No, Grease Isn't The Word!
Creation Story One: 1:1-2:4a
Showing my age now! Anyway, sticking with John, (not Travolta), we are informed the key word is Word, which does make for a fascinating descriptor and intriguingly powerful character name. John reveals that Jesus is this Word, (1:17). I can’t imagine it was ever used of Him during His earthly life. Nonetheless, it surely beats, dare I say it, The Dude.
John can’t state that ‘Jesus’ was there at the beginning because that’s His given incarnate name. John needs another word for the Person or personality of Jesus that pre-existed His becoming human and was thus present at and involved in the beginning of the universe. With Word (or Logos in the original Greek), things get very interesting for Story.
Logos means something like the-speaking-that-makes-happen. More like an event than merely stating something. Just as the universe begins when spoken into being, so too does Story. In this sense, Story is embedded in the very life of this originating Word, the one who is Jesus. This isn’t pietistic - it absolutely doesn’t mean every story has to be exactly like the story of Jesus. Rather, it means the blueprint for Story is found in the One who is Word.
Given the number and variety of stories written, this is patently a very grand claim. What, then, is this supreme pattern? It is Jesus’s journey into and out of this world, perfectly summarised in the celebrated Philippians hymn:
His state was divine, yet he did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave, and became as humans are; and being as all humans are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross. But God raised him high and gave him the name which is above all other names so that all beings in the heavens, on earth and in the underworld, should bend the knee at the name of Jesus and every tongue acclaim Jesus Christ as Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (2:6-11)
In other words, this is the supreme expression of the Hero’s Journey of epic literature. Now, obviously, such stories predate Christianity, (eg Abraham, Gilgamesh, Horus, Odysseus, Orpheus) but the journey of the Word Incarnate represents their perfection because God himself enters the fray as the perfect human to save the entire universe. At a cosmic level, then, the victory is complete. Jesus is Lord of All Realms (above, here, below). There’s no topping an infinite solution to the problem of evil. Hence, all else becomes prefigurement.
However, it’s unlikely to have escaped your notice that things aren’t exactly measuring up down here. That’s why the Hero Tale retains its power. We all know what struggling against personal demons feels like and there’s nothing like the horrors of the Twentieth Century as a salutary reminder of why we must never tire contending with the darkness. But the Word version now reigns supreme not through any religious or doctrinal imposition but because it places the most important of all realities at its centre, leaving all other motivations pale in comparison, eg self-destruction, strife, hubris, tribal justice, revenge, personal glory, patriotism etc.
In the First Letter of St John (1 Jn 4:8) we find the words: God is love. The Ancient Greek word for love here translates as self-sacrificing love. In other words, the very nature of the Word is self-sacrificing love or, put another way, the love that through death overcomes death. All story (and so life) is now measured against this gold standard. No one has greater love than this: laying down their life for friends, (Jn 15:13) and, if that weren’t enough, whilst also praying for their malign executioners (Lk 23:34). The good hearted and innocent self-sacrificing hero/ine becomes, at the very least, the model par excellence of tragic literature. Reflected in Michelangelo’s Pietà; a broken Lear holding the gentle, loyal and lifeless Cordelia; Jack having done everything to save Rose; the most powerful Star Wars movie - Rogue One.
Notably, though, with the Resurrection, the Word blueprint also scales to Romance literature (ie happy endings). Self sacrificing love might manifest simply in tireless community service, in workaday acts of selflessness, in helping the vulnerable at uncounted cost. Think It’s A Wonderful Life. Or in remaining faithful when sorely tested eg Job. It might mean the overcoming of fatal flaws, a heroic and very public battle with our vices, the humility to accept help, to admit when we’re wrong and make reparation, eg Leontes of The Winter’s Tale. It might even mean a simplicity of lifestyle so tender as to be barely recognisable as heroic. Heroes don’t have to die to be heroic. It isn’t always about taking a bullet or finally succumbing to one’s wounds beside the steaming corpse of a freshly slaughtered dragon. Bullets and dragons come reticulated. After all, the ultimate story arc is life. LIFE! And to the full. A narrative that, thanks to the Incarnate Word, punches right through physical death.
The gauntlet is, thus, laid down to any aspiring Christian writer. Find Word! Show salvation: the dying to selfishness that leads to a truly fulfilled life. Pass beyond the obvious truth that every story is contingent; a particular journey in space and time. Explore the very far from obvious truth that Story is an attempt to channel the flood tides of eternity. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, show the mystery within the manners. In other words, allow the eternal day to break out of the everyday. Even in things as simple as mustard seeds. Or, especially.
This truth extends to how a story is created; written into existence. The struggle to find any good words let alone royal ones itself becomes a journey in self-sacrificing love. It isn’t in itself about getting published, hubris, agon, or becoming faymuss, but rather more the daily deepening of love for Word. Every immeasurable moment turns out to be the beginning, every fresh pen-stroke is Word still creating in the beginning; still fleshing-out in the beginning. We’re always beginning.
In the Book of Revelation, Jesus is described as the Alpha and the Omega (Rev 21:6), notably, letters: the first and last of the Ancient Greek alphabet. Last lives inside First and vice versa. The beginning is nested inside eternity and thus is already mysteriously complete. The finest prolonged meditation on this I’ve encountered is T S Eliot’s Four Quartets:
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, [Little Gidding V]1
So moves this eternal Word through the rounding seasons of the soul:
Yes, as the rain and the snow come down from the heavens and do not return without watering the earth, making it yield and giving growth to provide seed for the sower and bread for the eating, so the word that goes forth from my mouth does not return to me empty, without carrying out my will and succeeding in what it was sent to do. (Is 55:10-11)
It may not always feel like it, but everyday is in fact an adventure of Word: originating, re-expressing, revitalising and returning. And when you’ve exhaustedly penned or edited the last one in the story resting before you, new ones already cluster upon a horizon filled with light, eager for incarnation.
Header photo: Patrick Tomasso, Unsplash
T S Eliot, The Complete Poems & Plays, Faber & Faber Edition, London, 1969, p 197.