John 1:1-18
These are two passages that go to a time before creation, into a cosmic timelessness. The passage from Proverbs describes some being who is a witness to God’s creation.
“The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world's first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
You have to dial back a couple of verses to identify the speaker: Wisdom. Not sure where that fits into our cosmology. Is this another word for the spirit or the child of God? Is it male or female? Maybe it’s Sophia.
These lines from John are one of the passages that flow most nicely in the Revised Standard Version, which tends to cut a little short of poetry. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Nice short phrases piling on top of each other. Sounds pretty good in German too: “Im Anfang war das Wort, und das Wort war bei Gott, und Gott war das Wort.” Listen to the subtle sense difference caused by the word order in the last clause: the Word was God, or God was the Word. It’s not an exactly equivalent substitution.
The next phrase takes it out of created time: “He was in the beginning with God.” The German is “Dasselbe war im Anfang bei Gott.” If I understand this correctly, dasselbe is a neutral word, something like “the same.” So this entity, the Word, both was God, and was there with God. Is the Word also Wisdom?
“All things came into being through him [dasselbe again in German], and without him [yes, dasselbe] not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
And then we are introduced to John the Baptist, who testifies to the light.
OK, so the Word, which like Wisdom exists with God before anything has been created, converts into Light over these few lines. It seems like we are very close to Gnosticism here, with divine Wisdom and divine Light leading us into the created world of historical time, or watching and witnessing.
These passages are a comfort to geeks. John is the great champion of the power of language to create the very world. The ultimate creative power of the divine word echoes in the efforts of writers and people who deal in words. And these lines in Proverbs describe Wisdom largely as an observer. The previous lines do identify Wisdom’s active roles in providing advice, guiding kings and rulers, serving as the source of wealth and honor, and Wisdom is the “master worker.” But part of Wisdom’s role is to watch, just watch. It seems like Merton had similar ideas about the role of the contemplative. Put them together (which isn’t exactly right, since this bit of John is in the daily lectionary and Proverbs is from the Sunday readings), and you’ve got a celebration of observing, thinking, and putting things into words.
A note: if I had proper qualifications to be doing what I’m doing here, I would be able to read Greek and could get to the bottom of things like the gender of the words in John. But I don’t and
I can’t, so I do what I can. One thing is to triangulate from a couple of translations. But truth be told, I treat the German Bible as a sort of
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