The Gospel Lesson for the first Sunday of Christmas is the
operatic Prologue to the Gospel According To John:
In the beginning was
the Word
And the World was with
God
And the Word was God
Through him all things
were made
And without him not
anything was made
And that life was the
light of humanity
The light shines in
the darkness
And the darkness has
not overcome/comprehended it . . ..
The Word became flesh
and dwelt among us.
John’s Gospel is a narrative, but it begins with a hymn; so
the Prologue was probably written separately. New Testament scholars sometimes
say the Prologue was written later as an overture to interpret the story.
Maybe. But usually, Biblical Scholars think that poems and hymns are older than
prose narratives. So, just possibly this hymn came first and the narrative in
John was written to flesh out the imagery of the hymn, as Jesus fleshed out the
Word, the Logos, the Meaning of Reality. Just maybe the hymn came first.
The Gospel According to John is usually said to be the last
Gospel written. It is dated to the 90’s, while Matthew, Mark, and Luke are
assumed to have been written in the 70s and 80s. That may well be true.
But why do we believe John came late? I don’t think it’s
because of archaeological or historic evidence. It rests on this: In Matthew,
Mark, and Luke, we see a very human Jesus.[i]
But in John we see God in human form. We assume that as time went by memories
of the real human Jesus faded and a loftier golden haze image of Jesus
developed. We call John a “high Christology” meaning a more divine Christ; as
opposed to a “low Christology” meaning a more human Jesus.
Maybe it happened that way. But to my mind there’s a small
fly in that ointment – the Epistle to the Hebrews. It is also commonly said
that the Epistle to the Hebrews is late like John and that is said for the same
reason: Jesus in Hebrews is every bit as divine as he is in John, maybe more
so. But here’s the glitch. Hebrews is obsessed with Temple Sacrifice. It makes
an emphatic case against the oblation of goats, grains, etc. in the Jerusalem
Temple. But the Temple was destroyed in
70 C. E. Why is Hebrews going on so about something that could not have
been happening in the 90s?
New Testament scholars have not missed that point. They are
bright folks, no doubt brighter than I. They argue that these passages
challenging Temple sacrifice are symbolic or evoke memories, etc. They may well
be right, but these arguments seem strained and convoluted to me, rather like
the various arguments that the Song of Songs isn’t really about sex. If Hebrews
was written before the destruction of the Temple in 70, and its Christology is
every bit as high as John’s, then John could well have been written then too.
So here’s what I wonder: These days there are Christians who
see Jesus as a completely human way-shower, a wise teacher, a man who showed us
the path to God. There are others of us who see Jesus as the focal human
expression of God. For some of us today, take New Testament scholar N. T. Wright
for example, truly “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us . . ..” But for others of us, take for
example another respected New Testament scholar, John Dominic Crossan, Jesus
was quite human and divinity is a subsequent human interpretation.
Maybe these different perspectives on Jesus go all the way
back. Maybe in 60 C. E. Mark’s community had a rather Crossan-esque view of
Jesus while John’s community took more of an N. T. Wright view. Maybe the
Apostles who sat at table with Jesus each saw him differently.
Low Christology is in vogue these days. But I am of the High
Christology school myself. With complete respect for the low Christology folks,
the assumption that Low Christology came first is not necessarily warranted by the
facts and is a rhetorical assumption that marginalizes some of our greatest
theologians over the centuries, not to mention the folks I hang out with today.
On this first Sunday of Christmas, when we read one of the
most beautiful passages of the whole Bible, the Prologue to John, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God and the Word was God – those lines that set the sameness and difference
of Christ and God in a pulsating fluid interchange that will ultimately flower
into the doctrine of the Trinity – when we read that text, might we consider that
maybe it is not an afterthought, but that maybe at least near the beginning of
the writing of the Gospels someone saw this light shining in the darkness?
[i]
N. T. Wright argues that the Christology in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew,
Mark, and Luke) is higher than it seems, just less explicit. Sill, John’s Jesus
is much more explicitly divine.
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