Eskēnōsen (1 of 2)

The most important sentence in the New Testament for what follows in this volume is John 1:14. In Greek: kai ho logos sarx egeneto kai eskēnōsen en hēmin. In English: and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Every word in that sentence is doing work.

Sarx is not the polite word for body. It is the visceral word. Meat. The thing the butcher handles. John could have used soma, the more general word for body that Paul prefers in some contexts. He did not. He chose the word that resists every instinct to soften what is being claimed. The Logos — the eternal rational principle through which all things were made, which John has just identified as God in the first verse of his Gospel — became sarx. Flesh in its most ordinary, blood-and-tissue sense.

Egeneto is the verb doing the heaviest theological lifting. It is the same verb used in the Septuagint for the creation events of Genesis 1 — let there be light, and there was light, kai egeneto phōs. John is deliberately echoing the creation account. The Word who said egeneto in the beginning has now himself become subject to egeneto. The one who spoke all things into being has become one of us. Not pretended to be. Become.

Then the verb the chapter takes its title from: eskēnōsen. He pitched a tent. He tabernacled. The verb is built on the noun skēnē, which is the standard Septuagint word for the Tabernacle — the Tent of Meeting that Moses constructed in the wilderness, the structure in which the glory of God descended and dwelt in the midst of Israel. John is making a precise claim. The descent of the glory that occurred in the Tabernacle in Exodus 40 has now occurred again, in a different mode. The glory has taken up residence not in a tent of goat hair but in a tent of human flesh. The tabernacle is now sarx. The glory dwells in the body of a Galilean man.

Athanasius of Alexandria, writing around 318 AD, gave the Church the formulation that has guided its thinking about this event ever since. He became what we are, Athanasius wrote, so that we might become what He is. He became human so that we might be made divine. Not divine in essence — that remains the Creator's alone — but divine in participation. The descent of the Word was for the sake of humanity's ascent into communion with God, an ascent humanity could not make by its own motion and which therefore had to be initiated from the other side.

What initiated from the other side is what the second Johannine anchor names. Chapter 5 named the convergence at the asymptote: light could remain constant without coming down, and love could not. The descent of the Word is what love does when light alone would not have reached us. The flesh the Word assumed is the medium through which the love that God essentially is enters the ones He was reaching toward. Athanasius's formula carries a consequence that is sometimes left in the shadow of the first clause. He became what we are so that we might become what He is — by which Athanasius means that the divine love the Word personally is would, through the Incarnation and its consequence in the Spirit's indwelling, come to be the form of the redeemed person's own loving. The descent is for the sake of an indwelling. The indwelling will be the subject of Chapter 10.

Notice what Athanasius is doing. He is not describing a rescue operation in which God preserves divinity at a safe distance and sends down a representative. He is describing a movement in which God Himself takes on the full condition of human beings, including mortality, so that humanity can be lifted into participation with what God is. The exchange is real. The Logos really became sarx.

The Christological precision that the Church worked out over the next three centuries — at Nicaea in 325, at Constantinople in 381, at Ephesus in 431, at Chalcedon in 451 — was the precision of holding two things true at once. The one who became flesh remained fully God. The one who became flesh became fully human. Not a hybrid. Not God pretending to be human. Not human elevated to divine. Two natures, fully present, in one person, without confusion or change or division or separation. The Chalcedonian definition states it with the precision of an engineering specification: the properties of each nature are preserved and concur in one person.