Year B, Second before Lent

Proverbs 8.1,22-31; Colossians 1.15-20, John 1.1-14

Sunday 4 February 2024, 8am (adapted) and 11am

Revd Catherine Edenborough

We have made it through January! January seems to be the longest month of the year – as in my head it always seems to start on Boxing Day! We come to that gap between the end of Christmas/Epiphany season and the start of Lent. The crib has been put away, the tree (both trees this year!) are down, the decorations are stored away and we are in the gap, looking ahead to the start of Lent, but not there yet.

The Christmas narrative of Jesus’s birth is still fresh in our minds. Last week, we were confronted with the question from Mark’s gospel: ‘Who is this Jesus?’ And this week, we get the answer to that question, spelled out in no uncertain terms. If you were at all unsure about who Jesus is, you get the full low-down here, no holds barred. It’s a like a breaking newsflash, saying ‘Listen up everybody, this is important!’

Today’s Bible readings are BIG. Blockbuster big. They might be very familiar to many of us, but reading them one after the other, it feels like we are hit – bam, bam, bam - by a series of powerful statements about who Jesus is and the nature of God. Each of these statements alone is worthy of a sermon in its own right. We have left behind the baby Jesus in the stable and here the focus is well and truly on the cosmic nature of Christ. We hear things like: “Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, in him all things hold together, the head of the body, the church, in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, in him was life and the life was the light of all people.” On and on and on it goes. By the time we get to the grand finale, the end of the John’s gospel reading - slightly breathless - to hear ‘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’, it feels as though the only appropriate response is to be silent, in awe and worship.

So where to start with this? For today, I would like us to consider just three of the big themes that seem to stand out in these verses. Firstly God’s desire for connection with us from before even the beginning of creation. In the reading from Proverbs about wisdom we hear that wisdom, or Sophia in the Greek, was created before the world came into being. I love the line about wisdom being brought forth before God had made the ‘world’s first bits of soil’! There are resonances with the Word being with God in the beginning that we hear about in John’s gospel. And the last line from Proverbs tells us about wisdom’s delight for relationship – ‘I was rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race’. In a book in the Apocrypha, Sirach also called Ecclesiasticus, we find a passage in chapter 24 where wisdom seeks a resting place on earth. Having been a mist encompassing the earth, she desires to be among people and God sends her to make her dwelling in Zion. She desires relationships. In the same way the Word of God came to earth and lived among us. There seems to be a deep-rooted desire to seek after connection and relationship built into God’s nature. Simply wanting to come and BE with us.

The second theme, and one harder to get your head around, is the idea that Christ is before all things and in all things – ‘all things came into being through him’ we hear in John’s gospel, speaking about the Word, the ‘logos’. ‘In him all things hold together’ says Paul in the letter to the Colossians. In this mystery, there is a suggestion then that Christ is somehow present in the entire created order. In all that is around us. He is present in the warp and weft of our daily lives. There is nowhere he is not. There is a timelessness about it. So he is here present with us now. In us. In the people sitting on either side of us, in the very stones and splendour of this building, in things like a beautiful sunrise, but also in the struggles we face, in the homeless person in the precinct, in the people we don’t get along with, he is present with those in situations of conflict and war. Nowhere is beyond his reach.

This presence of Christ opens up opportunity and potential where we might not have seen it before. It creates freedom. It challenges us to be more open to people and situations that we might not have been open to before, and it reassures us that even in our darkest times, we are not alone. Christ is with us. In all things.

The final, and equally mind-boggling, theme is that in Jesus we see all the fullness of God. This is like the finale, the big reveal. At the end of the Colossians reading, we hear ‘in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell’, and at the end of the John reading ‘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’. Not only does God desire connection with his human race; not only was the Word with God from the beginning, in all things and through all things, but most wonderfully, he came to live as one of us and reveal God’s glory to the world. To show us what God is like.

And you might be thinking ‘well, yes, of course we know that. That’s why we are here this morning’. But I find in our journeys of faith, there is always another level of wonder to discover. Another layer of depth to uncover and marvel at. A new perspective. There is always more of God to encounter. There are such riches in today’s passages, it might be useful to take the service booklet away and read very slowly through whichever passage draws your attention, noticing which words and phrases stand out for you. Spending time with them and listening out for what God has to say to you personally about who Jesus is.

Because this week’s readings are not to be missed. This newsflash is bright and alive and demands our attention. It is full of who Jesus is. And when we see even just a bit of who Jesus, the Christ, is, we cannot help but be silent and bow down in worship.