The Johannine letters obsess over a matter that seems a point of detail to readers intoxicated with the idea that action rather than ideas are the important thing. Jesus’ ‘coming in the flesh’ is stated over and over as a deadly serious litmus test by which true believers may be discerned over against those who traffic in lies.
Given the multiple options available for understanding ‘the Jesus thing’, this insistence upon an enfleshed savior seems archaic, trite, even impolite.
Yet the letters will not give it up:
Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist!
Not only careers are made and broken upon such a trifle, but eternal destinies as well. We stand before a major disconnect between modernity’s adjustable lens and the antiquity’s dogma. It is usually wise, at such a faultline, to pause, to listen, to discern what truth lies folded into the belligerence.
The Johannine impetus falls to pieces in the moment it allows that heaven and earth have not truly commingled in this Jesus, this ‘Father’s Son’. At a point like this, a sensible tradition becomes unbending in its insistence that either something very precise happened or nothing at all.
Jesus, for this way of viewing things, came in flesh as real as yours and mine. No mere appearance, no metaphorical symboling, no mystical semblance is sufficient. He breathed, laughed, relieved himself, wept, ached, hurt, died. Else nothing of worth happened and we can get on with our undifferentiated lives.
Flesh is dignified in this insistence, rescued from the repetitive historical impulse to downplay its created importance. Jesus assumed it, we are told, so it must be worth such redemptive ambitions.
This life of mine. This flesh, this me.
Worth heaven’s invasion, Jesus’ claim? Worth sweat? Tears? Blood?
Good grief.
Canter Bridge 
Leave a Reply