Tag: Book of John

Come and See: Asking Unanswerable Questions

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Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” 

Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”  

Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” 

Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.  Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’  The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”  

Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,  that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
John 3: 1-15

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer.
But a rather special sort of “No answer.”

It is not the locked door.
It is more like a silent,
certainly not uncompassionate, gaze.

As though he shook his head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, “Peace, child; you don’t understand.”

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable?
Quite easily, I should think.
All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

How many hours are there in a mile?
Is yellow square or round?

Probably half the questions we ask –
half our great theological and metaphysical problems –
are like that.
~C.S. Lewis from  A Grief Observed

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. 
You are yourself the answer.
Before your face questions die away.
~C.S. Lewis from Till We Have Faces

At present we are on the outside of the world,
the wrong side of the door.
We discern the freshness and purity of morning,
but they do not make us fresh and pure.
We cannot mingle with the splendors we see.
But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling
with the rumor that it will not always be so.
Someday, God willing, we shall get in.
~C.S. Lewis from The Weight of Glory

And now brothers, 
I will ask you a terrible question, 
and God knows I ask it also of myself. 
Is the truth beyond all truths, 
beyond the stars, just this: 
that to live without him is the real death, 
that to die with him the only life?
~Frederich Buechner from The Magnificent Defeat

And that is just the point…
how the world, moist and beautiful,
calls to each of us to make a new and serious response.
That’s the big question,
the one the world throws at you every morning.
“Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”
~Mary Oliver from Long Life

Some days, it is impossible to be a silent observer of the world. 
I ask so many unanswerable questions.

When the wind and rain pulls down nearly every leaf,
the ground is carpeted with the dying evidence of last spring’s rebirth, there can be no complacency in witnessing life in progress.

It blusters, rips, drenches, encompasses, buries.
Nothing remains as it was. And neither do we.

And yet here I am, alive.
Awed.
Born to be a witness to all this.
Called to comment.
Dying to hear a response.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

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Come and See: Make Straight the Way

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And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?”  He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” 

And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?”
He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?”
And he answered, “No.” 
 So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” 
 He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.”

(Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” 

John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” These things took place in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing.
John 1:19-28

We grow accustomed to the Dark —
When Light is put away —
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Good bye —

A Moment — We Uncertain step
For newness of the night —
Then — fit our Vision to the Dark —
And meet the Road — erect —

And so of larger — Darknesses —
Those Evenings of the Brain —
When not a Moon disclose a sign —
Or Star — come out — within —

The Bravest — grope a little —
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead —
But as they learn to see —

Either the Darkness alters —
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight —
And Life steps almost straight.
~Emily Dickinson

I admit that I’ve been stumbling about in the dark,
bearing the bruises and scrapes of
random collisions with objects hidden in the night.

My eyes must slowly adjust to such bare illumination,
as the Lamp sometimes is carried away.
I must feel my way along the road of life.

I know there are fellow darkness travelers
who also have lost their way and their Light,
giving what they can and sometimes more.

And so, blinded as we each are,
we run forehead-first into the Tree
which has always been there and always will be.

Because of who we are and Who loves us,
we, now free and forgiven,
follow a darkened road guaranteed straight, all the way Home.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Each week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

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Come and See: To Be Known

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Knowing God is more important than knowing about God.
~Karl Rahner

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, 
and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.  

(John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”) 

 For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.
For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 

No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.
John 1:14-18

There is no peace
like the peace of those whose minds
are possessed with full assurance
that they have known God,
and God has known them…
~J.I. Packer from Knowing God

When our pastor preached recently on this passage from the Book of John, he explained that the Greek word ἀνακειμένον used for “at the Father’s side” is the same word John used later in his book as he ate supper with Jesus, reclining at the table with the other disciples.

John describes resting on Jesus’ chest or bosom, or on his heart.

This is how John helps us understand Jesus’ relationship with God the Father – Jesus rests on the Father’s heart – and that closeness is what brings us nearer to a knowledge of God.

To know God – indeed, resting on the Father’s chest – is why Jesus was sent, in the flesh, to our world.

We can rest there too as the Light overcomes the darkness.
We can listen for the living heartbeat of the Word.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. At the beginning of each week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

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Come and See: The Light Shines in the Darkness

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He was with God in the beginning.
 Through him all things were made;
without him nothing was made that has been made. 
 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 
The light shines in the darkness, 
and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:2-5

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening
into the house and gate of heav’n:
to enter into that gate and dwell in that house,
where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling,
but one equal light;
no noise nor silence,
but one equal music;
no fears nor hopes,
but one equal possession;
no ends nor beginnings,
but one equal eternity;
in the habitation of thy glory and dominion,
world without end.
Amen.
~John Donne – a prayer

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
2 Corinthians 4:6

It seems impossible that God could be contained within the darkness of a womb.

The Creator, who made the heavens, went deep into His vast inner universe of atoms and sub-atomic particles. He hosted tiny cellular nuclei within His body, instead of the heaven-flung massive nebulae in distant galaxies.

And He chose to do this. Out of His love and goodness, He became Light in the darkest space of the human body, to be birthed to illuminate a world bent on destruction.

From radiance to ribosomes,
from cosmos to cytoplasm,
from galaxies to Golgi apparatus,
from moons to mitochondria,
from utter darkness to “let there be light.”

And there is Light.
God is there, coming from above and coming from within.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

Lyrics:
Through love to light!
Oh, wonderful the way
That leads from darkness to the perfect day!
From darkness and from sorrow of the night
To morning that comes singing o’er the sea.
Through love to light!
Through light, O God, to thee,
Who art the love of love, the eternal light of light!

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Come and See: Grasping a Rainbow of Words

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The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.  It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
~Henry David Thoreau from Walden

In the beginning was the Word, 
and the Word was with God, 
and the Word was God.
John 1:1

Painting the indescribable with words necessitates subtlety, sound and rhythm.

The best word color portraits I know are by Gerard Manley Hopkins who created pictures through startling word combinations: 

“crimson-cresseted”,
“couple-colour”,
“rose-moles”,
“fresh-firecoal”,
“adazzle, dim”,
“dapple-dawn-drawn”,
“blue-bleak embers”,
“gash gold-vermillion”.

I understand how difficult it is to harvest daily life using ordinary words. Like grasping ephemeral star trails or the transient rainbow that moves away as I approach, what I hold on the page is intangible —
yet nevertheless very real.

I keep reaching for understanding, searching for the best words to share here: those that are ephemeral color yet eternal, and very very real.

After all, in the beginning was the Word, and there is no better place to start with its promise.

I’ll be reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore the promise together.

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