Reflection on John 1:1-18

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Thursday, December 31, 2020

Be humble just as your heavenly Father is humble!

The first chapter of the Gospel of John reaches its zenith with this profound and breathtaking phrase: “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”Catholics who pray the Angelus will easily recognize those words and probably know their significance. 

One of the heresies that the Catholic Church has constantly opposed since  the heresy’s inception is gnosticism. Among other things, gnostic doctrine avers that matter is evil, material things including the human body are bad. Some gnostic writers even claim that our being material is in a way a falling away from God. Because our being material is evil, gnosticism maintains that the spiritual can only be attained through a negation of the material. This line of thinking is also common to all forms of puritanism. You would expect a gnostic believer or a puritan to practice extreme forms of mortification of the flesh like slashing the body with razors, whipping the body with sticks, sleeping on a hardwood and using a piece of rock as pillow. They will do all these because they believe that the body is evil and therefore must be “mutilated,” punished, subjected, undermined and neutralized. But authentic Christianity, inspired and supported by the breathtaking claim of St. John, has persistently fought back and exposed gnosticism as as a wrong teaching. Why is gnosticism wrong? It is wrong because the Word of God took to himself a nature like us. John says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). This Word (Logos) “became flesh and made his dwelling among us…” (John 1:14). God took to himself a human nature and thereby elevated the human body and all of matter and made it a sacrament of the divine presence. As such, all material things are essentially good. 

The Greek expression behind, “made his dwelling among us” can also be translated more literally as “tabernacled among us” or “pitched his tent among us.” According to the Book of Exodus, the ark of the covenant, which is the embodiment of Yahweh’s presence, was originally housed in a tent or tabernacle. But now John is saying that in the flesh of Jesus, Yahweh has established his definitive tabernacle among us. God has moved into our neighborhood. God is now here, among us, and with us. 

Beloved in Christ, if the Almighty God, the Creator of the universe and everything in it will humble himself and in the process was humiliated just to demonstrate the stretch of his love for us, why do we sometimes raise our shoulders above that of our brothers and sisters? Why do we carry our shoulders high and display “I’m better than you” attitude? If you have more wealth than others, good for you. If you are more educated than someone else, good for you. If you live in a fancy house and drive a fancy car, good for you. If you have more power, more connection, more pleasure, more honor, and more wealth,  good for you. But does any of these give you super-humanity? Heck No! The excess you have does not make you more human or impose a super-humanity on you. The deprivation of a poor man, a struggling single mother, a needy woman, and the haves not around you does not strip or reduce their humanity and dignity. If God can come down to our level, you have no reason to raise yourself above another. Be humble just as your heavenly Father is humble.