Within the gospel reading's are the profound words, with the simple message that God is revealed in a human person. Though we might try to understand how the word existed with God, from the beginning of time, The wonder we celebrate at Christmas is that the word continues to dwell among us. Christ comes among us in the gathered assembly, the scriptures, the waters of new birth, and the bread and wine.
Few words in scripture have gripped the human mind with the power of the opening lines in the fourth gospel:
In the beginning was the word
And the word was God.
And the word was God...
The Western Church used these words for centuries as a blessing for the sick and for the newly baptized children. It was even placed in amulets and hung around the neck to protect one from sickness.
It's seductive, though, to be so entranced by the mysterious repetition and simplicity of these words,
that we forget their importance. Like all human words, they are meant to bear a message, and that message becomes clear only at the end of this passage:
No one has ever seen God:
It is God the only Son, ever at the father's side,
Who has revealed him.
Jesus Christ has solved this riddle of God.
Riddles are not simply childish jokes. They have a long history in humanity's quest to understand the world. Have you heard the " Riddle of Sphinx?"
The ancient Greeks told of a monster which came each year with a riddle. " What speaks with one voice, but walks on four legs, on two legs, and on three legs?" If no one could answer, the sphinx would capture the victim and carry him away for dinner. Finally Opedipus answered the riddle by saying that man crawls on all fours when he is small, walks on two legs when he is grown, and hobbles with a cane when he is old. By answering the riddle, he saved the city.
We still use the "riddle" in his serious sense when we talk about the "riddle of life." or the riddle of suffering."
For many people God is a riddle. They would pose a question like this: " If there is a God, why do the innocent suffer?
Why is there so much pain and suffering?
Why is there so much pain and sorrow in the world?" or they ask " Why does God demand so much of us, when he didn't create us perfect in the first place ?"
We ought to take these questions quite seriously, because they remind us that the existence of evil and imperfection becomes an acute problem when we dare to talk about a loving God. Even the church calendar poses this riddle when it places observance of St, Stephen's day and holy Innocents day right after Christmas Day. It's as though we barely have time to hear the angels sing about " peace on earth" before we are reminded that people were stoned for their Christian faith and that a King so feared the coming of Christ that he tried to kill all the children under two years of age.
For a Christian then, the riddle would be: What kind of a God would let himself and his followers be pushed around by a hard cruel world?"
We are not the first ones to puzzle over this question? The gospels reminds us that confusion and misunderstanding have clouded the good news of God from the beginning.
"He was in the world... yet the world knew him not, " He came to his own home and his own people received him not." The rest of gospel of John repeatedly calls attention to the fact that people misunderstood Jesus- from Nicodemus asking " How can a man be born again when he is old?"to Pilate impatiently snapping, What is truth?"
An yet the answer to the riddle was there. That's the way it is with good riddles, When you really understand the question, you already have the answer.
Do you remember that old favorite about " What is black and white and read all over?" The secret to that riddle was the sound of the word "read." " newspaper."
Once you understood that it did not refer to the color red, the answer to the riddle made sense. Or
take the one that went:
"Railway crossing, look out for the cars.
Can you spell it with out any R's
When you realize that the task is to spell " it" rather then Railroad crossing, the answer becomes self evident.
The riddle of God is like: "that Once we grasp the key word, questions about his power and his will can be answered". John says the key word for today's riddles, is " Word;" "And the word became flesh
and dwelt among us."When we try to solve a riddle of God from any other starting point, we run into a dead end.
That's what Jesus meant when he said, " No man comes to the Father but by me."
How does Jesus solve the riddle? He shows us how God's power differs from our usual concept of power. For us, power means strength to have it our way, no matter who opposes us .We use it in like
"power-play or power-hungry." Today in a community, the people who make decisions and can enforce them are called the Power structure!
No body would dare challenge us. Power is that ability to eliminate the opposition.
If that's what "power" means, then God should have the power to blot out evil, protect his followers, and eliminate suffering. Prisoners of war have testified that the best resource they had against torture
and abuse was the absence of fear. When they worried a bout their reactions, the enemy had them in their grip. Christ met human anger, betrayal and even death, not by becoming angry himself, but by accepting the worst we could dish out and proving it could not destroy him. His resurrection illustrated how God's power works. It does not eliminate death. It simply takes away death's finality.
Jesus spent much of his ministry urging people to see that suffering does not go unnoticed. God marks the fall of a sparrow and the plight of the leper.
So Jesus becomes the key to understand the riddle of how to deal with suffering in a sinful world.
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