Gracious and loving God, thank you so much for the gift of your Son through whom we see just how much you love us ✠ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
We’ve all heard that phrase “lost in translation.” If you’ve ever studied another language, you know how difficult it can be to translate an idea from one language to another. In English, we say “she burned the midnight oil” whereas in Spanish you’d say, “se quemó las cejas.” That Spanish phrase though is not a direct translation using the word for oil; rather it means “she burned her eyebrows.” Now, both phrases mean that someone stayed up late at night – one suggesting that you’d need extra oil in the lamp and the other suggesting that maybe she got a bit too close to the flame while reading or writing late at night. But neither of these phrases is actually about staying up late in any literal sense, you have to teach someone what the idiom means.
This
gets even more complicated when it comes to Biblical translation. We’re going
from Biblical Hebrew and Greek, languages that aren’t even in the same
linguistic family as our own. And it’s not just language, but also cultural
norms and assumptions, as well as historical happenings that need translation.
A year ago, if I said “January 6th,” some of us would have immediately
thought “the Feast of the Epiphany” and others would have thought of just a
random date in early January. But after last year, the two words “January 6th”
mean something completely different. Well, that’s also the case in Scripture –
there are references everywhere to historical events that aren’t explained for
us to read 2,500 years later. And, in the case of Hebrew, we’re translating out
of a worldview that knows nothing of the Western philosophical tradition that
influences how we think, so even the categories that we bring to the work of
translation aren’t held in common.
These
translations issues can sometimes be rather funny. Consider some signs that
people have noticed around the world in their travels: a sign in Romania reads,
“The elevator is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that
you will be unbearable;” a clothing store in Hong Kong has, “Ladies may have a
fit upstairs;” a laundromat in Rome reads, “Leave your clothes here and spend
the afternoon having a good time;” or a hotel in Mexico has, “The manager has
personally passed all the water served here.” These are funny, right? We
completely understand the idea that is trying to be conveyed, but there is a
translation issue. And if we were not fluent in English, those translations
could lead to rather significant misunderstandings.
All
of these difficulties are present in the opening first eighteen verses of John,
often called the “prologue” to this gospel. To translate is to interpret, and
so there is a lot at stake when we translate words and concepts like “In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” or “The
light shines in the darkness” or “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and
we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son full of grace and
truth.” I won’t, but it would be easy to talk for hours about all of the references
and connotations that such phrases entail. Translation is incredibly difficult,
but also immensely important.
Instead
of drilling down into specific words or phrases and explaining these particular
issues of translation, taking a cue from John, I want to zoom out and consider
the bigger picture. What John is telling us is that this is a story of translation.
“In the beginning was the Word… and the Word became flesh and lived among us…
and we have seen this glory.” In other words, in Jesus, God has translated
heaven to humanity. As we’ve already considered, translation is difficult. God
is discernible in nature, but those are more whispers than declarations. God had
spoken through the prophets, but the limits of human language are still a
barrier to perfect translation. And so God became the translation when the Word
took on flesh. In Jesus, heaven is translated perfectly into human. This isn’t
some working translation; no, this is the holy grail of translation, where idea
matches idea, concept matches concept, meaning matches meaning. When John
writes, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s
heart, who has made him known,” he’s telling us that if you know Jesus then you
know the Father.
In
any translation, and especially a perfect one such as the Incarnation, you have
to be fluent in both languages. My English is pretty good, my Spanish is quite
rusty – and so my translations of Spanish would be barely passable right now. Well,
God speaks both perfect heaven and perfect human, and we need lessons in both.
We
tend to think that we’re pretty fluent in being human – after all, as a species,
we’ve been doing this for about 200,000 years and most of us have several
decades of being human under our belts. If we’re an expert in anything, wouldn’t
it be in being human? Well, experience doesn’t always translate to fluency.
Just because you watch the news in Korean doesn’t necessarily mean that you can
speak it.
John
opens with “In the beginning,” which is an obvious link to the beginning of Genesis
which also opens with “In the beginning.” And what we know from the Creation
poem that opens Genesis is that humanity is made in the image of God. This is
what it means to be human – to be an image-bearer of the divine. Because of the
limitations of our humanity and sin, we do not perfectly reflect that image in
which we are made; we have distorted the image. Yes, we have plenty of experience
speaking broken human, but we speak through the dialect of sin and need some grammar
lessons.
This
is one half of what the Incarnation is all about – God coming to us as a human
to teach us how to speak better human. Look at the human life of Jesus – unlike
nearly every other famous person in history, we don’t have a single thing he
ever produced: no writings, no artwork, no buildings, no artifacts. When he
died, Jesus had a few dozen followers, and just twelve disciples, one of whom
denied him, one who betrayed him, and ten who abandoned him. Even at his
Ascension, Scripture tells us that “some doubted.” Jesus was born in poverty,
lived in poverty, and had to be buried in a borrowed tomb. By every modern
metric for human success, Jesus was a total failure. And that tells us not that
there was something wrong with Jesus, but rather there is something wrong with
how we measure human success.
Jesus’
life was one of obedience and devotion to God, of spending time with the lowly,
of seeking peace, of trust in God to provide, of proclaiming God’s mercy, of
truth-telling, of radical and costly love. Jesus’ life was full of community,
compassion, and centeredness in God. This is why we need Jesus as our language teacher,
because he has much to teach us about being human. To be sure, none us of will
perfectly follow in his footsteps or speak quite as clearly as he did, but
Jesus helps us to speak better human. After Jesus’ arrest, someone approached
Peter to accuse him of being associated with Jesus and the evidence for this
claim is that Peter has an accent that betrays him. May that same accusation be
made against us – that we have the accent of peace, grace, and love in speaking
human in the way that Jesus taught us to.
The
other side of the translation equation is that Jesus spoke perfect heaven. As
John notes, “He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being
through him.” As one of the great hymns of Christmas puts it, “Of the Father’s
love begotten, ere the words began to be, he is Alpha and Omega, he the source,
the ending he.” All things came into being through Christ the Word and all things
will find their culmination in him. Because Jesus has always been with and in Holy
Trinity, Jesus is fluent in the language of heaven, for he himself is the Word,
the language itself. Jesus has the mind to know the peace that passes all
understanding, he has knowledge of the mysteries of God, he lives beyond the
limits of space, time, and materiality. But more than this, it’s not that Jesus
is like a super version of Wikipedia that has a page dedicated to every single
topic – no, rather he is the answer to all things. This is why John notes that
in Jesus we see the glory of God, full of grace and truth. Jesus does not know
all things, rather all things find their true answer in Jesus. All things,
including our lives, find their full meaning in Jesus.
And
so in coming to us, Jesus brings heaven and translates it into human. Without
Jesus, we would think that power is about might and strength, but in him, we
see power most fully displayed on the Cross. We learn things like “it is more blessed
to give than to receive,” things like “the last shall be first,” and “your sins
are forgiven,” and “Just as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me,”
and “God so loves the world,” and “blessed are the peacemakers,” and “love one
another.” To use a phrase that I often turn to, Jesus shows us the grain of the
universe – it is a grain of love, mercy, and grace. That is the language of
heaven, and Jesus translates it into a human life so that we can be confident
of God’s presence with us, of our forgiveness, of our eternal life in Christ.
The
effect of the Incarnation is that “to all who receive him, who believe in his
name, he gave power to become children of God.” Another classic Christmas hymn
includes the line, “O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray, cast out
our sin and enter in, be born in us today.” This is what God’s translation in
Jesus does, it makes us children of God so that we can learn to be bilingual. As
you do with learning any language, this takes practice, you’ll make some
mistakes or not sound fluent at first, so don’t worry about that, just keep at
it. You might try memorizing those important, but difficult, phrases such as “I
love you,” “I need help,” “I made a mistake, please forgive me,” “I forgive you,”
“Here, please take this,” “God is with us,” “All shall be well.” Practice these
words to help with fluency.
I
remember in seminary that on Tuesdays, there was a table in the refectory
called the mesa español and if you wanted to practice your Spanish, you’d
sit there and the conversation would be in Spanish. Well, the same thing
applies in learning to speak both better human and better heaven. The Church is
that mesa español for us. Scripture, Sacraments, and the gathered Body
of Christ all teach us how to speak human and heaven, and the Church gives us a
place and people to practice with. Yes, “come and see” always applies, but it’s
also “come and hear” and “come and speak.”
By
God’s grace, we are taught the language of God so that we can speak with an
accent of love and peace on earth as it is spoken in heaven. In God’s love, we
are given an example of a fully human life in Jesus. And in God’s mercy, when
we misspeak or use the wrong words, in Christ, God has translated forgiveness
to us. On Christmas, we celebrate the gift that the eternal Word of God was
translated into human so that we can be translated into heaven.
