I really love the Message paraphrase of John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish...”
There’s something about that phrase: “... Moved into the neighbourhood...” The idea of the eternal, creating, life-sustaining Word becoming flesh and blood, and just “moving in.”
There’s an awesome video about a flash mob in a food court at a suburban shopping centre. A flash mob is a drama-team or a singing-group disguised to look like everyday shoppers going about their business, who suddenly and unexpectedly burst into performance startling their peers out of their mundane chores!
This particular flash mob have powerfully trained voices – and one at a time they join in, joyously bursting into the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah – until a hundred strong choir are sounding aloud: “King of Kings and Kings and Lord of Lords for ever and ever and ever...” to an utterly amazed audience of harried and tired Christmas shoppers eating their junk food in a busy, noisy, commercial mall!
And then it’s over, the choir in their everyday clothes dissolves into the crowd and disappears, but the joy and laughter and strength of the performance permeates through the crowd!
Ordinary people in everyday clothes entering into the frenetic chaos of pre-Christmas shopping; with its harried shoppers, annoying spruikers; tired children; frazzled shop keepers; noise; junk-food and jingles! And yet what music! The Word in grace entering and touching humans hearts. It’s like the verse of that old Carol:
“Still through the cloven skies they come
With peaceful wings unfurled
And still their heavenly music floats
O'er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains
They bend on hovering wing.
And ever o'er its Babel sounds
The blessed angels sing.”
The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.
I wonder what does it look like for us to move into our neighbourhoods? What is the music of grace that we are called to play?
