John 1:14
"The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."
John does not start his gospel with a manger. He starts with the beginning of everything. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through Him. Without Him nothing was made that has been made. He is talking about Jesus. But he is not talking about the baby in Bethlehem. He is talking about the eternal, pre-existent, cosmic Christ. The One who was there before time. The One who spoke stars into orbit and oceans into their beds and breath into lungs.
And then he writes the most staggering sentence in all of literature. The Word became flesh. The Creator became a creature. The infinite became an infant. The One who holds the universe together needed to be held. The One who feeds all living things needed to be fed. The One who is everywhere was in one place. A specific place. A dirty, humble, unremarkable place. And John says we saw His glory. Not in the stars. In a human face.
Made His dwelling among us. The Greek word John uses is skenoo. It means to tabernacle. To pitch a tent. John is reaching back to the Old Testament, to the tabernacle in the wilderness where God's presence dwelt among His people in a tent of fabric and wood and gold. Now the tabernacle is not made of fabric. It is made of flesh. God is not dwelling in a building. He is dwelling in a body. The permanent tent. The eternal dwelling. God with us. Not visiting. Living. Breathing. Eating. Weeping. Laughing. Dying. Rising.
I need to sit with this because my brain wants to domesticate it. To turn it into a nice theological concept I can file away and forget. But it is not a concept. It is a scandal. The God of the universe has skin. He has fingerprints. He has a voice that could be heard by human ears. He got tired. He got hungry. He got thirsty. He bled. He knows what it feels like to have a splinter in His foot and dust in His eyes and grief in His chest. He knows because He lived it.
This changes everything about how I pray. I am not talking to a distant deity who does not understand. I am talking to a God who has calluses. Who has wept at a graveside. Who has been betrayed by a friend. Who has felt the weight of the world and the weight of a cross. When I bring Him my pain, I am not bringing it to someone who sympathizes from a distance. I am bringing it to someone who has been there. Who has done that. Who bears the scars to prove it.
"The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us."
Today I am worshiping the God who got close. The God who did not send a memo. He sent Himself. The Word became flesh. He is not an idea. He is a person. He is not a philosophy. He is a presence. And He is here. In this room. In this moment. In the cracked and ordinary spaces of my life. He pitched His tent here. He is not leaving. And I am never alone.
With the twenty-first candle blazing and the mystery of the incarnate Word pressing against my ribs, I am worshiping the God who moved in next door. Claire