He may have already stopped hoping by the time Hope was born.
Over 400 years of silence from God overshadowed this man’s
ancestors. It was a silence that rivaled
the 430 years of Jewish slavery in Egypt . And this Jew, born in the Egypt that had
enslaved his ancestors, thought he may as well have been hoping for a
resurrected Moses liberator as for a Messiah after all that silence.
The way this man Philo saw it, it was time for God to step
out from behind His curtain and once again declare “I AM.” But Philo Judaeus wasn’t seeing even a
rustling of the curtain, so he decided to yank it aside himself. Moses was lost up on Mt. Sinai
He used a little dab of Plato, a good helping of Hebrew
Scripture misinterpreted as merely allegorical, and sprinkled his new creation
with the other philosophies of the day.
He married philosophy with God and birthed his own mediator
between God and man: logos, which in
his mind meant “reason.”
Meanwhile, the true Logos
was being born of a virgin in a forgotten stable in a conquered Israel .
Philo, looking back on the baffling centuries of silence,
said that God was unknowable. He said
that the world was senselessly evil, and that since God could not come in
contact with such blackness, He could not have directly created it. This is where Philo’s logos came in, the neither unbegotten nor begotten second-in-command
to God, the mystical mediator of God’s powers to humanity, the philosophical
substitute for the Messiah.
Meanwhile, the true Messiah was getting to know fishermen
and tax collectors. He, as one with God,
was performing miracles and changing lives.
He was getting dirty and tired and hungry in villages and on roads, yet
He was utterly and completely God at the same time.
Philo saw his logos as
“reason:” impersonal, archangelic, the Idea of Ideas.
Yet the Messiah on the cross was not impersonal, nor merely
angelic, nor a mystical idea. He was
Someone greater: the Word become flesh who dwelt among us (John 1:14).
“In the beginning was the Logos” carries with it a declaration as weighty as the entire
history of the world:
Jesus is the Logos
who spoke the world into existence.
Jesus is the Logos
who fulfills the Ten Logoi: the Ten
Commandments.
Jesus is the Logos who
declares “I AM.”
Jesus is the Logos who
broke 400 years of silence.
Jesus is the Logos who
was seen by human eyes and touched by dirty human hands and heard and known by
His creation. He was just as much the
Word when He was in Mary’s uterus as He was when He was bleeding on the cross
or sitting at the right hand of God.
Yet Philo may have already stopped hoping by the time Hope
was born, settling for a God who needed the universe to avoid a death of
loneliness and a logos no greater
than the limits of Philo’s own human creativity.
But when John divinely penned, “In the beginning was the
Word” and “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” God divinely shattered Philo’s
idol of reason and his convenient pseudo-Messiah that fit his culture,
emotions, and demands of God.
With “In the beginning was the Word” God divinely shattered
the convenient idols of my age, too: the pseudo-Messiahs that fit nicely into
my boxed traditions of who I think God should be. John used the very Greek word Logos that Philo had twisted, with all
the weight of the Jewish history, and bridged the way to the the Word for both
Gentiles and Jews.
It was the birth announcement of our Hope. And with that, 400 years of silence was
shattered by the Word, crying in a stable.
Lauren’s best friends are her family–her parents, Steve and Jennifer, and her five siblings. She is passionate about history, good music, and being a feminine woman in a feminist culture. You’ll find her blogging at One Bright Corner with her twin sister, Mikaela, and typing behind-the-scenes on the Christian Heritage blog and newsletter. When she’s not doing that, she loves teaching music, being outside, and ministering with her family!
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