He woke from a coma only to discover that no one seemed to know him. That was the story of a Liam Neeson thriller from 2011, “Unknown.” Neeson’s character goes to the hotel where he and his wife were staying only to find his wife refuses to recognize him and that she is with another man who has taken on his identity. It seems that all the people who should know him do not. They all refuse to accept him for who he is.
It’s not just a movie plot. Our Gospel text, John 1:10-18, opens this week with these verses about Jesus: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” Those words are a little jarring after we’ve just been celebrating the glorious arrival of Jesus in the world. Rustic shepherds and foreign magi came to see the infant Jesus. Angels sang about Him from heaven. Yet here He is, according to John, unknown among those who should have known Him, “his own.”
The lectionary gives the option of beginning the reading at verse 1 rather than at verse 10. But I’m not going to exercise that option this week because I’ve covered the opening of John in preaching many times. I should also acknowledge that many liturgical, church-year-following churches will observe Epiphany on this coming Sunday, January 2. That’s the Catholic model which allows worship leaders to “transfer” the January 6 Epiphany celebration to the Sunday between January 2 and 8, inclusive. That’s what I’ve done for years. But this year, with the nearest Sunday to Epiphany being the next one, January 9, I decided we would observe Epiphany on that nearer Sunday. This week we are reading together the assigned texts for the “Second Sunday after Christmas,” which almost always get skipped in an Epiphany transfer.
So I am particularly interested in this latter half of what is often called the “prologue” to John’s Gospel. When it’s begun at verse 1, it seems we often end at what feels like a climax in verse 14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father” (King James rendering). But four more verses are part of the opening of John and they too are worth our attention.
I particularly like verse 15 which gives us John the Baptist saying enigmatically, “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” To us looking back with clear Christian understanding of Jesus’s divinity it makes perfect sense. The pre-existent Word appeared to the world after John but ranked ahead of John because He was always God long before John ever existed. Yet imagine the confusion of those who first heard such a statement from John. No wonder Jesus came and was not understood or recognized.
Yet another almost paradoxical part of the text appears in verse 18 as it explains that Jesus, whom His followers have seen in the flesh, has “made known” the unseen God whom, “No one has ever seen…” The same thought recurs throughout John, as in chapter 14 verse 7. Yet there is also the “subplot” that the seen and God-revealing Jesus remains unknown to many who encounter Him. Jesus turns the revealing role around in chapter 6 verses 44 and 45 to say that only those who know and attend to God will come to Him, Jesus.
In the Liam Neeson film the problem was an ugly conspiracy by those who refused to recognize his character. In the real world the failure to recognize Jesus and thereby recognize God, and vice-versa, is the result of the ugliness of sin. In His perfect humanity, Jesus Christ also reveals who we are, far, far less than perfect. Thus the fact that Jesus is often unknown can be the result of willful failure to accept and acknowledge Him. Likewise, the many sins of we who call ourselves Christians and followers of Jesus may be the result of our failure to recognize who Jesus really is and that those who truly know Him cannot continue to live in the unrighteous ways we often exhibit to the world.
So in the season after Christmas, let us do all we can to keep beholding the glory of the only begotten of the Father, the glory of God Himself. And let us live as people who know and understand what that glory might look like in our own lives.