example he provided in the worldly life that began with the Incarnation. He may no longer physically reside in our neighborhood, but he is still God with us, inspiring us through his word and the Holy Spirit to demonstrate “love and mercy to all.” (Luka, 208) I pray the coming year offers us opportunities to encounter Christ, to be his light to others, and in doing so, to offer a glimpse of God’s kin-dom.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
Works Referenced
Brawley, Robert L. “Luke.” In Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha, edited by Gale A. Yee, Hugh R. Page, Jr., Matthew J. M. Coomber. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014. Kindle edition.
Brettler, Mark Zvi. “Kethuvim.” In The Jewish Study Bible: Second Edition, edited by Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Luka, Reuben Turbi. “The Prologue of John: A Conceptual Framework for African Public Theological Discourse.” Conspectus, Volume 32, October 2021, 199–213.
MacLeod, David J. “The Incarnation of the Word: John 1:14.” Bibliotheca Sacra 161, January-March 2004, 72–88.
Powell, Mark Allen. Introducing the New Testament: A Historical, Literary, and Theological Survey. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2018. Kindle edition.
Reinhartz, Adele. “John.” In Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha, edited by Gale A. Yee, Hugh R. Page, Jr., Matthew J. M. Coomber. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014. Kindle edition.
Thurman, Howard. The Mood of Christmas. United States: Friends United Press, 1985.
