Logos

Advent Vespers, Week Three

Deuteronomy 32:45-47

When Moses had finished reciting all these words to all Israel, he said to them: “Take to heart all the words that I am giving in witness against you today; give them as a command to your children, so that they may diligently observe all the words of this law. This is no trifling matter for you, but rather your very life; through it you may live long in the land that you are crossing over the Jordan to possess.”

John 1:1-18

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 into being through him, and without him 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.

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Words are important. They allow us to communicate, as it were, mind to mind.

Many of the greatest divisions in the Church have been cleft by misunderstandings of language, by using the wrong words. If you do not speak the same tongue as another human being, it can be quite difficult indeed to understand them. Yet if you do share a language, then neither time nor distance stands as any barrier. We can read the words of men long dead from their own pens, directly encountering other minds, other human souls, who left this world thousands of years ago.

Where there are words, there is reason. Where there is reason, there is a mind.

The ancient Greeks found two things about our world most remarkable. One was that our world, by and large, made sense. It had a reason, a logic behind it all—what they called the Logos, the Word. And perhaps more amazing still, our human minds had the capacity to encounter this Logos, to make sense of our world. Nowadays we take this for granted, but it’s still pretty astonishing when you think about it. Our world doesn’t have to make sense, yet it does. And it seems ridiculous to imagine that our squishy little monkey brains should be able to discern the deep truths of the universe—yet that’s precisely how we got to the moon.

We didn’t invent mathematics. It was always there, waiting for us to uncover. Math, as they say, is the language of the universe, the words constructing reality. And where there are words, there is reason. Where there is reason, there is a mind. The Greeks with their philosophy, with their love of reason, had stumbled across a truth brobdingnagian in its implications: the fact that the world makes sense indicates that there is a mind behind it all. And the fact that we are able to make sense of the world indicates that that great and hidden mind is speaking to us.

So, yes, the Logos is kind of a big idea. It’s the logic of the universe, the reason that guides the stars. It’s also the language of the Mind Behind It All: the Logos is the Word of God. Reason doesn’t disprove God. Reason is our surest sign of God. That’s why, through most of Western history, the existence of God with a capital “G” was considered not religion but philosophy. Reason could prove the existence of God, or at least prove the absurdity of a universe without Him, without a divine Logos. Reason could tell us that there is a great unknown God behind it all. But it couldn’t tell us what He was like. It couldn’t tell us what He thought about us.

For that you need revelation—you need God to speak directly to human beings in words that we can understand. We all experience God in our own ways; we encounter Him whenever we experience goodness and truth and beauty. Poets glimpse Him. But to fulfill the mysterious purposes that God holds for us, He needed to be a bit more direct than just making sure that two plus two equals four. He chose the most unlikely of candidates—a nation of slaves descended from a wandering old man—to serve as His special priestly people, revealing right and wrong to the world, revealing God’s care for justice towards the weak and the vulnerable and the oppressed.

And they wrote down these words, words not from an oracle or demigod or fallen angel but from the Voice of the Creator Himself, encounters with the Mind Behind It All. And these became the Holy Scriptures of the Bible, the written Word of God. Here we were given the Good Book to go along with that First Book of Nature—a book of revelation illuminating a book of reason. And this Book outlasted all its rival claimants because people found it to be good and true and beautiful. In other words, they found it to be an accurate account of the Mind of God.

Yet this was not enough. God was not content to leave His footprints upon the mountains, His fingerprints in our equations. Nor was He content to write a single book for a single people. He wanted to know us face to face, mind to mind. And so the Word became flesh. The logic, the reason, the Mind Behind It All, the Visible Image of the Invisible God, took on blood and bone and breath to dwell with us, to become one with us. Truth became a person and walked around on earth.

That’s why we call Jesus the Logos, the Word of God. In some sense He is indeed God’s logo, the image and stamp that reveals the whole. But He is also the reason behind it all—the Word of love and self-sacrifice and infinite life that makes sense of our world and of our God.

Seek out the Mind of God in the world around us, in the vast wonders of the heavens and the intricate machinery of the quantum world. Seek out the Mind of God in the Holy Scriptures, which were written thousands of years ago for others, for all of us, and just for you. But most of all seek out the Word of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, for He is indeed the Word made flesh. Seek Him, love Him, know Him. For to know Jesus is to know the Mind of God.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.