What Is the World?
J. Marshall Jenkins
He was in the world,
and the world came into being through him;
yet the world did not know him (John 1:10).
What is the world? “Oh, for heaven’s sake,”
my writer’s conscience protests, “Do not
write about that abstraction. Turn your
gaze to something in the world, a towhee
or rare northbound river or blades of grass
reaching up through a crack in the curb.
Asking questions about the world is like
observing frames in an art gallery
and overlooking the paintings.” Yes, but
if I do not stand apart from the world
and observe it, I am as unconscious
as a hibernating toad. Yet, if I
do not immerse myself in it, I am
as pointless as a perpetual motion
machine. Either way, this poem, if you
want to call it that, would be bereft
of a poet. The Fourth Evangelist
said that the Word made the world, apart
from it, yet entered in, found himself
a stranger here, misunderstood, reviled,
killed, too much apart even as he walked
dusty roads, talked about lilies of the field
and birds of the air, cursed a fig tree,
and converted water to wine. He slept
through a storm until those too much in it
awakened him, and he stilled it. He rose
from death, forever apart and within,
making a place for us where he is now.
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The Prince Of Peace and Us: Who Waits For Whom?
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you
and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven,
for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you (Matthew 5:11-12).
John’s gospel rings with truth and poetry and I love it. I have trouble wrapping my head around some of the concepts, well, like the word was God and the word was with God and all that. I’m having trouble with a word being God. What does that mean? Can you clarify? I love your poems, Marshall. Keep them coming.
“The Word” in Greek is logos, a term that means much more than our ordinary use of the term. Minds communicate with each other mainly through words. Logos refers more to the mind that speaks, in this case, the mind of God. In Genesis, God created through saying the words, calling things into being. Following that line, John is saying the mind of God became flesh, the same mind that spoke all flesh and all else into being. By becoming flesh and dwelling among us, Christ then showed great love, especially by finding himself a misunderstood and persecuted stranger among those he saved.