Word, words, joy, and judgement: John 1:1-5, Nehemiah 8:1-12, and Jeremiah 36:10-28

 

              My impulse, when citing scripture about the Word is to go to the Gospel of John and regale people about the Logos—that is, John points to Jesus as the Word/Wisdom/Blueprint of God, and the shocking part of that is that the Logos becomes flesh.

The danger is that as a culture we’ve so completely identified Word with Bible and scripture, that we start to confuse the Bible and Jesus. To be clear, there are useful analogies one can make between the two, for example: If we’ve always affirmed both the divinity and humanity of Jesus, it shouldn’t be too hard to affirm both the divine and human hand in the inspiration of scripture. But confusing the thing pointing to God’s acts, and God’s acts themselves, is dangerous; as one of my predecessors in the ministry drilled into several congregations he served, “We worship Jesus, not the Bible.” So, let’s go to two earthier examples of the Word, one where Scripture’s witness is positively received, and one where it is decidedly not received that way.

In the first case we have the overwhelming joy the reconstituted people of God feel when Ezra has the Torah read aloud to the people (do note that they give the plain meaning of the law to the people). It is like a constitutional convention, a celebration of being a people again, of cutting a covenant with God and neighbor—these words are holy for us.

              In the second case, the higher ups in Jeremiah’s society read a Word of the Lord, and instead of cutting a covenant, cut the words to pieces, and use them as kindling! You can almost see Jehudi slicing scripture like an apple or a celery stalk; Jehudi throwing the Word of the Lord into the fire like campers tossing pinecones into the bonfire.

              King Jehoiakim and his people receive the Word as judgement, whereas the people in Nehemiah receives it with joy—Lutherans might describe them as experiencing it as Law and Gospel. One speaks to an end of a people, the other to a new beginning. And then you have John’s In-the-Beginning Word—drawing the totality of the cosmos toward the living Word uplifted on a cross, that we might know the invisible God made visible.