Collect

Collect for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal; grant this, O heavenly Father, for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

John 1.14-18


And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him, and cried out, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.'") For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.

This is one of the few spots where I actually don't like the ESV very much -- it uses idiomatic equivalents here where a literal rendering would be just as good (and, in my opinion, better for the fact of being literal). But I want to stick to one translation throughout, so.

The phrase "the Word became flesh" is the climax of this prologue. In the Catholic Church it is traditional to genuflect whenever this verse is read (at Masses in the Tridentine form and in the Anglican Use, it is read after every Mass). The thing is, we're used to it -- whether we are Christians or not, we are accustomed to the idea of God becoming Man in Jesus -- whereas, to an ancient audience whether Gentile or Jewish, this was shoelace-eating lunacy.


The idea of the Incarnation (dynamic equivalence).

The Logos among the Greeks was supposed to be an all-pervading, animating principle of the universe. The Divine Wisdom of Hebrew thought was a heavenly reality, a personified attribute of an utterly holy and separate God. Neither of them was supposed to be a human being. To the Greeks, no individual person could possibly be that important, and certainly not to the all-encompassing Divine, whether conceived monotheistically or pantheistically or polytheistically, or however you please. To the Jews, the notion of the absolute, transcendent Godhead being one with a human, however exalted, was raving sacrilege. Men, even holy men, even prophets like Moses, were not permitted to see God -- how could any of them be God? It's absurd!

It is this very message which is most emphatically stated in the Gospel of John; it is woven into the whole of it. The Word made flesh is practically the point of his book. There is a saying, whose origin I forget, that "God became Man so that man might become god." The Johannine perspective on the nature and origin of the Church could be summed up in that way.

The word translated "dwelt" in verse 14 is significant. A flat-footedly literal translation would be "tented" or "pitched his tent"; it suggests the erecting of the Tabernacle. Once again, as in the opening verses, the complete identity of God with the Word is made.

It is of course impossible to know whether John had read the Gospel of Luke; however, certain parallels here are rather interesting. As we shall see later, the role that John gives to the Blessed Virgin Mary is a truly fascinating one. Now, Mary is not directly mentioned in these verses -- her presence is implicitly there, insofar as the flesh which the Word received, He received from His Mother. But the use of this word that draws our minds to the Tabernacle is reminiscent of Luke's account of the Annunciation, and specifically of Luke 1.35, where the archangel Gabriel tells her that "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you". This recalls the closing verses of the book of Exodus, where, after the Tabernacle is completed, it says, "Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting". The parallelism here is strengthened by verbal and thematic parallels between the transporting of the Ark of the Covenant from Shiloh to Jerusalem in II Samuel 6.1-15 and Luke 1.39-56, in which Mary goes from Nazareth to Jerusalem to visit her cousin Elizabeth, the mother of the Baptist (and it may not be coincidence that, immediately after this verse in John, the Baptist is cited again even though what is said is scarcely new). Especially when taken together, the image of the Virgin as the Tabernacle of God's presence emerges, and indeed of her as the Ark of the Covenant -- containing the heavenly manna with which Jesus will compare Himself in chapter 6.


The comparison between Christ and Moses, a common motif in the Gospel of Matthew, strengthens and builds on this theme. Various Jewish festivals, rites, and institutions are brought up in John for the specific purpose of displaying Jesus as the fulfillment of them, the perfecting of what they had suggested. And, in perfecting them, He replaces them. The transition from "law" to "grace and truth," another expression suggestive of the writings of Saint Paul, summarizes this; it will be stated in specific instances later on.

Returning to the mention of the relationship between the Son and the Father, an important one throughout the Gospels and particularly in John, we come to one of the poorer examples of the ESV. The word they render "only" is more traditionally translated "only-begotten," and this more traditional translation is also, it so happens, more accurate. The image of begetting, used as a technical and dogmatic term in the Nicene Creed, was doubtless heavily influenced by (if not drawn directly from) these verses. The change, from the language of God and the Word to that of the Father and the Son, is interesting; taken with verse 13, it may be meant to suggest the identity between the Word/Son and those who accept Him, as the identity between Him and the Father has already been established in the preceding verses. The theme of indwellings and identities of various kinds will be picked up again, especially in the Upper Room Discourse of chapters 13-17.

The mention of receiving grace from the Son's "fullness" suggests yet another Pauline parallel, from Colossians 1:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities -- all were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

The cosmic language of this passage and that of John 1 are strikingly similar. Johannine literature is often represented as being markedly distinct from the rest of the New Testament, and in some ways that's true, but I find it impossible to read passages like these and not see the fundamental unity that underlies the two.

This idea of fullness being given from the Son to those who believe in Him is suggested again, with particular force in two passages: the Bread of Life discourse in John 6, and the Upper Room Discourse. Both contain various symbols and teachings with eucharistic overtones, and of course Catholic and Orthodox Christians take Christ to be speaking precisely about the Eucharist in John 6. The sacramental themes of this Gospel are more vivid and pronounced than in any of the Synoptics, even without a direct account of the institution of the Eucharist. (If the author knew of one or more of the Synoptic Gospels -- which he may well have, if the scholarly consensus that John is the latest of the four is correct -- then he probably felt it was simply unnecessary to go back over that familiar information.)



The clause "No one has ever seen God" is a rather intriguing inclusion. Several scenes common to the Synoptics are missing from John, including the Transfiguration, which included a vision of both Moses and the "cloud" which concealed and therefore symbolized the presence of God. It's just possible that another Pauline parallel is intended, this time to the early chapters of II Corinthians, where the Apostle points out that Moses' vision of God, even as limited and indirect as it was, left his face shining so brilliantly that it had to be veiled -- and therefore, how much more brilliant was this new covenant in Jesus? However, what is more clear is that here, as so often in the prologue of John, we have a call-forward: in the Upper Room Discourse, Saint Thomas (of course!) says "Show us the Father," and Jesus replies, "He who has seen me has seen the Father."

"At the Father's side" is another disappointing translation of the Greek, though here there is a good reason for it. That reason is that there is no perfect way of conveying the particular word involved here. I think that the (again, more traditional) translation "in the bosom of the Father" is better, but it is still imperfect. The Greek says that the Son is in the kolpos of the Father. A kolpos was a sort of pocket, formed by lifting a fold of one's garment -- like we did when we were kids and wanted to collect berries or interesting stones or what have you, by picking up the edge of our shirts. (Obviously "In the Father's pocket" sends kind of a different vibe, though as it happens also a true one.) This, as it happens, is another, more minor, call-forward. In the Upper Room, in chapter 13, we get one of our glimpses of the author of the Gospel, who refers to himself throughout only as the Beloved Disciple; he is right beside Jesus, and, you guessed it, he is described as being in Jesus' kolpos.

5 comments:

  1. I loved this post and the last one, and I'm eagerly looking forward to the rest. :D

    Having said that, I'm more than a little skeptical that the reference to Christ tabernacle-ing among us is a reference to Mary as the Temple. Just one chapter later, John includes the episode of Christ referring to Himself and His own body as the Temple. It seems much, much more natural to take this as an example of the New Testament parallel between Jesus *Himself* and the Temple: just as the latter was the place of God's glory and presence in the Old Testament, and the only place where one could go to worship and encounter God according to His commandment and institution, so also Jesus is the second and superior Temple, who is (as you pointed out in your post) the fullness of the deity in human flesh, the final revelation of the Father, and the only way, truth, and life (cf. John 14). I think that interpreting the tabernacle reference here as referring to Mary is a really big stretch and, with all due respect, I don't think the Gospel taken as a whole lets you have it.

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    1. Thank you. I should have known that my Lutheran friend would be paying close attention to a series on the Gospel of John. :)

      I certainly don't wish to de-emphasize the spiritual (or, in the literary sense of the word, mythical) identification that John makes between Christ and the Temple. I do think that such an identification is also true of Mary, but I think it's true in a different sense. The idea of Mary as specifically the Ark of the Covenant is, I think, the stronger and more Scripturally rooted form of this -- Luke 1.26-56 and Revelation 11.19-12.17 being the key texts (with their parallels and cross-references in texts such as II Samuel 6.1-15, Psalm 132, and II Maccabees 2.1-8 because neener neener neener). The differing levels on which such an interpretation would work would be, for instance, that Christ is the Temple, containing Mary who is the Ark, herself containing Christ who is the Manna (cf. Hebrews 9.4). Dante's words in Paradiso XXXIII.i, "O Virgin Mother, Daughter of thy Son," express something of the same pattern of matryoshka-like concepts.

      Now, I would certainly agree that this idea is not explicit in the Gospel, coming much more from Luke. However, I was the more willing to include it insofar as this series is primarily devotional; I'm far less hesitant about speculative theology in such a context. If this were primarily a dogmatic or text-critical piece I would probably have excluded it, or at most given it a footnote as a possible parallel. I certainly wouldn't put any weight on this interpretation of John in an argument.

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  2. "Kolpos" - when I ready your description I cannot help but think of a kangaroo's pouch : - )

    But seriously, the image is one of incredible tenderness, something like the way the priest takes the Blessed Sacrament on Holy Thursday in a fold of some special vestment - I think it's called a humeral veil.

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  3. Cruised over your site after several weeks of surfing elsewhere. Although it surpasseth my understanding why a gay man would become a Catholic --except that being a Calvinist is so much less attractive-- I know that souls have their desires. Shaking my head over your further decline into pacifism, I now discover from your subheading that you are a Brony. Please tell me that this last is a joke. Please.

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    1. Well, the short explanation for why I became a Catholic is that I became convinced Catholicism is true. (The reasons for that would take a good deal longer to explain.) The pacifism isn't so much a further descent; it predates my Catholicism. I don't know if it'll make you feel better that it's a personal calling -- I don't argue that fighting is always wrong for everyone. Being a brony, however, I make no apology for. If a man can't stand up for something other people will make fun of him for, he can't stand up for anything.

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