There is another angle to magnification, though, as is explained by the word's etymology. Underneath the word magnification is the Latin word magnus, which means great or high (as in magna cum laude: with high honors). So when you magnify something, you make it greater, you lift it higher in your mind's eye.
This morning at church, the Scripture passage for the day was from Luke 1:46-55, a passage also known as The Magnificat, for obvious reasons:
And Mary said:
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
For He has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant;
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.
For He who is mighty has done great things for me,
And holy is His name.
And His mercy is on those who fear Him
From generation to generation.
He has shown strength with His arm;
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
And exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
And the rich He has sent away empty.
He has helped His servant Israel,
In remembrance of His mercy,
As He spoke to our fathers,
To Abraham and to his seed forever.”
Before I go on to a discussion of the miraculous, I want to digress for a moment on the subject of DNA. Recently, I paid the $99 (plus $4.95 shipping and handling) for the Ancestry.com DNA test. Ostensibly, it's purpose is to read your genotypes and find out where your ancestors likely came from. To my surprise, I would up having much more in common with Eastern Europeans in my ancestry than Western Europeans, plus a chunk in common with those from Great Britain, and a couple of parallels to people from Ireland and Scandinavia.
The supporting materials that explained their methods were pretty interesting and explained why this oddball mixture of ethnic backgrounds was actually pretty plausible, given who has dominated Europe over the centuries: The Celts, The Vikings, The Angles and Saxons, The Hapsburg Dynasty, The Prussians, etc. No surprise, then, that I am somewhat of a mutt, instead of the purebred I thought I might have been. Whatever. I still think of my people as being Bavarian and Austrian. Maybe I just like the countryside and the language. :) (and the sausage, and the cheese, and the pretzels...)
The supporting materials that explained their methods were pretty interesting and explained why this oddball mixture of ethnic backgrounds was actually pretty plausible, given who has dominated Europe over the centuries: The Celts, The Vikings, The Angles and Saxons, The Hapsburg Dynasty, The Prussians, etc. No surprise, then, that I am somewhat of a mutt, instead of the purebred I thought I might have been. Whatever. I still think of my people as being Bavarian and Austrian. Maybe I just like the countryside and the language. :) (and the sausage, and the cheese, and the pretzels...)
A side benefit to the DNA test is that Ancestry.com lets you download your entire gene sequence in a .csv file which you can then take to other sites and check your genetic record for the presence of certain markers. I have a gene that creates a predilection to diabetes, for example. But, I lack the gene that increases one's likelihood to contract Alzheimer's (thanks be to God! that's a disease I fear.) It's really amazing to me how much of one's destiny is shaped by their genetics. It's kind of like a poker hand - you are dealt what you're dealt, and simply have to play the cards the best way you can.
Now on to the miraculous. This morning's message at The Gateway Church, including this video clip as setup, put me in mind of a sermon I preached there 3 years ago. I enclose it here as a bit of an Advent meditation:
Do you believe in miracles?
I do.
This is the season
for miracles, & that’s good, because I’m gonna need one this morning. This is one tough topic. I’m talking, of course, about explaining
childbirth – but in my case, Divine
childbirth.
It’s every parent’s
dilemma as children grow up: how will I answer “the question”? You've heard the stories, I'm sure, about the
silly things nervous parents tell their children when first faced with that
“Birds and the Bees” moment, that always-too-soon-asked question: "Where
do babies come from?" They gulp, try to breathe calmly, and come out
with something regrettable about finding them under a cabbage leaf, or picking
them out of a catalog, or taking them from behind a secret display in the
organic section of the grocery store, or even being flown in by a stork (which
I suppose will soon be replaced by an Amazon drone aircraft to sharply reduce
shipping costs).
Some other parents
try to muddle their way through a more biologically correct explanation about a
mommy and a daddy loving each other very much and then... there is always this
awkwardly intimate part where they pause and insert … "and then a miracle
happened, and wow, YOU showed up in the hospital!”
Well, in my
experience this is a whole lot simpler.
You get your children … at the airport. It has to be a major
airport, of course, so you may have to drive quite some distance, but you get
there, park the car, find the right terminal and gate (which coordinates are
given to you on very short notice in a coded message on a secure phone line
direct from the child delivery authorities), and then it's like this miracle
happens: someone walks off the jetway, hands you a kid and says: "Here you
go, buddy. Best of luck! I'm pretty sure all his parts are working.
I know a couple of them definitely are. It was a long flight, let
me tell you."
And here in your
trembling hands is this 4 month old someone or other, and ... I have to say it was pretty much the coolest experience
ever! Wouldn’t change it for anything. THAT was a miracle!
One of the
consequences of THIS version of “where babies come from” (the airport) is that
I missed out on all the gestation and delivery part; I went straight to
carryout. You figure out ahead of time what you want, talk to the people
in charge, drive there, park for 15 minutes, and then go home with your order
while it's still warm.
Now don’t get me
wrong, I do like this! I’m a real fan of
the whole conception and childbirth thing. It’s one of those everyday miracles that is
all around us, but never ceases to amaze!
I mean, you take a little bit of this, and one of those, mix it around,
cross your fingers, bake for 9 months, and then: Woah.
It’s a miracle!
Do you believe in miracles? I do.
Still, I have a hard
time relating to the whole pregnancy thing, since I haven't lived through it.
Plus, then there's the fact that I'm a guy, so... that limits my
viewpoint more than a little. See, from a guy's perspective, getting that conception
part down, working on that process, getting that right, that’s pretty much our
main focus. Besides, it seems to be WAY more fun than all the other upkeep stuff
that comes shortly thereafter.
So, when it comes to
the Christmas story and the part that involves Mary, I gotta admit that I am
pretty clueless. Not only is all that girl stuff happening (you know, this
"with child" business, the pregnancy and delivery and all that), but …
even the way cooler part involving
conception isn't exactly ... normal, either. I mean, listen to
this:
"The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the
power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is
to be born will be called the Son of God."
Yow. You lost
me there. How does that work,
really?
Since I don’t get
this, I am going to have to turn to the female portion of the congregation and
ask you if you can relate to what it must have been like for Mary.
The Bible talks about Mary's elderly cousin Elizabeth getting pregnant in
her old age by her husband Zechariah, and then going into seclusion for 5
months. Seclusion? What is that about?
Yeah, I see your
knowing looks. You get it somehow. You probably also get why after
Mary became pregnant she just took off
for 3 months and hung out with Elizabeth, who must have been 3 times her age.
You can probably understand how these women, each with a miraculous (and
to a degree, a socially shocking) pregnancy could have solidarity with one
another, and understand one another like no one else could, drawing strength
from their shared secret.
The expectant
fathers, Zechariah and Joseph, would have heard some smack talk from their
peers, I think. You know, the “old guy jokes” for Zechariah about his
new-found potency, the needling of Joseph for being a little too eager with his
fiancée, and well… we can save the rest for the locker room. Men show friendship shoulder-to-shoulder, in
groups, with joking; women show friendship face-to-face, in pairs, with sharing. So here you have Mary & Elizabeth
sharing each other’s joy, anxiety, and wonder.
Do you get this,
ladies? Do you follow the dynamic
between these women? Do you understand their need to get out of the public eye
with an understanding friend? I
don’t, I admit it. And neither do I
understand what it could possibly be like for “the Holy Spirit to come
upon you, for the power of the Most High to overshadow you”. And then, as a result… to conceive. I don’t get it. How can I?
But maybe you have
thought about that, maybe you have caught a glimpse of it during your
meditations, thinking about what it
might have been like to be Mary. To be…
overshadowed by the Power of God… and then to have a miracle living within. No wonder Mary “treasured up all these things
in her heart.” How could she not?
And yet, inquiring
minds want to know: How does that
work? That conception part… in this
case, this unique case. And as we noodle
around on that question, we start to fit humanly possible scenarios into the
story, and that is where we go wrong.
Yes, there’s a natural process in play here: conception, gestation,
birth, growth, Humanity.
But there is also a
SUPERnatural process in play here: Intervention by God into the affairs of men
(and in this case, a woman), the Infinite entering the realm of the finite, changing
it forever; Power coming online, holiness, intimacy, creation, conception,
Divinity. For what is a miracle but
the supernatural affecting the natural, inexplicable to us? Miracles by definition are beyond our
comprehension.
Do you believe in
miracles?
The Christmas season
is full of stories of miracles. Just
watch the Hallmark Channel, you’ll see plenty.
Hopelessly broken or despairing people, crazy coincidences, chance and
providence colliding, new hope, lives healed, hearts changed. But that’s not what I’m talking about here –
not those kinds of miracles, not the kind that change human hearts. They are easier to accept, actually. The kind that are hard to accept, hard to
believe in, are the miracles that fly in
the face of all logic, science, or mathematics – the kind that DISAGREE with
the natural order, the kind that pull back the curtain where the machinery
is running, and you find… not machinery, but Power – the kind of Power that
makes people fall flat on their faces in awe and trembling, such that this
Power has to say right out loud: “Fear not!”
(“Fear not? But you’re so loud!” I don’t know, I just think they must
be shouting; they’re probably not loud, these angels, but they certainly must
be earnest, you know? “Fear NOT!” This is Good News, I got Joy here. Fear not!”) The crazy thing about Mary is that she
encounters this Power announcer, Gabriel, and she’s like so.. Zen about
it. I know, wrong analogy, but still. One little question, and then its “okay, then. As you say.”
Man, I’d be groveling on the ground the rest of the day and rattled for
weeks.
This is the kind of
miracle that involves Eternity itself stepping in to time and doing what is
NOT, I mean NOT normal. This requires
belief in the supernatural. This is,
like Paul said a couple of Sundays ago, "God getting his hands
dirty", getting right down in it with Creation. So when you say you believe in the virgin
birth, you are swimming upstream of contemporary culture, and run the very real
risk of ridicule. It takes a counter-cultural faith to stand on the existence of
miracles.
Do you believe in
miracles?
As Paul said a while
back, there are levels of belief, all the way from "well, I sort of think
so", to total childlike trust. Faith - belief - is knowing, being
convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, that the humanly impossible… is true.
When I was in seminary, one of the books I was assigned to read was Longing to Know by Evelyn Meek. It’s about Epistemology, the study of how we
know things. She postulated that coming
to know God is similar to how we come to know our auto mechanic: through
experience, which develops either trust or mistrust. If trust develops, then you look forward to
encounters with a degree of hope for those encounters to bring truth, even if
that truth is uncomfortable. When we
reach that point in the relationship, we can entrust to that trusted person
some very precious and valuable things.
In the mechanic’s case, the vehicle on which we depend in an
auto-centric culture. In God’s case our
very lives, past, present and future.
So, do we trust that God is whom He claims to be? Can the supernatural
(in this case the God in whom I've placed my faith - my belief), intervene in
the natural, affecting directly the affairs of humankind?
What do you
think? How would you answer that? Can God intervene in this world
and do the humanly impossible (what we call miracles)? My answer is:
OF COURSE HE CAN!! He already has, multiple times. The Bible is a record
of God's interactions with us: from Adam to Noah to Abraham to Jacob to
Joseph to Moses to David & Solomon to Elijah & Elisha to the Macabees
to Mary to Jesus to Peter to Paul to the church today. When God steps in
and interacts with humanity... miracles occur. They must, for by
definition the supernatural is above, is greater than, the
natural. God is beyond us in scope and power, so whatever God does among us will astound us, will be miraculous.
The miraculous will provoke a reaction, either negative or positive, either
skepticism or belief, either ridicule or praise.
Do you believe in
miracles? How do you react to the concept, the
testimony in the Bible, that God stepped in to the affairs of humankind and,
without human agency, apart from a husband's will, and in God's role as
Heavenly Father, united His own nature with Mary's DNA to produce a child fully
human and fully divine?
I could say that
it’s a mystery and I don’t need to know the details. But, I want to know how the Divine and
the Human blended here, and that’s where we’ll go next. For truth like this, we’ll turn to the
Internet!
The great thing
about the Internet is that if you search diligently enough, you can find
someone to corroborate every crazy theory you can possibly think of. Naturally, I have one - a crazy theory. (actually I have more than one, and they’ve all
been confirmed on the Internet!) For now, we’ll just focus on the one involving
the Incarnation of Christ – the Word made flesh, dwelling among us, God’s only-begotten
Son.
Here’s what the Internet
said: The LORD God fulfilled His promise to Eve, that from her genetic “seed”
(maternal inheritance) would come the Messiah, who would bruise the serpent’s
head. God used the woman’s DNA, which
carries the mitochondria of inheritance, to keep her “seed” available for God’s
redemptive plan, in which God would unite a […] Y chromosome [which God
supplied directly when the Power of God overshadowed Mary].
God interrupted the
long chain from Adam of defective genetic procreation in humans to create one
man, His only begotten son, to level the unequal playing field Satan had
created at the Fall. Jesus’ Y-chromosome
came directly from God. Thus he is and
forever will be the ONLY begotten Son of God.
However, what geneticists will NEVER be able to do by tinkering with
God’s creation, Jesus did when he offered himself as a living sacrifice to
atone for man’s sin, and reconcile mankind to God. He bore God’s “likeness” and his spiritual
heredity, and was born, not of corruptible, but incorruptible seed! I have another theory about how the Linear
Algebra explains how the Infinite can be mapped to the finite by using a
transform function as is done in mapping 4-space to 2-space, but… we’ll save
that for another day.
If you believe that
God created the heavens and the earth (from scratch, mind you), and created the
first man (Adam) from the dust of the ground, and the first woman (Eve) from
the rib of Adam, then surely it's not hard to believe that at the time of Mary's
conception God did it again! God fashioned a new DNA sequence with a Y
chromosome so the child born would be male, and when the power of God
overshadowed Mary, God caused this new DNA sequence to join with that of Mary's
and... there you go: crazy theory confirmed on the ‘net. Male child from divine
and human parents. Easy for God to do, not so easy for humanity to grasp.
Do you believe in
miracles?
Of course, if you don't
believe that God has the power to intervene in the natural world, including
creating something from nothing, then there's not much to discuss, really. The whole of Christianity hangs upon the
intervention of God in the natural world.
You can’t believe in the Christianity presented in the Bible unless you
believe in … the Christianity presented in the Bible, miracles and all! The redemption story, and so our confession
of faith, is totally shot through with the miraculous. But if you DO believe in miracles, in God
intervening in the natural world, then this is one very important miracle: “And
the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as
of the only begotten of the
Father, full of grace and truth.” God’s only-begotten Son – fully human,
and fully divine.
Begotten, you
say? What does that mean, anyway –
begotten? It means “born of”, or generated
by. The Greek word looks like this:
μονο·γενής or in
English transliterated: monogenes
Mono
means “only”, or one alone. Genes
means: “kind”, as in “like kind” or same kind.
It’s where we get the terms genetics, or genus, as in genus, species,
etc, the zoological classifications. The
expanded dictionary definition, then, is:
the
only born-in [the same] kin(d)", with an emphasis today on kind (downward
differentiation of generations) rather than kin (family, sideways and up), but
sharing both senses
Is the emphasis here
on birth “in-kind” strong enough for you?
This isn’t an adoption kind of parentage, where a person other than the
biological birth parent steps in and assumes the role of parent, taking on the
duties and responsibilities, and the love and affection, the nurture and
discipline that a parent brings. That’s
what Paul talks about in Galatians 4:5, Ephesians 1:5, and Romans 8:15 – our
adoption into God’s family as dearly loved children, with Jesus our elder
brother.
No, while that is
entirely appropriate for us who are redeemed by Christ and identify with Him,
it is NOT appropriate for Jesus Himself.
He is in another category altogether – the only one of His kind, born of
Mary AND born of God, in a literal sense AND in a miraculous sense. God intervened in nature to conceive a
genuine “miracle baby” fully human and fully Divine. In the
Bible, adoption is tantamount to redemption; someone outside comes inside. Begetting… that’s inside all the
way. Jesus is the only real
“insider” in God’s family… all the rest of us are outsiders, brought inside to
be loved and cared for.
I get adoption. I’ve lived it for 30+ years now. I get Joseph, the adoptive father of
Jesus. I understand him, I think. What I don’t get, is Mary. Mary
bridged the gap, carried within her the Holy of Holies, the Glory of God, who
was not only carried by her… but derived from her, in cooperation with
the Most High God, the Creator and Initiator of life.
Do you believe in
miracles? I do!
Whether it was a Y-Chromosome just like Adam’s, or a strand of DNA
created ex nihilo, or angelic gene
splicing therapy, honestly, I could really care less HOW God did it. I do know THAT God did it. The
virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and His name shall be called “Immanuel”,
God with us.
Now, to our
immediate text of John 1:14, and one other Greek word in that verse. That Greek word is … Word. It looks like this:
λόγος or in English transliterated:
logos
According to the standard,
trusted Bible research tools in broad usage, Logos means an expression, often (but not always) verbal or
written. Its focus is not on the speaking or writing but on the thought, the
reason, behind the speaking or writing. Logos is a speaking, a saying, a word as
the expression of thought; differentiated from the act of speaking.
Now before I go any
further with this, I need to take a brief excursus into the setting in which
the Apostle John wrote his Gospel account.
We’re talking first century AD, roughly the same time as Philo of Alexandria, a first
century Jewish philosopher very much influenced by Greek culture and
wisdom. Some scholars hold that his
concept of the Logos as God's
creative principle influenced early Christology. He refers to the Logos as the revelation of God to humanity, especially as found in
the writings of Moses. He used the term Logos to mean an intermediary divine
being. Philo followed the Ideas of Plato
that made a distinction between imperfect
matter and perfect idea, and therefore intermediary beings were necessary
to bridge the enormous gap between God and the material world. The Logos
was the highest of these intermediary beings, and was called by Philo "the
first-born of God." Philo also wrote that "the Logos of the living God is the bond of everything, holding all
things together and binding all the parts, and prevents them from being
dissolved and separated."
Philo came up in a
culture that had heard for 400-500 years the teachings of Heraclitus, Socrates,
Plato and Aristotle. Heraclitus, the first to use the expression in philosophy,
taught that logos provided the link between rational discourse and the
world's rational structure, and that there was a universal Logos independent in its existence.
Plato located his Ideas within the Logos,
but to Philo the Logos also acted on
behalf of God in the physical world. In particular, Philo identified the Angel
of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) with the Logos, who also said that the Logos was God's instrument in creating
the universe.
Any of these ideas
sound familiar? They should. New Testament writers John and Paul both
wrote similar things. Philo died in AD
50, prior to the bulk of the New Testament writings, but not so much prior that
his ideas were out of vogue; they were very likely widely discussed in the
Greco-Roman world. It’s no surprise that
to an educated and thoughtful writer of the Scriptures, as both John and Paul
were, allusions to thought from the contemporary world would be seen as useful in
communicating the Gospel, and would be used often.
By the way, scholars
also suggest that the first 18 verses of John are a prologue, possibly an
adaptation of a hymn used in worship, or a section added by a later author to
introduce the main theme of the book, which is something like: Jesus, the one
and only Son, is the self-revelation of God, who through his incarnation
brought life and light to humanity. I
prefer the thesis that John himself composed the prologue, added after the main
content of the book was completed (a result of his own meditation on the
content of the book) and that the title Logos
is John’s shorthand for all that this discussion implies.
So… to translate Logos as Word, without the rest of the
layers of meaning and the philosophical context of the day, is to very much short
these verses in John of their richer meaning.
Recognizing the influence of Greek thought, verse 14 could just as
easily be stated this way:
The
Logos (the Divine Reason, which brings unity and order to the cosmos, holding
it together by the dynamic force of God’s will) became flesh and dwelt among
us, full of grace and truth.
Back to our
definition, then. Logos
means an expression, often (but not always) verbal or written. Its focus is not
on the speaking or writing but on the thought, the reason, behind the speaking
or writing.
Logos is a
speaking, a saying, a word as the expression of thought; differentiated from
the act of speaking. While it is the expression, its focus is on the thoughts
from which the expression emanates. It
can be seen as rational thought expressed for others’ reception. In the case of God, it is rational thought
that is also creative in nature, as well as loving in nature, for God is both.
Think of an artist
who has an idea for a painting, sculpture, song, poem. The idea springs from the creative spark (a
combination of instinct & emotion).
The idea is then refined rationally, including the desired medium of
expression, into an executable concept.
Then there is a decision of the will (volition) to move ahead and make
it so. Then actual work is done in the
physical realm (putting together words, notes, or raw materials into a finished
version of the concept), executed according to that rational plan, “willed”
into existence, if you will, by the artist.
Creativity (emotion, instinct) begets idea. Reason begets plan, materials, etc. Volition (or will) chooses to act upon
it. Power and skill combine with will,
to bring the plan to fruition. The
artist’s logos (that’s logos
with a lower-case L) is all of those
things: the tangible expression of the creative will. All
aspects of a person: emotion, instinct, reason, will, skill, and effort, are
involved in the outworking of the logos. And so it is with God. The Logos
of God spoke the universe into existence.
God said “let there be light!” and there was light. God said “let the earth bring forth
vegetation of all kinds”, and it was so.
God’s reason and creativity took on form and shape through the will
& power of the Logos of God.
Do you believe in
miracles?
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 were made through Him, and without Him nothing was
made that was made.
That familiar
passage from John 1:1-3, when read in the unembellished original Greek, such as
you’d find in an interlinear, reads more like this:
In the
beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with Theos, and the Theos was the
Logos. This was in the
beginning with Theos. All
things became through this (Logos), and without this became not even one
thing that has become.
The word “became”
here is gínomai, a similar word as genes,
which we looked at earlier. It comes
from the same root (gen-) as well,
from where we get the English word “generated”. Other uses of gínomai in the New Testament are translated “it came
to pass” or “there arose” or “it happened” or “came about” or… “became”, which
is how it’s used in our text for the morning:
The Logos became flesh
and dwelt among us, “and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten
of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
The Logos is generative, creative, bringing into existence the thoughts,
intent and self-expression of God, much like the way it works with an
artist or craftsman, bringing their design into a fully expressed form that all
can see and appreciate.
Do you believe in
miracles?
This is how we got to
behold God’s Glory in human flesh. The Logos of God made it so. God
expressed creative, rational thought in the Incarnation, the blending of the
Divine and human. The Logos of God took shape inside Mary,
wedded inextricably to the human condition, but wholly, fully the
expression of Almighty God, Creator of Heaven and earth, in whom we confess our
faith by the Apostle’s Creed. The Logos dwelt among us as “the exact
representation of the Father”, and through Him, we came to know God in the
flesh. Jesus, the seed of woman, AND the
Son of God, is our elder brother in the family of God, the firstborn among many
brothers and sisters, but… the only-begotten Son of God, the only
“born-in-kind” offspring of God, Jesus the ultimate insider, both in the human
family… and in God’s.
