I’ll Be Home for Christmas: In Him Was Life

When you step into the Gospel of John, you realize immediately that you have left the street noise behind and entered a home that is well-thought out and filled with light, poetic, sleek designs with intentionally designed and placed accents draw the reader’s attention, yet at the same time that it feels like you have stepped into art, you are remarkably comfortable.

Welcome to the organic architecture of John’s Gospel. While Mark constructed a small, one-room cottage with a stove at the center, focusing the reader on the death and resurrection of Jesus, and Luke welcomes us to his farmhouse with a wide front porch and plans to take us room by room through the whole house, every room decorated beautifully, story after story, pointing out the real treasures and giving the backstory on the furnishings, Matthew opens the doors of a neo-classical stone mansion, imposing outside with portraits of generation after generation lining the stairwell to the dazzling ballroom, radiant and aglow with people who have travelled from the far ends of the globe to be here for this occasion.

John’s Gospel rises from the landscape and at the same time is distinct from it and one with it. The writer’s goal is not so much to tell the story of Jesus as it is to explain the significance of the story of Jesus. And the first thing the reader needs to know is that this is not a new story. John begins with the first words of Hebrew Scripture: “In the beginning…”

In the beginning, God created AND in the beginning was the Word.

If you visit a home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a master of organic architecture, you will have difficulty walking right up to the front door; he intentionally hidden them from the street, from casual approach. Likewise, John’s prologue winds purposefully, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” The Good News doesn’t start in Bethlehem. The Good News starts when the earth was formless void. God was and God spoke, “Let there be light.” From the very beginning, God willed the darkness back by bringing forth light. “In him was life, and the life was the light of all.” And now, the “Word becomes flesh and dwells among us.”

Creation and redemption are inextricably, inexplicably woven together. God formed humankind out of the ground in God’s image and breathed into us the breath of life. Now, the breath of life takes on terra firma, taking nothing away from God’s image and lives among us.

Ireneaus, one of the early church leaders, about 50 years after the Gospel of John was written, wrote, “God became what we are in order to make us what God is.” Rev. Dr. Cynthia Campbell puts it this way, “The Word became us – flesh and blood – so that we might become what we were meant to be.” The incarnation is for our transformation. In him, was life!

He was filled with grace and truth. He was filled with the divine tension that causes our lives to reverberate, to sing, to have meaning! He was filled with grace – God’s love that we do not and cannot deserve. He was filled with truth – God’s omniscient – all knowing, all seeing, all wise – reality.

Once you have entered the front door of a Frank Lloyd Wright home, you are at once aware of the quiet and the light. Wright built the façade of his urban homes tall and solid to block the noise of the world, and he curtained the back of his homes with glass, allowing the light to stream in allowing the home’s walls and furnishings seem to naturally flow with nature outside and around. His prairie homes mimicked the lines and colors of the prairies on which they were built. Organic architecture marries art and nature. One of his most famous homes, Fallingwater, blends into the wooded mountains around it at the same time that its terraces imitate and accentuate nature’s waterfall on which the house sits.

Now, here is the reality. Fallingwater’s cantilevered terraces have been sinking and cracking since the day that concrete was poured. Over and over again, they have been repaired and reinforced. We are not different. Our structural integrity needs to be analyzed regularly; we sink and sag and need restoration.

And yet, they have accomplished amazing feats of engineering to imbed steel cables beneath the surface of the walls and floors, deep inside. And we who receive him, receive the power to be children of God.

We are meant to be organic architecture, connected so deeply with Christ that we blend into his nature and emulate his grace and truth, for in him is life and the light of us all. Amen.