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Listen to my tale, of Jonah and the whale,

Way down in the middle of the ocean.

How did he get there? Whatever did he wear?

Way down in the middle of the ocean.

Preaching he should be at Nineveh, you see! 

He disobeyed, a very foolish notion.

But God forgave his sin, salvation entered in,

Way down in the middle of the ocean. 

This is Sunday School exposition, a way of telling the story that reduces a literary masterpiece to a cartoon comic. But there's no doubt singing it fixes the outline of the story, and the didactic soteriological lessons in the memory; evidenced by my word perfect recall from over 58 years ago! There's something about Jonah the prophet I've always liked, and something about the story of Jonah that has intrigued, provoked, and often enough interrogated my own understanding of God.

I live in and look at the world around, and wonder how I'm supposed to think about my own contemporary world where empire, power and cruelty still seem to go unrestrained, and their excesses unpunished despite the cost to human lives. Nineveh stands for any kind of overwhelming, oppressive power, whether nations, economic systems, or social structures which become abusive, unjust, self-perpetuating by holding on to the levers of power – from military superiority as threat or reality, to economic control of resources, to institutional systems that marginalise and depersonalise.

The sheer variety of interpretations on offer evidence the cleverness, ingenuity and ambiguities woven throughout the story of Jonah. A quick trawl of currently available studies, from devotional and popular expositions to more scholarly commentary, reveals quite a lot about the authors' presuppositions concerning the purpose of this very short story. Jonah – a Study of Compassion; Jonah – Running From God; Jonah – Preacher on the Run; Jonah, the Parochial Prophet; The Reluctant Evangelist; The Prodigal Prophet; Man Overboard; You Can Run but You Can't Hide; Jonah, God's Scandalous Mercy; Under the Unpredictable Plant.

Recently I've come back to Jonah for a closer look. I've preached on it, taught seminars on Jonah and Mission in a Pluralist Society, over the years read commentaries and monographs, and I'm glad to say I still haven't tamed this infuriatingly recalcitrant story, nor have I lessened its uncomfortable theological ambiguities. The scholarly literature is extensive, and every bit as varied in presupposition and conclusion as the titles of current popular treatments above indicate.  

But Jonah becomes a politically charged story when I ask where Nineveh is today, and who or what are the powers in my time that do great evil, whose behaviour is "dire", and whose power seems unbreakable by those worst affected by them.

Then I ask- so who are the Jonah figures today, the doom merchants, those morally outraged at abusive power, who want justice understood as punishment to fall on oppressive regimes and systems; who are today's Jonah figures with vividly seared memories of "dire evil"? Who are the fierce critics of Nineveh who want to see it brought down, humiliated, and replaced by something better?

Then there is the God who sends Jonah, pursues Jonah, argues with Jonah, threatens Nineveh with destruction, and then shows mercy. It's not often a prophet is disappointed in God; but Jonah is seriously disaffected, in fact he is (literally) mad as hell!

Reading the story again, I follow Jonah to Tarshish and inside the whale, eventually to Nineveh and then to his little hut on the hill to watch the eschatological firework display that finally gives Nineveh exactly and precisely the justice and judgement and punishment it deserves. But instead of judgement, mercy; instead of fireworks, repentance; instead of satisfaction at justice done, sheer frustration at the audacity of God's freedom to pardon. 

So what on earth is this short short-story meant to mean? Is it a rebuke to post-exilic exclusivism as recorded in Ezra Nehemiah? Is the story really about a reluctant preacher or a generous God, or both? Does Jonah fail, or was he set up? Does God change his mind, or did God know all along the moves that Jonah would make, and checked him towards submission like the ultimate cosmic chess master? Is Jonah really about mission in the way I used it 40 years ago? Or is that a hi-jacking of a much more complex story to provide a 'biblical' warrant for evangelism, and issue an early warning about having a too narrow understanding of what God is actually about in the world?

Alongside this annoyingly provocative and intentionally ambiguous story I sometimes read some verses of this remarkable hymn by Frederick W Faber:

There's a wideness in God's mercy,
like the wideness of the sea;
there's a kindness in his justice
which is more than liberty.

But we make God’s love too narrow
by false limits of our own,
and we magnify its strictness
with a zeal God will not own.

For the love of God is broader
than the measure of man's mind;
and the heart of the eternal
is most wonderfully kind.

At the very least, the "tale of Jonah and the whale" leads to serious thought and re-thinking about the kind of God God is. The God of the expected and the unexpected, of judgement and mercy, consistent in divine freedom and final purpose, the God described in Jonah 4.2:  

“Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity."

By the way, the text says Jonah prayed these words. This is Jonah knowing and trusting God sufficiently to have an argument, to rebuke God, to complain that God is who God is! It's one of the astonishing features of Jewish thought and faith that there can be such transparency of thought and feeling, expressed in the intimacy of anger – and the patience of God in explaining, yet again Who God is. 

“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. Yes, speak up for the poor and helpless, and see that they get justice.” Proverbs 31. 8-9.(NLT)

It's not as if this verse is out of step with the main thrust of the Bible. In the Bible 'justice' is a catch-all word that holds a variety of obligations: care for the poor, protection of the vulnerable, support for the weak, food for the hungry, hospitality for the stranger.

An entire Bible text concordance could be compiled with commands and imperatives, exhortations and incentives, stories and parables, about how to treat other people well, the importance of generosity as a lifestyle, and respect for the dignity and worth of each person whose path we cross.

So why is it that moral imperatives like those in that Proverbs text exert minimal purchase on our credit and debit cards, aren't enough to compel us to be the voice of those silenced by the powerful, and only occasionally feature at the centre and beating heart of our worship? Find a few contemporary worship songs that chime with "ensure justice for those being crushed." You might, but they are a barely audible minority report.

What would happen if a church community took these verses as their motto for 2023? We've done enough with verses about our own individual spiritual development, or renewed commitment to the disciplines of being the church community. These are often self-interested, perhaps even self-indulgent. How about a year when every agenda, from full church meetings to deacons' meetings, committees and task groups, had this verse as a specific, recurring, first item on our agendas?

First, it would force us to ask questions that dig beneath our comfort zones. Who are the people who can't speak for themselves? How can we help them find their voice? Are there times when we need to be their voice, or at least join our own voices to the chorus of the unheard to raise the volume levels? 

Second, who are those that our social systems, political policies, and our own social and political preferences and prejudices crush? 

"The poor may be defenceless against [the powerful] because they are too ignorant to counteract the obstructionist tactics of the legally savvy, too inarticulate to state their case convincingly, too poor to produce proper evidence, too lowly to command respect." (Waltke, vol 2 Commentary on Proverbs, p. 509)

These are the very people good government is there to enable, empower, and ensure that justice is available to everyone, regardless of status, wealth, power or social favour. 

Third, the imperatives are clear and uncompromising. "Speak up…ensure…speak up…see to it!" Do everything in your power to make this happen, church! What does that mean in practice? What is it the church is called to speak, to ensure, to see to, in relation to food banks, heat banks, fair and just wages, resources for adequate and humane social care, proper provisions for processing and humanely treating people seeking asylum? If the answers are not obvious, at least the questions are. And that's a start.

Fourth, in the light of this embarrassing text, what do we have to say about all of us being complicit in creating the kind of society that tolerates food banks as a growth industry? How can we better speak up for, and ensure justice for, those who now depend on food bank provisions to eat, be warm, retain some dignity? How do we "see to it" that justice and fairness can advance far enough to begin reducing the need for food banks, heat banks, and other support providers? Yes, they are hard questions, at times intransigent. But to be a follower of Jesus is already to be well down the road to loving our neighbour, questioning the status quo, and doing what is necessary for those Jesus once called, with exaggerated irony, the least of his family of brothers and sisters.

Fifth, and much more personally. I ask myself what difference it would make to my own way of living, my way of seeing the world, my responsiveness to the countless people I encounter day by day and week by week – what difference it would make if this text was printed at the top of each page in my week to view diary. A reminder that I am called to "Speak up…ensure…see to it." As a self examen at the end of a week – note down times this verse has galvanised my speech, energised my action, and so made a difference in the scales that measure out human well-being and social justice.

And thus, finally. Supposing I started my prayers by saying this text, and allowing it to question what I've been about. Use it as an intercession for those I know, or have seen in the passing – to pray for those who are indeed, without a voice, the poor, those disempowered by systems and structures, – unwanted, inconvenient, overlooked, superfluous to the requirements of a society sated in both possessions and possessiveness. To pray for justice and to speak up for it; to pray for the poor but also defend them; to pray for those seeking asylum, but also to befriend, support, be compassionate towards. That, at least.

I guess I could read those two verses from Proverbs and feel the inner slump of resignation. "I do what I can," might seem a realistic enough goal. But then I hear those imperatives of Proverbs, rephrased by Jesus and embodied repeatedly in the Gospels as his way of neighbour love and love for God in action – ""Speak up…ensure…speak up…see to it!"

Justice is what neighbour love looks like in public. Love your neighbour as yourself because you love God. Who knows, you may end up loving God even more in those very words and acts of speaking up, ensuring, and seeing to it that so long as you are in the neighbourhood, nobody is unloved.  

So Jim. Forget the complacent, "I do what I can." The text is not about shoulder-shrugging resignation. It's a yoke to be taken up with glad determination to learn and live Jesus' way. "See to it!" Do everything in your power "to ensure justice for those being crushed."

How? Well, God's grace is sufficient; God's peace guards the mind and heart; the Holy Spirit gives words to disciples under pressure; we walk every day in the love from which nothing can separate; and we serve one who came with his own manifesto of the Kingdom of God, and we buy into it with everything we are, and the living Christ walks with us on the road of the Kingdom of God:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”  (Luke 4.14-30)

 

New Year is a good time to say thank you. And don’t be too hard on the year we’ve just had. It has been difficult, unpredictable, at times infuriating, a bit scary, and a change of calendar to a new year doesn’t really solve anything. Except.

Years ago a lovely older friend remembered the family gatherings at New Year, and it was a big family. Her father used to look round the table and before giving thanks for the food would say. “Aye, isn’t it a mercy we’re all spared to be here?”

So here we are on the first day of 2023, and perhaps for all our complaints during and about the past year, our first words should be a thank you that we are still here, and ready to go again on the next part of our journey. Thankful too for all our friends out there who enrich our lives, touch us with grace, make us laugh, and help us live and love and interpret and understand something of ourselves, our world, and what matters most.

My current screen saver is this photo I took up on Brimmond Hill, with the sun rising over the horizon just ahead of me on the path. In 2023 there will be new paths to climb and follow, which is where hope points us. Every day, we walk towards the future that comes to us from the God who is always ahead of us. And as we walk towards whatever comes next, we’ll do so with our friends around us, and in the good company of God. And maybe find time to say, “Isn’t it a mercy we’re all spared to be here.”

Thought for the Day – Towards a New Year.

Monday

Luke 2.19 “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”

The day after Christmas isn’t an anti-climax. Christmas isn’t past and finished. The gift of Christ is God’s self-giving love, coming amongst us, to be with us, always, as Immanuel. Treasure that up in your heart, and ponder, and be glad and grateful. “Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift.”

Tuesday

Luke 2.20 “The shepherds returned to their fields, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.”

Like the shepherds, back to normal where nothing much has changed. Except we have changed. The world is different because of the coming of Jesus. This is a world where the feet of God walked as human feet. Shepherds who were of no social standing, stood in a floodlit field at an angel rock concert, and then stood first at the manger. Theirs were among the first eyes to see Jesus. No wonder they went away singing.

Wednesday

John 1.14 “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Maybe we won’t sing Christmas carols again for a while – though I’ve often thought we should sing one occasionally near Easter. “"Hail the Heav'n-born Prince of Peace! Hail the Sun of Righteousness! Light and Life to all he brings, ris'n with Healing in his Wings." See. Christmas and Easter converge. We have seen his glory, full of grace and truth – in the manger, on the cross, and in that early morning sunlit garden.

Thursday

Matthew 1.23 “You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

Names matter. This child’s name will describe who he is and what his life is about. It was a common and popular boys’ name. The humility of God is shown in his coming as the child of a poor family, born in an obscure village, hunted as a refugee – and yet, he was the eternal Word made flesh, Jesus who saves us from our sins. “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds in a believer’s ear; it soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds and drives away his fear.” The same writer wrote, “Amazing Grace”!

Friday

Matthew 2.11-12 “Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, and of incense and of myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.”

Like the shepherds, the three travellers go back where they came from, and to the lives they knew. They had worshipped and handed over precious gifts, and deep down they knew the world had pivoted. Our world will always have its Herods, so drunk on power they don’t care about who suffers. But power is not God, and not God’s way. Love is God’s way. Gold speaks of God’s precious gift of Christ; incense is the gift of our worship; myrrh is the sign of sacrifice. Deep down, because of the coming of Jesus, we too know the world has pivoted, Immanuel, God with us.

Saturday

Isaiah 9. “And his name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

The loving wisdom of God the Counsellor; the redemptive purpose and power of the Mighty God; the patient persistent love of God the Father; the reconciling grace and costly love of the Prince of Peace – these are the promises which all find their YES in Jesus. “No matter how many promises God has made, they are all Yes in Christ.” These four names would be a good way of structuring our prayers – for guidance in decisions, grace and strength, comfort and assurance, and peace for us and others.

Sunday

2 Corinthians 8.9 “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.”

This is Paul arguing with the Corinthians to get a move on and give generously to the fund to help those who were starving from famine around Jerusalem. He goes to the very heart of our faith. We have been so enriched and blessed by Jesus’ self-sacrifice; so, in turn we are called to live into and out of that grace, that generous, joyful and life changing Gift of the heart of God. “He who did not spare his own Son, will he not freely, with him, give you everything else you need?” Of course He will!

Smudge says: I have no idea what Karl Barth's Critically realistic dialectical theology is all about. 

The birth of Jesus starts the story of the New Testament. I've always felt that Christmas is a good time to reflect on the way the Old Testament starts the story of all things. Before there was a world to redeem a world was made.

Long before the birth of Jesus, God made flesh, human beings were formed and wrought by the creative impetus of a Love incapable of self-absorption. That seems to be something of what John's Gospel is saying in chapter 1.

And out of that Eternal Love came all that is made, including human beings, with all the risk and cost that would entail. And God still did it.

Whatever else we make of the omniscience of God, that strangely technical word refers to that universe of deep and eternal knowing that we call the Love of God.

Three Fibonacci Poems on Creation and Incarnation.*

Creation

Let
there
be light!
Creation,
from first to last, an
imperative fiat of love,
as Benign Being invites a universe to be.

Rest

God's
peace!
Sabbath
observance.
God's recreation.
Well done good and faithful God.
Now our harder task. Curators of God's masterpiece.

Incarnation

First
word
becomes
final word.
What else could God do,
but wrap words in flesh, be born as
God whose love exhausts whole lexicons of spelled out words?

(c) Jim Gordon

Fibonacci poems follow the mathematical fibonacci sequence, the syllables counted as follows.

• 1 syllable for first line
• 1 syllable for second line
• 2 syllables for third
• 3 syllables for fourth
• 5 syllables for fifth
• 8 syllables for sixth
• 13 syllables for seventh

You can find out more about it all over here – https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/fibonacci-poetry-a-new-poetic-form

I know. It's nearly Christmas and by now we should be immersed in the surround-sound of carols, soaked in images of stars and mangers, keeping company with shepherds and angels, and carried along by the story we know by heart, and most times want to live in, and live into.

The Nativity is the prelude to the Passion. At least the Scottish theologian James Denney thought so: "Not Bethlehem, but Calvary, is the focus of revelation." To be sure, an over-sentimentalised Christmas story that is uncomfortable with the dark shadows of Herod, Empire, swords and the murder of children is hardly good news for a broken world overshadowed by darkness.

When Mary was told "You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins", that was a statement of divine intent, a recognition of darkness and evil, oppression and cruelty, greed and lust, and the whole Gordian knot of the sin that entangles, invades and occupies God's creation like Japanese knotweed in the Garden of Eden, and in our contemporary life in the world. 

Ironically, a Nativity story without sin erases the reason the coming of Jesus is good news in the first place. Matthew tells of the slaughter of the innocents, the refugee status of the holy family, and the weeping and mourning of mothers every bit as loud and penetrating as the earlier songs of the angels. And if we are not careful, we may well be telling a story of sanitised sentiment, in denial of the dreadful consequences of sin for all those caught up in the misery and suffering of human evil, individual and institutional, personal and corporate, past and present. In words first aimed at those flirting with or embracing such a theology, Richard Niebuhr once warned of the dangers of distorted good news:   

'A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.'  

Oh, I know. None of us mean to mess about with the story that defines our identity as Christians. We are those who take with utmost seriousness and ridiculously hopeful joy, that promise than in Jesus God comes amongst us, Emmanuel, God with us, Saviour from sin, Light of Life shining in the darkness. 

So let joy be unconfined. The good news is not that sin doesn't exist, or should be airbrushed out of the realities of our lives. The good news is that sin isn't the final reality. Ultimately, sin can't win. God has seen to that. And what kind of God? That is what takes us from Bethlehem to Calvary, and notwithstanding Denney's words above, the Christian story is of the God revealed at Bethlehem, and on Calvary, and early in the morning in a garden. 

So this Christmas, I for one go back to a favourite hymn, a poem that has shaped my thoughts and prayers and theologising for over 40 years. The Good News is that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting our sins against us", but bearing their full consequence, absorbing their potential for death, and holding within the eternal purposes of Divine Love all that is created and destined for glory when God will be all in all.  

Morning glory, starlit sky,
Leaves in springtime, swallows’ flight,
Autumn gales, tremendous seas,
Sounds and scents of summer night;

Soaring music, tow’ring words,
Art’s perfection, scholar’s truth,
Joy supreme of human love,
Memory’s treasure, grace of youth;

Open, Lord, are these, Thy gifts,
Gifts of love to mind and sense;
Hidden is love’s agony,
Love’s endeavour, love’s expense.

Love that gives gives ever more,
Gives with zeal, with eager hands,
Spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
Ventures all, its all expends.

Drained is love in making full;
Bound in setting others free;
Poor in making many rich;
Weak in giving power to be.

Therefore He Who Thee reveals
Hangs, O Father, on that Tree
Helpless; and the nails and thorns
Tell of what Thy love must be.

Thou are God; no monarch Thou
Thron’d in easy state to reign;
Thou art God, Whose arms of love
Aching, spent, the world sustain.

For the I don't know how many times, I took this book down this morning. I've had it since it was published in 1981. It's my first port of call when I'm looking for some good warm Arminian correctives to the hard to argue with theology of the Reformed tradition! More seriously, this is a book I've read through more than once and consulted time without number.

It's by no means the most complete Wesley anthology, but it has several outstanding features. The 5 page Preface is written by Albert C Outler, who was an outstanding Wesleyan scholar and one of the driving forces behind the Bicentennial Edition of The Works of John Wesley. This is a succinct apologia for Wesleyan theology.

The Introduction by Frank Whaling is a sixty page essay covering biography, the rise of Methodism as a movement, the hymns, the sermons, the letters, and some of the theological controversies. It is a succinct summary that does what it says; introduces the reader the the people who wrote the texts contained in the anthology. More than that, it is a superb account of the spirituality and the lived experience of Wesleyan Christianity with its emphases on a free gospel, a universal atonement, the call to Christian perfection, and the experiential chain of conversion, justification, sanctification and assurance as a lived process of salvation enabled by grace and imparted by the Holy Spirit.

The chosen texts are arranged in three sections. Section I includes several extracts from key documents of Methodism, letters of spiritual counsel, John's translations of some German hymns and the Wesleyan Covenant Service. Section II has over 100 pages of representative hymns of Charles Wesley; these are well chosen and touch on the major themes of Charles hymn output. Section III contains the main texts relating to Christian Perfection, the most controversial of John Wesley's doctrines, and along with the brothers' insistence that Christ died for all, the focal points of the fiercest arguments between the Wesleys and Whitefield, Toplady and various other Reformed protagonists.

My copy has three splits on the spine, caused by frequent use. This is a good thing! What's more, there are pencil notes on most of the pages, and some of them enhanced by frequent underlinings, marginal notes, and cross references.

Opening somewhere near the middle I found these verses, their theological optimism one of the reasons my own spirituality has strongly coloured strands of Wesley woven through:

Thou lov'st whate'er thy hands have made;

     Thy goodness we rehearse,

In shining characters displayed

     Throughout our universe.

 

Mercy, with love, and endless grace

     O'er all thy works doth reign;

But mostly thou delight'st to bless

     Thy favourite creature – man. 

I mentioned A C Outler above. Here's a sentence from his Preface:

"Wesleyan spirituality carries within it an implicit theory of social revolution that is non-violent and conservative, a faith in the human future based on an unfaltering optimism of grace."

And I guess when push comes to shove, that's where I hang my theological bunnet too!

Yesterday was a day of several highlights: Nativity play and service at Montrose, the best World Cup final for a long time, an evening Carol Service in our home church in Crown Terrace. In both places good music, traditional and new carols, obvious and careful preparation, candles and atmosphere, Scripture and prayer. All of that, and all good.

But it was one of the readings of scripture at the evening carol service that opened me up to the recurring miracle that we celebrate by doing all that we do on these days leading to Christmas.

I've spent a lifetime fascinated by John's first chapter, especially chapter 1.1-14. I've studied it, exegeted it, read the theologians who went diving into it, learned it by heart (in the RSV version), designed a tapestry around one of its verses, and have come to think of this text as the distilled truth of a mystery beyond all our capacities, except perhaps worship in humility and wonder.

I've found faith and hope and love in phrases like:

"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not extinguished it.

"In Him was life and the life was the light of all people."

"The Word became flesh and dwelt among us…full of grace and truth."

The passage is obviously deeply familiar to me. But last night I heard it read by an Iranian friend I've come to know in recent months. He read it in his own language of Farsi, with the English text on the screen for us to follow. The coincidence in my mind of a text I know thoroughly, read in a language entirely foreign to me, but by someone who is my brother and not 'other', in the context of worship and our shared love for Jesus, whose birth we were celebrating – that was a moment of profound realisation of what it is that joins us in our humanity.

"In him was life, and the life was the light of all people." My Iranian friend and our community, we share faith in the same Light, the same love of life, the same faith in the Light of Life. Same words in different languages, same Word that transcends all difference and draws us together in a light that shines in the darkness, and cannot be extinguished – not by hate  and not by complacency, not by difference and not by indifference.

The lead up to Christmas isn't joy for everyone. Not everyone is, or wants to be, included in the often forced jollity. Not everyone is prepared to be implicated in the conspiracy of festive positivity, which easily becomes a denial of the uncomfortable realities of a world in which exclusion, indifference and hostility to 'the other' is an encroaching darkness. But.

"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not understood it,

and

"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot extinguish it."

There are two possible translations and I don't doubt John knew what he was doing when he chose his words. An older translation tries hard to reproduce John's deliberate double meaning: "The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not." Darkness can neither understand nor overcome the persistence of light. What God is about in Jesus is beyond human comprehension and defies human conquest. 

Last night, listening to the Prologue to the Gospel of John, originally written in Greek, first translated into English six centuries ago, read in Farsi, by a friend who in his life experience has found the Light of Life who shines in the darkness, and who goes on believing that the darkness shall not overcome – that was a moment when translation moved from semantic equivalence to human embodiment and personal faith experience. 

At that moment, "The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us….from the fullness of his grace have we all received one blessing after another."