it reduced being human to intellection. We are much more than that. John Macmurray once said that human beings are, in fact, agents.24 We are embodied and we do things. When I stop and think about something, what I’m actually doing is withdrawing from a large part of my humanity. I am not claiming that thinking is wrong, but believing that reason is the sum total of life is a terrible reduction in what it means to be a human being.
unchanging truths. But if you are going to talk about an event, we must start with its historical context, as the event is a part of a larger narrative. Some of these extraordinary claims about who Jesus happens to be only make sense in context. Due to our place in history, we do not understand how radical these claims were. The story of Jesus’ life and actions belong to a Jewish story, so in order to understand Jesus, we must understand some things about Israel’s story.
This is exactly what John is saying in his gospel. If you want truth that is really going to meet our humanity, then you do not want a truth that is limited to one aspect of it – like an idea. If a truth is going to speak to human beings, it has to be more than just an equation, more than just a philosophical idea. It may include those things, but it must be so much more because we are so much more.
One of the first extraordinary claims that John makes is that “The Logos became flesh.” In other words, it became a person embodied among us. Specifically, he says it tabernacled among us. A lot of the English versions will say “dwelled” or “made his dwelling”, but I do not think that those are very good translations.26 John chooses the word tabernacled because something happened in Israel’s history where a tabernacle was involved: Mount Sinai in the Exodus. Mt. Sinai in Israel’s story is where God came among them and they built a tabernacle for his presence. John uses exactly that language: “He tabernacled among us and we beheld his glory.”
If the truth is a person, this has some consequences about our understanding of truth. To be a person is a messy, mysterious, and complex thing. It is extremely difficult to adequately describe what a person is. Take Paul’s attempt to describe what love is, one of the activities of human beings.25 Love is really hard to describe because the more you start to talk about the things that make us really human, then the more difficult it becomes to put it into a box. Well, I think that theology should be just as messy and mysterious. One of my present battles at the moment is with people who think that theology is just another form of philosophy and want it all nice and neat and tidy. I say that they are crazy. If God is personal, then theology is going to be just as messy and mysterious as we are and perhaps even a lot more. Now I think that this is actually very rich. If that is the nature of truth, then the universe is a very exciting and mysterious place. The truth is not likely to be exhausted very quickly. But there are still places we can begin our understanding. If the truth has come among us as a person, the moment you talk about a person – again, here we go – you must talk about that person’s culture. If the truth comes among us in a personal form, then it must happen in a particular place at a particular time, and it happened among the Jews in the 1st Century. This is scandal to people like Plato, because they want timeless, 44
The theme of “tabernacling” returns later in John’s Gospel, during the cleansing of the temple. One of the first acts that Jesus involves himself in is he starts messing with the temple in Jerusalem. The Jews get upset about this and he then says to them: “destroy this temple and then in three days, I’ll raise it up.”27 For them, the temple was the dwelling place of the presence of God and here he is replacing Israel’s temple with himself. Jesus is saying, in effect: “It was the presence of God, but now I am. I am now the presence of God walking upon the earth.” That is a fairly interesting claim. You want to be able to back that up. This echoing of the first mention of tabernacling indicates that John wants to say Jesus was, in fact, the very presence of God walking among us. This extraordinary claim of the presence of God is picked up in some other language. Jesus frequently speaks of himself using this terminology: “I am.” Now that might not 24. “What is Action?” 35. 25. 1 Cor 13:4-8. 26. Editor’s note: The Greek word is “ἐσκήνωσεν”, which can be translated into “to make a tent,” “to make a dwelling,” or “to tabernacle.” 27. Jn 2:19.