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Each day this month we’re looking closely at one of the 1:1 verses of the Bible – exploring what we can learn from chapter one / verse one of various Old and New Testament books.
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.”
This seems like an odd way to begin a letter.
The author – traditionally assumed to be John the apostle – immediately begins describing his relationship with Jesus as something physical. We’re used to hearing about Jesus’ miracles and parables and travels and teachings. John goes a different direction: “We actually heard him, saw him, and touched him.”
Yes, he’s the Word of life (“word” being the Greek word “logos”). But I’m here to tell you, John says, that he was actually there.
Why this overwhelming emphasis on Jesus’ physical presence?
Scholars have long believed that John was writing sometime late in the first century (which makes this one of the last New Testament books to appear). His readers had apparently come under the influence of some teachers who are nowadays known as Gnostics.
“Gnostic” is a tricky label. It’s an umbrella term for certain intellectuals who had begun to use Christian terminology to preach non-Christian ideas. The name comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means “knowledge.” The Gnostics were convinced that if you learned “the real story” about the nature of God and the universe, you might become one of the “people in the know.”
And if you were an insider – one of the spiritual Wise Guys – you were on your way to salvation, unlike the vast majority of the world’s population.
What was this inside story that formed the core of Gnostic teaching?
The Gnostics’ signature conviction was that all spiritual things are good, while all material things are evil. Therefore the existence of the universe itself must be considered a terrible mistake.
According to the Gnostics, God never intended to make meadows and waterfalls and three-toed sloths and quasars and jogging paths through beautiful stretches of woods. A second-rate spiritual being called the Demiurge somehow trespassed on the True God’s territory and messed everything up by creating a world.
This was the Gnostic solution to the problem of evil. Why is there suffering in the world? The world was never God’s idea to begin with, so he is clearly off the hook!
Human beings, unfortunately, are now trapped inside physical bodies. The Gnostics saw the human body as a kind of wretched outer wrapper afflicted by unruly appetites, bad breath, and bodily fluids. Some Gnostics even had a catchphrase, a kind of first century bumper sticker: SomaSema.
“Soma” is the Greek word for body. You might remember somatic cells from high school biology. “Sema” means grave. For the Gnostics, Soma Sema meant “your body is a tomb.” It’s a prison. And you’re trapped inside.
Your lifelong job is to break free. True spirituality means abandoning the constraints of your body and everything else here on earth, so you can go to heaven (God’s realm) as a pure spirit.
Interestingly, some Gnostics became hyper-vigilant about bodily maintenance. Others ignored their bodies altogether. “Who wants to mess around with that old thing?”
Most Gnostics gravitated to the view that earthly preoccupations are irrelevant. That would include politics, going to college, feeding hungry children, playing sports, healing the sick, shopping for Christmas, writing poetry, seeing that justice is done, and loving your neighbor as yourself. Such things are a colossal waste of time.
To which the earliest Christian teachers responded in unison: That’s absolute rubbish.
The Apostles’ Creed – the earliest known Christian statement of faith – begins with these words: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” God made the world. Which means God is seriously into stuff – like knee joints and sparrow hawks and chocolate-covered cherries. God loves the world so much, in fact, that God the Son lived here as a human being for something like three decades, and still retains a human body.
John hammers home that point in the very first sentence of his letter.
He and the Gnostics at least agree on one thing: Jesus is the divine Word. But, according to John, Jesus’ body was entirely real, not a mirage (a favorite Gnostic perspective). He ate and drank and sweated and slept just like everyone else, so that if you bumped into him, it would ultimately occur to you that God himself must be genuinely serious about bodies.
What does all this mean for us?
It means your body is most certainly not a tomb. So, stop treating it like one. Don’t despise its limitations and impulses. Exercise and eat well (OK, maybe tomorrow we can all bend that rule a bit).
Make peace with your height, your shape, your frailties, and your age.
Our culture blares all kinds of messages about our bodies, and many of them are right out of the Gnostic playbook: You’re too fat. You’re too thin. You have too many wrinkles. You don’t have enough hair, or maybe too much hair in the wrong places. You ought to feel ashamed of yourself because your body is a hot mess.
Have you ever hoped that one day you might see an actual miracle? Take a look in the mirror. The author of Psalm 139:14 writes: “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
The Good News is that a good and beautiful God has made a good and beautiful world in which creatures like us can experience deep joy.
Even with less-than-perfect bodies.