I’ve known John 1:1 since I was little.
Besides John 3:16, it might be the only verse I can identify and quote offhand.
But years of familiarity doesn’t cheapen the words to me. I find the beginning
of John beautiful every time:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things
came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be
through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; that light
shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:1-5).”
Repetition
doesn’t have to be bland or monotonous. Rather, it can be an expression of joy
in the subject and in the familiarity. Chesterton says, “[Children] always say,
‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead.
For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible
that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do
it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies
alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired
of making them.”
There is a phrase I’ve
heard from black congregations when they pray. A prayer almost always starts out
with, “Thank you for waking us up today.” I’ve always thought that it’s a good
way to start a prayer, being thankful for mere existence and life before any
other particulars. But what if God doesn’t just wake us up each morning but wakes
the entire universe? What if the continuance of creation is merely God being
delighted in us, calling for encore after encore for eon after eon? What
passion it must take to infinity say, “Let there be light.”
No comments:
Post a Comment