The Logos and the Darkness: a sermon on John’s Prologue

John 1:1-18

A friend of mine who is struggling with mental health issues and sometimes exhibits quite a strong paranoia was trying to persuade me that there are evil people in the world. You’ve probably had conversations like this. I was trying to tell him that, evil is a part of all of us, and God loves all of us, even the one’s we think are totally evil.

It got me thinking about the mass slaughter going on in Palestine and the brutal war in Ukraine. Then the out-of-control climate change and the way I manage to screen the burning planet from my eyes to make life easy for me… the way I think we all do, to avoid paying the cost, to avoid changing our lifestyles and our economic habits. At the beginning of 2024 evil is both glaringly obvious, and so much more complex than the idea that there might be some evil individuals out there to get us.

Maybe evil has always been embedded in systems and habits, in ways of perpetuating violence and treating others as less than human. Maybe evil has always been, at base, a set of cultural habits. Evil has a history among us. I think so. Among all cultures… but with particular shapes and particular ways of escalating at different times.

In today’s reading from John’s gospel these habits and systems are called ‘darkness’, a darkness that renders the ultimate goodness and structure of the universe invisible. Greed and violence produce first of all blindness to reality. Darkness. The more we seek to own and control and dominate the world we live in the less able we are to see it. We live in darkness.

But, says our passage for today, at the deepest level the world is not darkness. Darkness is not the deepest truth, it is not there in the origin of the world. This strikes me as a good place to being 2024…somewhere other than the darkness, pausing from the flood of darkness. Not to ignore it, but to put it in its place. We really do need to reflect on and understand and resist the darkness. But if we are going to resist the darkness we need to begin with the light.

Two weeks ago Steven at the Baptist Church was encouraging us to begin the year and appreciate the presence of God in creation around us. Last week Nathan was thinking about dreams. About how God might be at work communicating in our own minds when we are not in control, like when we dream.

In the origin there was the logos

John 1:1

Today John introduces us to the enemy of darkness, a thing he calls Logos. Verse 1: “In the origin there was the logos”. Where we might begin… “once upon a time”. John tells us that once upon a time is never the real beginning. Before time there is an origin. Before every moment of time (not just the first moment) there is the origin. Some religions are very focussed on the past, the distant past of the ancestors perhaps (Maori tradition might be an example). Some are not that interested in the flow of time and are more interested in the now (like Buddhism). For John’s Gospel the flow of time as it shapes the present and opens up futures is meaningful. It has direction. It is not just a random set of events. But it is meaningful in the light of the origin and the logos.

This is a Greek way of thinking. And as a Christian, John finds it useful. Modern translations hide the Greek background and translate In the beginning was the word (like the KJV translates it). It sounds simple. The word Logos could be used for a spoken or written word. But it had also come to stand for something much bigger – and clearly it does here.

For the Greeks the changing flow of the universe was suboptimal. God kept out of it. The divine was somewhere else. And so the universe arises only when God/the divine creates a kind of second-tier deity whose job is to shape the universe – they called this second-tier deity – LOGOS (from the word for order or reason or word).

I think what John loves here, is this Greek sense of the beauty and order of the universe – it’s the Greek way of referring to what science pays attention to. Science is trying to understand LOGOS. John loves that better even than the Greeks. For him it is not second-tier. It lies in the he art of God. It is with God, it is divine. Unlike our modern imagination, the universe is not a random mix of dead material that somehow seems machine-like. It is more like an organism. It flows together purposefully out of the heart of God. So the Logos is the organiser of the world organism and the LOGOS is (in some sense) God.

The Logos is the organiser of the world organism (the universe as organism)

At the origin of all we see and hear and interact with every day, in every person, whether we might judge them good or bad, virtuous or vicious, at the origin of each moment and each individual is this ‘beautiful purpose’ that God is working out. All things are structured towards goodness. There is nothing that is absolutely evil. No the light of God’s logos shines in the darkness and the darkness does not conquer it

the light of God’s logos shines in the darkness and the darkness does not conquer it.

Perhaps that is the first good news for the beginning of the year. God’s creativity is indestructible life.

But you might say… that the fact that we, mere humans cannot destroy the structure of the cosmos, tiny inhabitants of a tiny planet that we are, is cold comfort. Cold comfort if we are apparently successfully destroying the biodiversity of our planet and in the process making life miserable for the lives of all but the 1% (starting with the poorest) and possibly wiping out human life in the process.

I mean, sure creation itself will continue, but somehow this seems like a failure nevertheless.

So as if to anticipate this concern, John changes tack. This time he does start with “Once upon a time….”

Once upon a time, “The logos (of God) became flesh”.

“There was a man sent from God. His name was John… and so on. We have moved from cosmos to time, from science to history. Once upon a time, “The logos (of God) became flesh”. The LOGOS, he says, enters the flow not just of the universe as a whole, but at the location of darkness, human history. The LOGOS dwells – the language is evocative – its the same word for setting up a tent. It’s a fragile moving dwelling. It’s a tent among other tents. In the midst of the flow of culture and community.

It’s as if John is suggesting, not only is darkness failing to overcome the work of the divine logos, but the work of the divine LOGOS is beginning to overcome the darkness.

To move from science to history is to move from looking at the world to acting in it.

To move from science to history is to move from looking at the world to acting in it. The tent of course is flesh and blood.

When we celebrate the incarnation of God every Christmas we celebrate that in the life of that wandering, mystical peasant, that pacifist, the prophet, the disturber of the politics of oppression, the truth and goodness and the origin of all things flooded into the darkness, as through a tent flap.

The organiser of the universe organised itself into a human life, reorganising human life around light rather than darkness. If darkness is that blindness to God’s creative LOGOS that arises from our violence and greed… our attempt to control the world and centre it around ourselves and use it for ourselves – a process accelerated by fossil fuels, maybe we see in Jesus of Nazareth an opening up of our human history to the beauty to be enjoyed in the world and in our neighbour, a fundamental hospitality towards all creation, especially but not exclusively our neighbours.

This week I went into the NZ bush in the Orongorongo valley with 9 friends and we soaked ourselves in the diversity of the flora and fauna. It was a great time. We had a sense of opening our eyes again to the world and to one another.

It was a glimpse of what seems to hard to see sometimes.

It’s 2000 years since that bright flame shone in Palestine… and in that time the light of that flame got co-opted by empires, used to justify domination and colonisation and enslavement, coopted by industry to dominate the natural world and destroy the ecosystem of the planet. This is the challenge: to not only see God in nature, but also in history. And not only to see, but to act, to participate in God’s action in history

This is the challenge: to not only see God in nature, but also in history.

John’s gospel has two things to say to us today. Firstly, if we are to resist the darkness in 2024 (and we must) we need to look for the goodness of the divine logos everywhere, under every stone or tree or friendship. We need to practice receptivity, to receive the world as a gift of God, of grace and truth and so to receive with it the beauty of God

Secondly, we are not simply receptive. We are not simply observing the world. We have lives to live. We have things to do with our lives, limited though they might be. God communicates not just in science but in history. Here too resisting the darkness matters. And here resisting the darkness means reorient ourselves, our plans our careers, our habits, to the grain of the universe of God’s LOGOS by taking the way and life of Jesus of Nazareth with complete seriousness. The life of Jesus, strange and radical as it might seem, is our life. Here the logos comes to liberate us from darkness.

May God bless you in 2024 so that we become the people who resist evil, together making light of the darkness.