In
the beginning was the Word…. And the Word became flesh, and tabernacled among
us; and we gazed upon his glory.
John
positively urges us in his prologue to see the whole of the story he will tell
within the long reach of the first two books of the Bible. John, after all,
focuses his story again and again on the Temple, on Jesus’ upstaging of the
Temple, on his implicit warning to the Temple and its guardians, and on his
final performance of that which the Temple itself could not effect.
What
has that to do with Genesis and Exodus? Well, everything: because Genesis 1 and
2 describe, to anyone with first-century eyes, the construction of the ultimate
Temple, the single heaven-and-earth reality, the one Cosmos within which the
twin realities of God’s space and our space are held together in proper balance
and mutual relation. The seven stages of creation are the seven stages of
constructing a temple, into which the builder will come to take up residence,
to take his ‘rest’: Here is Zion, my resting-place, says Israel’s God in the
Psalms.
Within
this Temple there is of course, as the final element of construction, the
Image: the true Image through which the rest of creation sees and worships the
creator, the true Image through which the sovereign and loving creator becomes
present to, in and with his creation, working out his purposes. Genesis 1
declares that the God who made the world is the heaven-and-earth God, the
working-through-humans-in-the-world God. (I wish there was a word for that; it
might be easier in German; or perhaps we could take the Greek and speak not
just of an anthropic God, a God who was appropriately bodied forth in human
life, but a dianthropic God, a God who desired to express himself perfectly by
working through humans in the world.) And already, with this vision of Genesis
before us, we understand both the beginning and the climax of John’s gospel: in
the beginning, en arche, bereshith: in the beginning was the Word . . . and the
Word became flesh. And on the last Friday, the ultimate sixth day of the week,
the representative of the world’s ruler declares ‘behold the Man’: like
Caiaphas earlier, Pontius Pilate says far, far more than he knows,
acknowledging that Jesus is the Proper Man, the true Image, the one at whom,
when people gaze, they see the Father; the one through whom the Father is
present, and powerfully working, to bring about his desire and design. And in
the end, when the light has shone in the gathering darkness and the darkness
has tried to extinguish it, the final word echoes Genesis once more:
tetelestai, it is finished. The work is accomplished. There follows the rest of
the seventh day, the rest in the tomb, before the first day of the new week
when Mary Magdalene comes to the garden and discovers that new creation has
begun. John is writing a new Genesis, and the death of Jesus places at the
heart of this new heaven-and-earth reality the sign and symbol of the Image
through which the world will see and recognize its Creator and know him as the
God of unstoppable love, the sign and symbol of the Image through which the
Creator has established that love at the climax of world history and as the
fountain-head for the rivers of living water that will now flow out to refresh and
renew his whole world. That is the primary story John is telling.
But
if it is a new Genesis it is also a new Exodus. For years, when reading Exodus,
I confess that I used to misjudge what Moses says repeatedly to Pharaoh: Let my
people go, so that they may worship me in the desert. I used to think this was
just an excuse: we want to go home to our promised land, but let’s just tell
Pharaoh that we want to worship our God and that we can’t do it in his land,
surrounded by his gods. But the whole logic of the book of Exodus, and indeed
of the Pentateuch as a whole, forbids that interpretation. If you read Exodus
at a run you will easily arrive at Mount Sinai in chapter 20; up to that point
it’s a page-turner, one dramatic incident after another, but then suddenly the
pace seems to slacken as we get miscellaneous rules and regulations, though not
(to be honest) very many of them yet. Don’t stop there; forge ahead; because
the whole narrative is indeed moving swiftly forward to the aim and object of
the whole thing, which is the restoration of creation itself, the purpose for
which God called Abraham and his family in the first place, the purpose through
which heaven and earth will be joined together once more, only now in dramatic
symbol and onward pointing sign. The giving of Torah itself is just a
preparation; what matters is the Tabernacle. The Tabernacle is the microcosmos,
the little world, the heaven-and-earth place, the mysterious, untameable,
moving tent – or perhaps it is the world that moves, while the tent stays
still? – in which the living God will come to dwell, to tabernacle, in the
midst of his people, in the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. The whole
of the book of Exodus is itself moving towards this moment, in chapter 40, when
the Tent is set up, constructed and decorated with the highest human artistry,
which itself is part of the point, and the Divine Glory comes to dwell in it,
so that even Moses couldn’t enter the Tent because of that glorious presence.
Exodus 40 answers to Genesis 1 and 2: creation is renewed, heaven and earth are
held together, the world itself is halted from its slide back towards chaos,
and the people of God, tent-makers and tent-keepers and pilgrims wherever the
glory-filled Tent will lead them, are to live the dangerous and challenging
life of the people in whose midst there dwells, in strange humble sovereignty,
the promise and hope for the whole of creation. (This is course is why
Leviticus is where it is and what it is, with the priests as the humans who stand
at the intersection of heaven and earth; but that’s another story.)
All
of this and much more – think of Solomon’s Temple in 1 Kings 8, think of the
vision in Isaiah 6 – is then poured by John into the dense and world-shaping
reality of the Prologue as it reaches its climax. In the beginning was the
Word; and the Word became flesh, and tabernacled among us; and we gazed upon
his glory. We have been allowed where Moses was not. We have seen the glory,
the heaven-and-earth reality, the human microcosmos, the Tent where the God of
the Exodus is revealed as the One God of creation and new creation. The Exodus
through which creation is rescued and renewed; the new creation which comes to
birth on the eighth day after the dark power, the great and terrible Pharaoh,
has been defeated once and for all. This is the story that John is telling.
Sources: Excerpt
from an Address to Dallas Episcopal Clergy, 16 November 2016, by N.T. Wright
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.