By Quin Hillyer, at PJ Media:
For this final Sunday before the church season changes from Christmas to Epiphany, the traditional Gospel reading is John’s ultra-famous formulation that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Several verses later, John writes that “He [the Word] was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”
This is all quite poetic, and also full of poignancy, with those who are created not knowing their own Creator.
It also, of course, is an obvious play on, well, words,….
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Yet what should grab our attention is not merely the initial metaphor, but the poignant reality (just those few verses later) of the Word not being known by those who should best know him – the oxymoron of unknown knowledge, the tragedy of wisdom ignored, the illogic of disorder. Even as God became incarnate specifically so He and the world could better know each other, the world did not recognize the incarnation.
This is worse than a prophet without honor in his own country; this is God not being understood by His own created world.
If the story ended there – if John 1:11 were the final verse – this would be a disaster of both epic and epochal proportions.
Yet it is not the final verse……
(For the whole thing, please click here.)
