The Christian New Year Begins

 

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it….

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. 

John’s gospel is to guide us through the new year. And this is how it begins.

What does it mean, that Christ is the Word? The Word pre-exists and creates the thing it describes? Does this sound odd to you? It is certainly counter to the usual theories of language.

Yet the idea is endorsed as well in the Book of Genesis. God the Father creates the universe by calling it into being. 

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

This is an endorsement of the Platonic concept of ideal forms. We are not speaking here of literal sounds, but of the essence of a word, the concept in the mind. Words are ideas. The idea in the mind of the thing exists before the thing exists, and the particular thing is an emanation of the symbol.

Put in human terms, we would not be able to experience “cat” if the idea of a cat was not previously planted in our mind by God. Otherwise, we would only have random sense perceptions. If we cannot form the word “cat,” in whatever language, we cannot experience the thing, “cat.” 

This is the opposite of the Aristotelian idea which dominates our current culture: that thoughts are inducted, induced, from physical experience.

This seems a logical impossibility. But in any case, this notion is not tenable for a Christian.

For when we say we are Christians, that we worship Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour, we do not mean the mortal man Jesus. Him we have never met, in the flesh, and his name was not Jesus. We worship the incarnation; we worship the cosmic Christ; we worship the Word, whom John identifies with light, grace, and truth. Light here being the light of consciousness; as we say “I see,” “it is clear to me now,” and truth “dawns on us.” Grace being beauty.

Elsewhere Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the light.” 

Plato would formulate that as “I am the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.”

This is what the true Christian seeks, wherever they are found in life. These are the emanations of the divine as they are experienced in this life, and seeking these is the meaning of life.