Beginning and Dwelling
Reflections on the Lectionary for January 5th
If I had to teach a course about the development of Christian ideas about Jesus, and I could only use one passage from the Bible to do it, I would use John 1:1-18. The prologue to the Gospel of John—that passage that starts with “in the beginning was the Word” and goes on to dabble in light and darkness, Word and flesh, and life and the world—it encapsulates so much of the conversation and debate that early Christians were having about Jesus. That passage is both a reflection of the debates that were going on about Jesus when it was written, and the passage also later became fodder for conversations that would arise through the centuries.
Think about it. Imagine being a follower of Jesus in, say, the late first century. Jesus’ lifetime would have been a story to you—something you had heard about from older folks. Jesus’ crucifixion was something that might have happened in your grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ days. By the time you were born, the events of Jesus’ life would have been as far away from your experience as World War II is from our experience—something a few folks might have remembered firsthand, but that was mostly by that point known through storytelling. As a follower of Jesus in the late first century, you would have coveted these stories about Jesus’ life, because as one of his followers you would have been convinced that Jesus had been important. And one of the key questions for you and all the other Jesus followers, as you listened to those stories and collected them, would have been how and why Jesus was important. Was Jesus a great moral teacher? Was he a divine messenger in the tradition of the prophets? Was Jesus a seer, a healer, a priest, an aspirant to the throne, or a representative of the peasant class agitating for more justice and equality? Was Jesus possibly a deity himself, and if so, what kind of deity was he, and what did that mean? The stories collected about Jesus, including the story collections we now know as the gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were all storehouses of speculation and claims, all offering bits of evidence for a dizzying variety of opinions about how and why Jesus had been important and how and why he was still worth following.
One of the first things you might notice about John 1—one of the first claims that is embedded in that text—is that the story of Jesus in John 1 closely mirrors the story of the world in Genesis 1. “In the beginning” is an iconic set of opening words, and even if you don’t know the Bible very well, you probably recognize that those words set the stage for the biblical stories of the creation of the world. “In the beginning” kicks off the whole world in Genesis, and “In the beginning” kicks off the story of Jesus in the Gospel of John. It’s a clever literary way to make a theological point: that Jesus was not only a human being who lived and died at a particular moment in time, but that he was also a divine or semi-divine being—that Jesus was also a Logos, or a Word of God—and that Jesus had been a part of the story of God and the world for a long time, as long as there had been a story. This claim seems mundane to a lot of Christians today, because we have been acclimated to it by centuries of Christian theology. But it was an enormous claim in the ancient world, and especially in ancient Judaism: that some part of a human was God, and some part of God was human.
To be sure, there were other divine-humans in the ancient world, and there were lots of ways to tell stories about it. Maybe most famously, the stories of the Greek and Roman gods were always weaving in and out of the divine and human realms, with gods engaging in dalliances with humans and vice versa. Political and military leaders often claimed divine origins, or other people claimed it for them. Several stories surrounded the conception of Alexander the Great, for example, suggesting a few different possibilities for divine status, not least of which was that he was Zeus’ son. The Roman emperors beginning with Augustus sometimes called themselves “a son of a god,” in reference to the divine status of their fathers (who were sometimes said to have been divine while ruling, or to have achieved apotheosis upon their deaths). Matthew and Luke’s gospels attempted to tap into those kinds of traditions with their birth narratives, writing decades after the fact to link Jesus’ birth to miraculous signs and divine messages the way other political and religious figures did. But John’s gospel did something different with its storytelling, mirroring Genesis and placing Jesus’ divinity not in the conditions of his birth, but in the deep antiquity of his existence. Jesus wasn’t born a god, John seems to be claiming, and Jesus certainly didn’t become a god. Jesus had always been God, John seems to insist, and God had always been there with Jesus.
This stance previewed an explosive debate that would erupt a couple of centuries later in what came to be known as the Christological Controversies of the fourth century. By that time, some Christians thought that Jesus was the pinnacle of all creation, the firstborn of God’s creative work, or God’s only son born in due time—all metaphors that suggest that there was a moment at which Jesus came into being (and therefore some moments before that when Jesus had not yet existed). Other Christians, though, thought that Jesus was co-eternal with God (in the language of the fourth-century Nicene Creed), and that there had never been a time when Jesus did not exist. (There are lot of double negatives when you’re talking about fourth century Christology). A close reading of John 1 could support either position, but it was stronger evidence for the folks who thought Jesus was eternally God. You can see already in the Gospel of John in the first century (or possibly early second century) that Christians felt the need to tell stories about Jesus that bolstered his credentials as eternally divine, and not only someone who became divine at some particular moment. Matthew and Luke had been eager to tell the story of Jesus as a child of the divine; John was eager to tell the story of Jesus as a God.
But it was never that simple, and this prologue to John helps map some of the complexity. Christian claims of Jesus’ divinity created other theological problems, and one of the thorniest of those problems was what we now call incarnation. What did it mean, exactly, for God to be human and for a human to be God, or at least “with God” as John 1:2 says? How did that work, exactly? One of the answers from John’s prologue is something called the Logos. That’s a Greek word that means word, reason, or utterance. (It’s a root that shows up in a lot of our words today: biology, eulogy, theology, logic, ecology, and so on). Logos was a common Greek word, but it was also an idea common in philosophical and religious circles, including in both Neoplatonism and Jewish thought. A Logos was an emanation from the divine, an extension of god-ness in philosophical thought, or a means by which the divine communicated with humans in Jewish thought. Scholars still dispute whether John’s use of Logos came from Jewish sources or Greek philosophical traditions, but either way it’s there in the prologue of John, clear as day. Jesus in the prologue is imagined as an extension or expression or emanation of the divine whose job it was exist among human beings. But how did that work?
In trying to describe how it worked for a divine being to exist among humans, John’s prologue uses a word that always surprises me a bit and makes me kind of look at the text sideways. In some ways, it’s a strange choice of a word. I’m talking about the word in 1:14 that often gets translated “lived” or “dwelled” or “dwelt,” as in, “the Word became flesh and lived among us” in the NRSV—the word eskēnosen in Greek. I love this word for the same reasons I’m surprised that it's the one John chose: it’s an unexpected and inspired choice. The word literally means “to pitch a tent,” in the sense of making a dwelling, perhaps a temporary one. To us, pitching a tent might evoke a scene of camping in a national park on the weekend, but in the world from which the Bible came, it just as likely represented a nomadic or semi-permanent way of living. A tent would be pitched when someone was on the move and needed to make a home for a while. A tent was a dwelling place, not only a place of recreation, and the word adds some meaning to this passage in a way that a regular word of dwelling would not. (Elsewhere, the Gospel of John is really fond of the word meno, which is often translated “abide” or “remain.” That word would have worked perfectly fine in this prologue, but the author of John chose eskēnosen instead). The use of this tent-pitching word here really adds a sense of homemaking that deepens and complexifies incarnation. It suggests, to me, a one-foot-in, one-foot-out kind of incarnation—Jesus undertaking a residency among us, but not necessarily buying real estate.
The author of the Gospel of John might have thought of using eskēnosen in 1:14 because of another passage of scripture, one that also shows up in the lectionary this week—Sirach 24:8. (Sirach isn’t considered scripture by every tradition, but it’s often included as an apocryphal or deutero-canonical text, and so it sometimes shows up in the lectionary, and it would have been widely known as an important text in the period in which Christianity was forming). Sirach 24:8 speaks in the voice of Wisdom, another of the emanations from the divine: “Then the Creator of all things gave me a command, and the Creator pitched my tent. He said, ‘Encamp in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.’” Here we have the same word, eskēnosen, being used in the same way, to describe a divine being dwelling among humans. It’s easy to imagine the author of the Gospel of John searching for language to describe how and why Jesus was important, and coming across this description of God pitching a tent for Wisdom in the world and making a home there. It must have seemed perfect, and so the author of John grabbed the language—the same way the author had also grabbed the “In the beginning” language from Genesis—to describe the engagement of God in the world.
That tells us something important: that the followers of Jesus were not the first people in the Jewish tradition to imagine God making a home among humans. Christians often think we invented that idea, but Logos theology had been a part of the Jewish tradition for a while by the time Christianity showed up, and the Wisdom tradition, casting Sophia (the Greek word for wisdom) as an expression of God’s being, had been around even longer. Just like the author of John reaches back to grab older language (“In the beginning,” “eskēnosen”) to express an idea about Jesus, Christian ideas about Jesus themselves were built out of the raw materials of Jewish tradition and the philosophical ideas of the day.
The prologue of John, with all its dualistic language and high-minded theological claims, is an attempt to talk about how and why Jesus had been important. Written a few generations after Jesus’ life and death, the prologue of John was wrestling with Jesus’ importance, and trying to put into words why he had been such a big deal, and why Jesus continued to be so important for so many people so long after his death. In the end, the author of John found that the best language and ideas weren’t new or newly invented, but they were picked up from the past and repurposed for a new moment. We might discover the same thing.