How many of you like to read or write poetry? Eugene Peterson, who wrote the biblical paraphrase called The Message, points out that about 60% of the bible is poetry. He says, “poets tell us what our eyes, blurred by too much gawking and our ears, dulled by too much chatter, miss around and within us. Poets use words to drag us into the depth of reality itself. They do it not by reporting on how life is, but by pushing-pulling us into the middle of it. Poetry grabs for the jugular. Far from being cosmetic language it is intestinal. It is root language. Poetry doesn’t so much tell us something we never knew as bring into recognition what is latent, overlooked, or suppressed. Poetry forces us to slow down.”
We’re going to slow down into today’s readings. Both John 1 and Ephesians 1 are dense poetry, written with exquisite artistry and care, each word carefully chosen to convey the overwhelming love of God for all creation. Both texts announce the same message, that Christ is the very pattern or plan of existence. Christ was with God, was God before the cosmos began. Christ was fully revealed in Jesus and continues to be revealed in the us, the children of God who live in Christ. One day all the fullness of God’s grace in Christ will be our inheritance.
Three years ago, when these texts came around, I slowed way down to study them in their original Greek. This week I picked up where I left off. I could spend years studying these texts and never exhaust the depth. I’m going to try to share some of that fascination with you today in a manageable way.
Biblical poetry is different from what we normally think of as poetry today. I printed the gospel for you in a different format. Let’s read it responsively. This side is going to read the regular print, and this side is going to read bold print. Watch for parallelism, a thought presented once and then repeated a little differently for emphasis and deeper meaning. Look for how Christ is portrayed, as one with God, and one with us from before time began, as the pattern of life and light.
In the beginning was the Word, And the Word was with God,
And the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
All things came into being through him, And without him not one thing came into being.
What has come into being in Him was Life, And the life was the Light of all people.
The light shines in the darkness, And the darkness did not overcome it
He 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.
But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, And we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Passages like John 1 are not doctrine so much as they are doxology, songs of praise, exclamations of the greatness of God’s plan. In the last few years, I’ve been fascinated by these New Testament hymns to Christ. They distill the beliefs of the early church, proclaiming the incarnation as the very goal of creation itself. Another one of these hymns is found in Colossians chapter 1:
“Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him, all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”
These texts express that deep mystery of the interconnected web of all existence: God in Christ, Christ in us, us in Christ, and God revealed throughout the whole cosmos. In these hymns to Christ, we hear echoes of the poetry of Genesis chapter 1, when God spoke the world into being. They tell us that the Incarnation of Christ in Jesus is not a fall-back plan made necessary by sin, but is, actually, the very purpose of creation.
These hymns proclaim that God laid the foundation of existence so that it reveals God’s own love and goodness. God is within all that God has made, wooing us, whispering to us to choose, in our freedom, the most beautiful future intended by God’s own self. Jesus called that future the kingdom of God, a world in which love, justice and equality would reign. There’s a line in the Talmud, the rabbinical teaching of Judaism, that says, “Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers: “Grow, grow!” That’s the way God relates to us, always alluring us to grow in the direction of love.
Jesus is our guide for life. It is to be lived in the image of God. The Word, the Logos, the mind or plan or will of God- is what the Old Testament referred to as Wisdom. That Word works through all creation, in the tides and the crashing waves, in every act of love, in the power of electricity, the migration of butterflies, the birth of a child, or even the death of a faithful believer.
Dr. Ilia Delio is a Franciscan Sister living in Washington DC, an American theologian specializing in the area of science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology. She puts it this way:
“The Incarnation represents not a divine response to a human need for salvation but instead the divine intention from all eternity to raise human nature to the highest point of glory by uniting it with divine nature.”
God is perfect love and wills according to the perfection of that love. Since perfect love cannot will anything less than the perfection of love, Christ would have come in the highest glory in creation even if there was no sin and thus no need for redemption.
Jesus said, “anyone who sees me has seen the Father.” If we want to see what the divine looks like when fully aligned with the human form, we just need to look to Jesus. Paul says in Romans 11, “for from him and through him and to him are all things.”
Salvation is not just deliverance from sin but the very fulfilment of who God is, in Christ, for us, and for all creation. If we reduce Jesus to just helping us get rid of sin, we lose the fulfilment of God’s purposes for all of creation in Christ and in the church as a continuation of the incarnation. Certainly, salvation is the overcoming of sin, but the fullness of redemption involves the completion of creation’s purpose, to manifest the praise of the grace of God’s glory. The outworking of the love we see in Jesus is the very essence of God. The whole point of who God is and what God does is summed up in the incarnate Christ. That’s what we find expressed in our reading from Ephesians.
The 11 verses of our text from Ephesians today have been called the most monstrous sentence conglomeration ever seen in the Greek language. When it is translated as prose it becomes a 200-word mess of subordinate clauses and phrases. It starts to become clear when we realize that it follows a Greek poetic form of lyric poetry called an Ode. Odes were intended to stir the listener’s emotive response through rhythm and musical accompaniment. So, I examined it as if it were a song, looking for recurrent phrases and patterns.
I’ve tried to make it sound like poetry in English. Follow along on your insert and look for the ideas I’ve just told you about: how in Christ, the blessing of God is carried out, how we and all believers are included in that gracious belonging. Note the refrain that God’s plan is for us to live to the praise of God’s grace and glory. Note that nearly every line includes the idea of “us–in him.”
In Him, (based on Eph 1: 3-14) by Rebecca Ellenson
Blessed be God, The Father of Christ
Blessed be the one, Who Blesses us all
Blessings, all the blessings, of the heavens in Christ
God chose us in him
Before the world was made
Holy and pure, us in Him
Chosen in him, adopted through Christ
Children in him, us in Him.
For the praise of the glory of the grace of Him.
God’s plan, the will of God
God’s plan, the pleasure of God
In whom, in Him, the lavish grace of Christ
In whom, in Him, the forgiveness of sin
God’s plan, the riches of grace in Him
God’s plan, lavish wisdom, insight
God’s plan, the mystery, the will of Him
God’s plan, the good pleasure of Him
God’s plan, a purpose for all time, gathered up in Him
All heaven and earth in Him
In whom, we were chosen as heirs in Him
God’s plan and purpose in Him
Completing all things in Him
God’s purpose and will
God’s pleasure and plan
For the praise of the Glory of Him
We who have trusted in Christ
In whom, you too,
Hearing the word, the word of truth
In whom, you too,
Believing the gospel, the gospel of life
In whom, you too,
Were sealed in the Spirit of Grace
Given a deposit, a guarantee
The inheritance of us all
Until we all receive it all
For the praise of the glory of him.
Christ is more than just a person who walked this earth for 33 years, though he is that. He is more than a great teacher, marvelous miracle-worker, and extraordinary moral-exemplar, though he is that too. Indeed, Christ is even more than a God-man who died for our sins and rose from the dead, though that is a crucial part of the doctrines of Christ. The scriptures tell us in Christ we find the very structure of the cosmos itself, the pattern on which the universe was conceived, is built, and is still developing.
In addition to the great scriptural hymns to Christ, there are also a few other texts from the earliest days of the church that outline this idea. In the second century there was a man named Irenaeus who left us some amazing writing. He was born in Smyrna (modern day Turkey) and studied under another writer, Polycarp. Polycarp was a disciple of the apostle John.
That’s amazing isn’t it, that we have these messages that endure across the ages. Irenaeus became the Bishop of Lyon, in what is now Southern France. In about the year 185 he wrote the first systematic exposition of the Christian faith, called “Against Heresies.” In it he says something that seems to be based on these hymns we’ve been looking at, I quoted this passage last week too. He said,
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive. The life of humanity is the vision of God.”
When we are fully alive, we display the glory of God. As we follow Christ, we become more alive. We live for the praise the glory of the grace of Christ! Now, that’s poetry!