WEEK ONE 
TITLE: CHRIST’S GLORY REVEALED (JOHN 1 & JOHN 2:1–11)
February 22–February 25

The portions of Scripture in these first four days of Lent 2023 are passages that have been used in a number of past Advent/Lent Projects. They are beautiful iconic texts that never grow old and set the stage for the drama we will be participating in during the next eight weeks. In John’s prologue (John 1:1–8) are perhaps the most powerful words ever written. They often appear in anthologies of great Western literature.

These first eighteen verses of chapter one are often referred to as the “Hymn to the Word.” John’s poem references Genesis 1 by quoting the phrase “in the beginning” and emphasizing the motifs of darkness and light. John makes it clear at the outset that Christ is God, the uncreated Word, the creative power who brought all things into existence. He also emphatically states that “the Word became a human being and lived among us.” The one true God, John says, consists of both God the Father and God the Son, the one who took on flesh to purposefully help us understand something of who the Father really is.

We meet Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptizer, who in turn introduces others to Christ. In John 1, these new followers use seven distinct titles to refer to him: “Lamb of God,” “Rabbi,” “Son of God,” “Son of Man,” “Messiah,” “King of Israel,” and “Jesus of Nazareth.” It is through John’s ministry of baptism that readers are also introduced to the Holy Spirit, who we quickly come to understand is the third person of the Triune God.

Repeatedly in John’s Gospel the assertion that Jesus is the promised Messiah, the Son of God, is declared and challenged. 

Remembering the prologue throughout the coming weeks, continually going back to meditate on it, will help us as we prepare ourselves to embrace and enter this Lenten season. The themes highlighted in the prologue—light and dark, life, testimony or witness, seeing and believing, glory, faith, grace and truth––run throughout the entire gospel as they engage with us and with each other. During Lent, our Lord invites his children to bear witness like John, that is, to bear witness to Christ’s miraculous life of love and servanthood.

Day 1 - Wednesday, February 22
ASH WEDNESDAY
Title: THE DEITY OF CHRIST
Scripture: John 1:1–18

At the beginning God expressed himself. That personal expression, that word, was with God, and was God, and he existed with God from the beginning. All creation took place through him, and none took place without him. In him appeared life and this life was the light of mankind. The light still shines in the darkness and the darkness has never put it out.

A man called John was sent by God as a witness to the light, so that any man who heard his testimony might believe in the light. This man was not himself the light: he was sent simply as a personal witness to that light.

That was the true light which shines upon every man as he comes into the world. He came into the world—the world he had created—and the world failed to recognise him. He came into his own creation, and his own people would not accept him. Yet wherever men did accept him he gave them the power to become sons of God. These were the men who truly believed in him, and their birth depended not on the course of nature nor on any impulse or plan of man, but on God.

So the word of God became a human being and lived among us. We saw his splendor (the splendor as of a father’s only son), full of grace and truth. And it was about him that John stood up and testified, exclaiming: “Here is the one I was speaking about when I said that although he would come after me he would always be in front of me; for he existed before I was born!” Indeed, every one of us has shared in his riches—there is a grace in our lives because of his grace. For while the Law was given by Moses, love and truth came through Jesus Christ. It is true that no one has ever seen God at any time. Yet the divine and only Son, who lives in the closest intimacy with the Father, has made him known.

Poetry & Poet:
“Staying Power”
by Jeanne Murray Walker

In appreciation of Maxim Gorky at the International Convention of Atheists, 1929

Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts
outside to the yard and question the sky,
longing to have the fight settled, thinking
I can't go on like this, and finally I say

all right, it is improbable, all right, there
is no God. And then as if I'm focusing
a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up.
It's the attention, maybe, to what isn't there

that makes the emptiness flare like a forest fire
until I have to spend the afternoon dragging
the hose to put the smoldering thing out.
Even on an ordinary day when a friend calls,

tells me they've found melanoma,
complains that the hospital is cold, I say God.
God, I say as my heart turns inside out.
Pick up any language by the scruff of its neck,

wipe its face, set it down on the lawn,
and I bet it will toddle right into the godfire
again, which—though they say it doesn't
exist—can send you straight to the burn unit.

Oh, we have only so many words to think with.
Say God's not fire, say anything, say God's
a phone, maybe. You know you didn't order a phone,
but there it is. It rings. You don't know who it could be.

You don't want to talk, so you pull out
the plug. It rings. You smash it with a hammer
till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbery
metal bits. It rings again. You pick it up

    and a voice you love whispers hello.

THE DEITY OF CHRIST

As a first-century man in Judea, it’s likely that Jesus was somewhere between 5 feet 1 inch and 5 feet 5 inches tall. The current average for an American woman is 5 feet 4 inches tall and for a man 5 feet 9 inches. (I'm just an inch taller than that.) It’s interesting to imagine then, that if Jesus were standing in front of you or me, we might be looking down at him.

To imagine Jesus with a specific height, to consider where our gaze would turn to look into his eyes, confronts us with a stark incarnational containment to his Divinity. Yet, that is how the Word expressed himself—he became flesh and dwelt among us. The Infinite One had physical limits. The One whose reach extends beyond the boundaries of our universe needed a ladder to pick fruit from a high branch. It's this Jesus, the enfleshed Word, through whom everything was made.

And it's this same Word—however tall or short he was—who became close friends with someone we know as the disciple named John. John experienced Jesus in tears, in laughter, in sunlight, and under rainfall. John walked with Jesus. John sat with Jesus in the dark of the night. He saw him from afar, quietly communing with the Father in the early light of morning. John had the glory of Jesus revealed to him, encountering Jesus’ shine as lightning. He was with Jesus as he died. And he ate again with Jesus after he rose to life. John saw his friend Jesus in his full humanity and came to believe in his full deity.

Thousands of men and women saw Jesus during his earthly life, wearing his clothes covered in dust, seeing drops of sweat fall to the dirt below, chewing food, and breathing through his nostrils. For us, these 2,000 years later, we must imagine this very real and human Jesus. I’m thankful then to have John’s account to help us hold that human real-ness even as it reveals his divinity.

As we begin a journey through the Gospel of John, we can get a uniquely held glimpse of Jesus, one that is more poetic and relationally rooted than the other gospel offerings. It is this “disciple whom Jesus Loved” that can help us see Jesus as God and Man, as Poetry and Prose. We are invited to imagine and to encounter the Jesus that John knew, to better read the poetry of the Word, to more fully know the Author of Creation, even as we encounter the spit and sweat of the One who took on flesh. Flesh, that corruptible and perishable material, which in the hands of God the Creator, is capable and worthy of resurrection, of renewal, of eternity.  

How special it is then on Ash Wednesday, to begin with our gaze on art, music, and poetry that mixes the grandeur of the Creator with the baseness of the ashes and dust through which our flesh must pass. And from which we, and even Christ, have come.

The art and poetry for today's devotional touches on this mix of the poetic and the prosaic. The everyday-ness of fabric is yet beautifully folded and dyed, with shapes and colors, dark and black or vibrant with color, as it speaks to Creator and creation. And in the poem, the way an ordinary leaf can burst into flame through focused sunlight, or an everyday phone can connect us to a voice whispering love, challenges us to see and hear God beyond our doubts.

John came to know the Poetry and Prose of his friend Jesus, that Word in the Beginning he knew as an everyday man and eternal God. He saw the ultimate Artwork of Creation contained in the everyday folds of skin that would fade and perish. All life is destined to be rendered as ash through fire or dust through decay—save one. As we walk through Lent, we carry and are mindful of the potentiality of ashes and dust within us, but let us do so with the One who is the Word, whose eternal presence as Creator speaks life into dust and beauty from ashes.

Prayer:
Jesus, I praise you for being the Word at the Beginning. Thank you for speaking creation into being and life into my being everyday that I’m gifted with breath. Help me to deepen my friendship with you even as I deepen my awe and reverence of your divinity. As I encounter the ashes and dust of this world, let me hold to the hope in you that offers life and beauty.

Steven Homestead
Artist, Composer, Writer, and Curator

For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.