The blazing orange poster board with green letters captured my eyes. The placement was perfect. Nothing haphazard. Nothing left to chance. (The empty seats around this fan made that perfectly clear.) The sign’s designer and creator had strategically taken his seat behind the basket at the far end of the court, just enough to the left of the backboard that his bold message was unimpeded by anything, visible to anyone craving a little March Madness. The bold green on the orange canvas read: “John 3:16.”
It’s not an unusual thing to see at a sporting event, but it got me thinking this week. I do not doubt the sincerity of this young man’s attempt to profess his faith, but I wonder about the effectiveness. In a very real way, I think it is symptomatic of a problem, a crisis that we face in the church. The 8 characters painted with such pious care on the sign were completely disconnected from anything that might make sense of them. They were words with a context. And without a context, words always fall short of their target.
In the ethereal prologue to the Fourth Gospel, we come face to face with the Word. The language takes a powerful turn at verse 14: “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory….” Think for a minute about the implications of that confession. The Word made flesh stepped into first century Palestine and revealed God in a new and profound way (1:18). God sent the Word into the world to incarnate God’s love in a specific time and place, in a particular context (“lived among us, and we have seen”).
Throughout his account of the life and ministry of Jesus, John continues to reflect on Jesus, to wrestle with the context of his own day to discern and discover how the story of Jesus intersects and speaks into the experience of his church and his world. He invites the Word to become flesh again in his own day and time for a people who had not seen the Word with their own eyes, had not looked at it and touched with their hands (cf. 1 John 1:1). The universal message of God’s love (John 3:16) had to become a Word made flesh among them.
We are here now. We are not in the waning days of the first century, as John was when he put flesh on Jesus’ story for his church. We are called to become the Word made flesh for the world in our own time, to dwell here in our world. We can dwell in no other time, no bygone era. We are called and sent by Jesus to incarnate the God’s love in our world today, in our context (John 17:18; 20:21). The problem with holding up blazing orange signs with green letters is that the message is not recognizable to our world. There is no flesh and blood in them. As those sent by Jesus, we are called to know where we are, to engage and dialogue with our world. We need to be disciples who have a newspaper in one hand and a Bible in the other, so that we can know our context and discover God’s word for our day and time, just as John struggled to understand God’s word for his community.
This is a difficult but essential calling if we are to be the disciples of the Word who became flesh. But we are not without hope! In the same breath as he sends his disciples into the world, Jesus gives them the gift of the Spirit (20:21-22). As we step faithfully into our world to give the Word flesh again, we trust that God gives us all of the resources we need to be sent.
(See the comments at this post for an intriguing discussion on this topic.)
No comments:
Post a Comment