January 3, 2010 | 8:00 a.m.

Words of Hope

Sarah A. Johnson
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 147:1–11
John 1:10–18

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

John 1:14

Several weeks ago I went with some friends to see the movie Invictus, starring Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman. It is a beautiful film that narrates the inspiring true story of how Nelson Mandela joined forces with the South African rugby team to help unite their country. It is a film about the power of collective community, rallying behind a common cause, to unite and lift the human spirit beyond the reality of its circumstances. Mandela knows what the universal language of sport will do for a nation that remains deeply racially and economically divided. Nestled into this larger story, the film also narrates the development of the relationship between Mandela and the captain of the rugby team. Prior to being elected president, Mandela had spent twenty-seven years in prison, in a six-by-eight cement cell in the middle of an African wasteland. Sitting in that tiny bare walled room day after day for twenty-seven years must have tested the limits of the human capacity to endure.

During his imprisonment, Mandela drew strength from the words of the poem “Invictus” (which is Latin for “undefeated”) by William Ernest Henley. One evening while in his presidential office, Mandela writes the poem out on a piece of paper and gifts it to the rugby captain with the hope that the words may also inspire him to endure. Scratched out in longhand Mandela wrote:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
for my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Similarly, during his 118-day captivity in an Iranian prison in the summer of 2009, Newsweek journalist Mazihar Bahari found refuge in between interrogations in poetry, in this case the lyrics and melodies of Leonard Cohen. “Leonard Cohen became my guardian universe. . . . Of such stuff is survival made, Bahari wrote (Newsweek, 30 November 2009, pp. 36, 41).

Sick, healthy, male or female, black, brown, red, yellow, or white, we all know that sometimes the vulnerability of human life leads us to places of darkness where we feel broken or lonely, weighed down, lost, or maybe just done in by the bodies we once thought were indestructible. And when it does, we long for that thing—that song or verse, that piece of wisdom, those words of hope—that might lift our spirits and give us strength to keep going.

It is into this longing for inspiration and endurance that the writer of John’s Gospel pens some inspirational poetry of his own: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” John writes.

It is beautiful language in part meant to convey the unique relationship between God and the solitary grandeur of Jesus Christ. It is language that makes John’s Gospel different from the other Gospels. John abandons the narrative writing found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which begin the story with Jesus’ birth, and replaces it with the poetic description of the cosmic preexistence of the Word of God and the Word’s relationship to the world. Most scholars believe that the words have far less in common with any kind of prose than with the cadence of many early Christian hymns.

It is John’s song, John’s poem, about an idea so big that there simply are not adequate words to express it. The God of all our beginnings and endings, took on human form, lived our life, knows our joy and our pain, truly suffered as we do, and is there in the midst of it all. In her reflections on the Gospel of John, Gail O’Day writes, “God did not stay distant, remote, isolated; rather, in Jesus, God chose to live with humanity in the midst of human weakness, confusion, and pain. To become flesh is to know joy, pain, suffering, and loss. It is to love, to grieve, and to someday die” (New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume IX).

The great promise of hope in the poetry of John is that the story of God does not remain outside of human existence but belongs to it.

Binding God to the everydayness of the human experience is a claim so radical that for centuries the church argued over the fullness of its meaning. Traditional notions of deity, as ancient as they are modern, understood God to be about power through domination, by violence if necessary, just as human success is often measured by wealth and career advancement and as national greatness is measured by military triumph. For some, it was impossible that God would lower himself and take part in a fleshy human life. Embarrassed by Jesus’ humanity, Docetists argued that Jesus was only human in appearance. Others even contended that Jesus never left footprints or blinked his eyes.

There is a great little book by Christopher Moore entitled “Lamb: The Gospel according to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, in which Moore fictionalizes all the years of Jesus’ childhood that we know nothing about. And he does it through the eyes of Jesus’ fictionalized best friend Biff. In the book, Jesus takes part in all kinds of great human experiences, stomping on lizards in the desert, eating Chinese food, playing “kick the Canaanite” with the neighborhood kids. Toward the beginning of the book, Biff even makes sure to remind folks that “Christ” was not Jesus’ last name. Although he does mention that he always forgot to ask Jesus what the “H.” stood for in his middle name.

Some might consider this book blasphemy, but I think it is in many ways a creative literary affirmation of the mainstream of Christian teaching that Jesus was fully and completely human.

The mainstream of Christian teaching affirms that Jesus was not a phantom, a lifeless puppet kept in motion by strings from above. Like every human being, he was “born of a woman.” As a first-century Jew, he was deeply influenced by the culture and the religious heritage of his people. He grew and matured physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Jesus experienced hunger and thirst; he became tired. An itinerant preacher of the kingdom of God, he had no home. From personal experience he knew the pain of grief when a loved one dies. Hanging on a cross Jesus really suffered and died.

It matters a great deal that God lived the breadth of our human lives.

As Princeton professor Daniel Migliore wrote, “If God in Christ is not present to us in the depths of human finitude, misery, and godforsakeness, then whatever this person may have said or done, he cannot be the savior of human beings who know finitude, misery, and godforsakeness all too well. If God in Christ does not enter fully into solidarity with the human condition, we remain without deliverance and without hope.”

Each December Time magazine publishes its annual edition of “The Year in Pictures,” a photographic review of the most notable events of the past year. This past year’s images include soldiers sleeping in firing holes that look a lot like shallow graves; prosthetic limbs from the rehabilitation center in Kabul; a generation of Baby Boomers caring for their aging parents; millions of people displaced to a sports arena, with no water, no plumbing, after a typhoon. The pictures are always intimate in scope, preserving in time some corner universe, some vulnerability of the human condition. When looking at these photos, I am always struck by the importance of the theological promise that our bodily lives matter, are known and redeemed by a God whose Word became flesh.

In her book An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor writes about it this way: “After years of watching bodies being dug out of craters in Manhattan and caves in Afghanistan, after body counts coming from southeast Asia, Gaza, and Iraq, most of us could use a reminder that God does not come to us beyond the flesh, but in the flesh, at the hands of a teacher who will not be spiritualized but goes on trusting the embodied sacraments of bread, wine, water, and feet.”

Those things, of course—bread and wine and feet—are what the next chapter of the story is about. Jesus was fully human, but he was also at the same time perfect humanity. Living in solidarity with sinners and the oppressed, Jesus is the norm and promise of a new humanity in relation to God and to others. So as he lived, he also taught his disciples to transform their lives through the grace of his.

And when he left them, with all the conceptual truths of the universe at his disposal, he didn’t leave behind a speech or an intellectual model; he left his followers with bread and wine and with the command to kneel and wash one another’s feet as signs of his kingdom—earthly, tangible things that they could taste and swallow, that would require them to get close enough to touch one another, things that would continue to teach and transform them even when he was no longer around to teach them himself.

Between 2006 and 2008, NPR published a set of books entitled This I Believe, based on the radio series of the same name. The books are collections of essays, only 250 words long each, written by both famous and ordinary people alike reflecting on what it is that they believe. Some of the essays are funny—“Be Cool to the Pizza Dude”—and others are poignant or wise, such as “Finding the Strength to Fight our Fears.”

I picked up one of the books earlier this week and read an essay by Steve Banco, a veteran who did two tours of duty in Vietnam, earning the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts. In 1996 Banco received the “Courage to Come Back” Award for his struggles with alcohol and depression. In his essay entitled, “I believe . . . in a Silent Night That Brought Healing,” Banco writes about lying in a military hospital on Christmas Eve in 1968. He had a shattered leg and badly burned hands. But he wasn’t alone, of course. There were others in the hospital. In the bed next to him was a white cast-shaped body with cutouts made only for the eyes, nose, and mouth—a human-shaped cast from head to toe. According to Banco, the man in the cast would let out a low moan every so often. When the nurse passed by Banco’s bed, he asked her to push his bed a little closer to the man in the cast. And as the speaker over the PA system played the last strains of “Silent Night,” Banco reached out and took his new friend’s hand, one of the few pieces of flesh still showing. “We spoke no words,” Banco wrote. “None were needed.”

I think this is what John meant when he wrote those ancient words of hope: “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That God who revealed himself in the human person of Jesus Christ knows our suffering and is present to us even in the depths of our lives—when we are happy, when we are sad, when we are broken, and when we long for hope when none seems to be around. God is there. I think it is also what it means to continue to embody with our lives the truth of John’s Gospel and to transform our lives through Jesus’ life, to continue to touch one another’s lives in Jesus’ name.

As we move past Bethlehem, the promise that we carry with us that gives us strength and courage for all that befalls us are those ancient words that are more precious with every year: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

All thanks be to God. Amen.