Sunday, April 15, 2012 (1 John 1:1–2:2)

The familiarity of the great texts of the New Testament can obscure the achievements of their writers. In its first three verses, the First Epistle of John joins "the eternal life that was with the Father" with the physical presence of Jesus, who has been seen with eyes and touched with hands.

Christ's deity might have been cast into doubt rather than affirmed by these remembered encounters with his humanity. It is surely remarkable that the ultimate theophany should have taken the form of the life and death of an obscure man whose face and voice, however well loved, were also familiar to those around him, apparently neither imposing nor forbidding. While he lived and taught, any number of people must have looked on the face of God and gone on about their lives, taking no special notice of it. Yet these verses invest his earthly presence and the experience of it with as pure an awe as they do his presence at the creation.

All poetry and all fiction have as their deepest question the kind and degree of meaning that we, brilliant and limited creatures that we are, can take from the world, from what we hear, see and touch with our hands. Behind this lies the deeper if unacknowledged question of the beginning of things, how being came to be. If the event behind it all can be described exhaustively as the consequence of natural forces, then the presence of humankind and everything else is both accidental and more or less inevitable as the working out of the effects of this first event. It is, of course, speculation that such forces preexisted the cosmos we know. And my use of the word natural to describe them, as if the absence of intention or spirit in the forming of the cosmos were baseline reality, is a concession I make here only for brevity's sake. In any case, the idea of an accidental universe is pervasive and full of consequence because it makes meaning a secondary property of existence. It can have arisen only out of human desire, or human fear, or human error. This view of things reflects but cannot interpret the fact that if our strange species did not exist, the question of meaning would itself be meaningless.