“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life, the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us, that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” (1 John 1:1-3 RSV)

Here Follows an Exegesis (an attempt open up and bring out something of the meaning) of the above passage followed by an application or two.

Many years ago I remember sitting in Greek Class under Ms. Knapp and all on my own without her help, or anyone else’s help, for the first time I translated a portion of the New Testament out of the first century C E (Common Era) Greek into English. The above lines from 1 John were the verses I translated. As the words of the verses took shape and began to cohere, like the pieces of a puzzle coming together sufficient to begin to make out the picture, it was as if I had never read them before. Awe and wonder came over me. Here follows my thoughts on this passage penned here from the Udon Thani Landmark Plaza coffee shop Easter morning April 5, 2015 starting about 7:30 AM. The little fellowship I attend here decided to cancel the sermon and in its place hold a free McDonalds breakfast fellowship. My absence is my silent protest. Easter morning of all mornings the Gospel should be preached. Not preaching the Gospel on Easter morning is like a bride not showing up for the wedding. I will preach in a couple weeks the Lord willing and my sermon looks to be from this passage.

The thoughts that follow fall into two pieces. The first (Part One) is a simple attempt to open up the core meaning of the verses. The second (Part Two) looks at the text through a particular problem that confronted the believers to whom this epistle of 1^st John was written. This piece contains an application to the dominant religion here in S. E. Asia with reflections on American culture.

Part One

These opening words (1 John 1:1-3 quoted at the lead of this article) contain the foundation for everything else that is written in the five chapters that follow. Here I will make a few comments on the core meaning in these three opening verses then in Part Two I will shift my attention on the significance of the surprising physicality and ‘sensuality’ of the phrase “that which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled” (KJV).

The message in these opening verses, while poetic and profound, remain simple enough to grasp. Something hidden with God from the beginning was manifested to John and his fellow disciples and then they, doing what they were suppose to do, proclaimed it to the rest of us. When we receive this revelation we have fellowship with them and with God the Father and the Son. This is the ABC structure of the verses.

Manifested Over Against Hidden

The center piece of our passage tells us that something hidden in God was manifested. Something cloistered and hidden in God from the beginning made a debut. This is the structure of the text. “Hidden in God” is the flip side of manifestation and as such, while not stated explicitly, is certainly inferred. In order to get the full thrust of this word manifested it is helpful to think about the hiding that persisted prior to this manifestation and the effect of this.

Human beings only know what they experience. Reflecting on experience we distill wisdom and are able to speak about the future. The chief lesson life teaches us is that life, as we know it, is pinched by injustice, evil, greed, disease and death. There are a host of external and internal forces that humans are overcome by. In the USA we like to say only two things are sure – death and taxes. Life is not free to fulfil itself but in the grip of forces that obstruct life. Any other assessment is naïve. To believe in God or the gods as in former times does not necessarily help one’s outlook.

Where women and men have believed in a god or gods they simply imputed on their gods human attitudes. If life was severe God was severe, if they prospered they were favored by God or their gods. And most assuredly if and when humans failed the right formed in their conscience they believed God was out to get them and punish them. Humans have always created God after their own image. After the psychological, social and emotional ferments that inhabit their being humans sculpt the face of God. Beyond the changing canvass of the human mind beset with anxieties, guilts, fears, failures and morbid common sense experience God inhabits a different reality true to God’s own being. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts neither are your ways my ways says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-10).

What was hidden in God and with God that no one was able to penetrate or grasp? Submerged in the human experience of this world we cannot see God nor penetrate the mind of God. What we see, touch, feel and experience is the boundary of our knowledge. We cannot see past our experience. But John’s word to us is that beyond this boundary of our experience and in contradiction to our experience, Zoe Aeon existed hidden in God from the beginning and was manifested here on earth through the “Son.”

The Manifestation of Zoe Aeon

The thing that was hidden was manifested and John is happy to tell us what it is – Zoe Aeon. The manifestation of eternal life in and through the Son is the big deal in this passage and the heart of all John and the other Apostles have to tell us. Everything else is superfluous in comparison. The curtain was pulled back and something that was there from the very beginning in the mind and will of God was manifested – Life with a capital L. Here follows a couple ways to get a handle on Zoe Aeon so as to grasp what it is.

Early on the disciples who threw in with Jesus began to recognize this thing John calls Zoe Aeon. Bringing Zoe Aeon to people was Jesus mission from the get go. At the very start of Jesus’ ministry returning from 40 days of fasting in the wilderness he went home to Nazareth and on the Sabbath entered the synagogue and when it came time to read the designated Scripture for that Sabbath day he stood up and read from the book Isaiah chapter 61 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and the recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable day of the Lord”. When he finished he sat down and commenced to speak saying this day this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing”. From the beginning Jesus was about life, about opening up life where it had closed.

When John the Baptist sent his disciples to see Jesus and ask him if he was the Christ-messiah that was to come Jesus was not quick to answer, rather he invited them to hang around and observe after which he said “go and tell John what you see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear and the dead are raised up and the poor have good news preached to them. Blessed is he who takes no offense of me” Matthew 11:4-6 RSV.

Jesus in his ministry was about life, restoring it to the people who had lost it. Everywhere he went he removed anything and everything that obstructed life. He forgave them, healed them, restored their sight, and gave them hope where no hope existed. No doubt when John wrote that Zoe Aeon was manifested in Jesus Christ he also recalled Jesus’ earthly ministry. Even so Jesus life and ministry trekking around Galilee and Judea is not the main or primary antecedent of these words Zoe Aeon.

Indeed in Christ’s ministry life was being liberated wherever he went. That is the picture we get from the Evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John”. But the problem was that this ministry of liberation smashed up against the evil political powers and religious anxieties of the time exciting their furry. Reaching the threshold of tolerance, excited by bigotry and anxiety in one quick swift movement the charismatic Nazarene was branded a religious blasphemer and a political seditionist and brought before Pilot, who, to please the mob released him to the soldiers to be hung on a gibbet outside of Jerusalem on a hill. Life made an auspicious beginning in Jesus’ ministry but the darkness in men’s souls and the evil that easily embraces death as a solution to protect the lie that they had become, regained the upper hand as it always does. Hanging on the cross that black Friday of Passover the Zoe Aeon party was suddenly over. By early Saturday morning all the disciples ran off to Galilee to save their own necks. Zoe Aeon, they were sure, had disappeared for good. Disenchanted they were sure of one thing only, evil men of power ruled, death reigned and righteous men and women who touch people’s lives with healing, compassion and truth end up where they always do. Everything I have written thus far in this meditation comes to this climax. Zoe Aeon as it came to light in Jesus’ earthly ministry was partial, intermittent, veiled and ultimately showed itself to be fragile. Only on the other side of passover and the crucifixion did Zoe Aeon decisively and dramatically emerge. The full power and meaning of Zoe Aeon embodied in Jesus Christ was seen and comprehended only in the immediate wake of Easter by the disciples in time and place. Standing at the intersection of two colliding powers capsulated in the contrast between Friday afternoon and evening at passover and Sunday morning (Easter)  the message of the triumph of Zoe Aeon Zoe would be propelled out of the backwaters of Galilee and Judea into a cosmic playing field (no wonder when Peter tried to thwart Jesus’ decision to go to Jerusalem and Passover Jesus rebuked him saying “get thee behind me Satan”).

Easter reversed the disciple’s precipice fall into nihilism when it pulled up the stakes of their ideas about Jesus’ mission and reset them far beyond anything they had imagined before. By the day of Pentecost, fifty days after Passover, they had sufficiently comprehended what had happened and what had been manifested to commence preaching the Christian Gospel. And perhaps John, better than his Apostle colleagues, and with greater simplicity than any of the others, was able to convey what went down. The Jesus mission that came to light  in the wake of Easter, that is to state the horizon of Zoe Aeon that came to light in his travels in Judea and Galilee were exceeded by what happened Easter morning. All the liberating words and acts that had occurred in his thee and half year ministry were a preparation for and prologue to the main event when Zoe Aeon would come into its own in the risen Christ. Embodied in Jesus Christ is the power of God for life eternal and this power ultimately can never be subdued by the powers of darkness that seem so strong in this world.

Stated in the vernacular the following summarizes the meaning embedded in John’s language. Everything that is lame, that turns life away from the fulness that it was created to fulfill, everything that is false, fickle and untrue, everything that perverts and misuses the gift and power of life, everything that turns life against the blessing, power and purpose for which was created, everything that harms, hurts and destroys life is overcome on the cross and goes down into the grave and on Easter morning Zoe Aeon emerges in Jesus Christ full and free and is proclaimed to all as a gift in him. “This is the record God has given to us eternal life and this is in his Son he that has the Son has life.” (1 John 5:12, 4:9&10, 2:1&2). We do not have Zoe Aeon in ourselves as a possession it is in Jesus Christ united to him by faith we await its bestowal.

 What is An Apostle?

The Apostles like John were not especially wise, especially spiritual or moral. Their credentials for ministry turn on one little detail. They saw something up close and personal. They happened to be on the scene of the accident and just because of this they were summoned to testify to what they saw. When you sweep all the extra religious clutter that accumulates over time within Christian cultures this is what we are left with. Of course John and the other Apostles didn’t just happened to stumble on the scene they were called to the scene, chosen and groomed to see this manifestation of Zoe Aeon that emerged through the suffering and death of one come from God. Once the confusing dust of  the Passover crucifixion settled and the Easter encounters passed they began to grasp more fully the universal–human significance of what they had experienced, what had been manifested to them. Starting fifty days after Passover their new job commenced – preach the “word of life”. Through the suffering and death of the “Son”, through One life had been wrenched free from all that obstructs it and turns against it. Measured by their proclamation hope is no more a hope so hope. Hope waits for the coming of what has been manifested.  [see endnote*]

What is Fellowship?

In the final verse of our text John writes of a new fellowship that forms in the wake of the proclamation of the Apostles. And what is this fellowship other than the celebration of life, life wrenched free from the clutch of sin, evil, death and all that obstructs and negates it through the One who came from God. Many people celebrate life in different ways and find fellowship in doing so. The fellowship of which John writes certainly shares something in common with any group who exalts what truly sets the blessing of life free for all peoples. Even so it has a distinctive ring. It celebrates life in its fullness as a gift already given to us in and through the way God chose to give it. As such our celebration of life has a Christo – centric ring to it. We glory not only in the great blessing of life but in the God and Lord over us all who gave this gift of life reclaiming it for us in this surprising and costly way. This praise and jubilation for life and the life giver unfortunately transits from fellowship to religion whenever the teaching persists but the fellowship and jubilation cease.

Part Two

Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up

In this Part Two I pay attention to the surprising physicality and ‘sensuality’ of the phrase “that which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled” (KJV). When I first translated the passage I was struck by the physicality of the Apostle’s encounter later I began to understand something about the purpose and importance of this physical emphasis and ‘sensual’ language. Remembering this can help us find the distinctive significance in our Christian faith.

For a long time scholars have suggested that pre Gnostic ideas had begun to infect the Christians this letter was written to. The early verses of chapter 4 are the give away. In these verses John explicitly warns against a new heresy making its way into the church that claims Jesus “did not come in the flesh”. Gnosticism would claim that Jesus was spiritual indeed but not physical at least by the time he achieved divinity. Gnosticism(s) generally taught that through esoteric (secret) gnosis i.e. knowledge or enlightenment one rises to the divine (Spirit) and this would have to include Jesus as well. He does not come from the father but achieves enlightenment and ascends to God and this ascension to or toward divinity is a movement away from physicality and materiality toward pure spiritual being. The teaching that the Christ as the Son was the eternal life, the word of life who was with the father, from the beginning who the Apostles saw with their eyes, looked upon and their hands handled is not merely poetic but a radical rebut to this kind of belief and a assertion of the union of the spiritual and material in Jesus Christ over against the splitting of these two.

The Eternal life written of here, also called the word of life, is not spiritual transcendence from the physical – material realm, it is corporeal. In Jesus Christ, his person, body and being, Zoe Aeon is manifested. He embodies this life. This is life wrenched free from the grip of everything that is not life, that is against life and these things are not psychosomatic per se, i.e. materiality and desire. This is a full-bodied life not the lame pseudo version pawned off as life sold to us in this world where the model of life has increasingly become measured by material and sensual fulfillment. Nor is this life a flight from the material existence via asceticism (denial of bodily and material desire and comforts) to spiritual being (the historical context these words addressed). It is embodied life rather than bodiless life, where every good and healthy desire, socially and physically remains intact but ceases to become the be all and end all. Rather it is asked to take second place, service to God and others taking preeminence.

John’s words here recall Jesus’ encounter with Thomas after the resurrection. Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28 RSV). Whatever else that is true about this manifestation of Zoe Aeon one thing is clear – it comes to us embodied. Spiritual indeed it is because it comes from God who is Spirit (Gospel of John 4) and leads to worship of God. But this spirituality is not antithetical to materiality and all that is right and good in material existence and embodied human desires.

Application to Southeast Asia and the Euro and American West

Here in Southeast Asia these words that describe physicality and materiality of Jesus Christ and the eternal life that he is the bearer of finds a relevance partly different from that in the West. Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Laos and Cambodia are 98 % Buddhist and almost, if not all Asian countries possess a significant presence of Buddhism. Here follows a description of the Buddhist view of reality for the purpose of rethinking what is invested in John’s Zoe Aeon and also for rethinking the crisis in the modern world and both contemporary Christianity’s and Buddhism’s religious and spiritual antidotes to this crisis. My Buddhist description is not perfect but it is not far off base.

In Buddhism one achieves enlightenment and learns self-denial by recognizing that all bodily material desire is fickle. Through spiritual enlightenment and asceticism (denial of desire, including body desires) one achieves through practice a level of karma toward the coveted state of nirvana (spiritual peace and serenity). In proportion to a person’s achievement or lack of achievement of positive spiritual energy their level of karma is raised or lowered and this karma energy is not lost but reborn in another life form after death. At death the karma that one has generated in their life and choices/acts is released from its body home and reborn in another to potentially ascend up the ladder toward pure spiritual subsistence -nirvana. The higher one ascends the more one is emancipated, not only from desire, but also from the mirage of selfhood as a discrete distinct unique identity. Depending on how Buddhism is interpreted the apex of this development of Karma finally involves the emancipation from form i.e. materiality

In this view of reality there is of course no body-self future, no resurrection of the body, no discrete self – ego in a new heavens and a new earth, no “the meek shall inherit the earth,” no “thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth” no “creation groaning in travail waiting for the glorious liberty of the children of God,” no “you shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit, build houses and in habit them.” Here life is conceived as a wheel, a never ending cycle of birth, decay and death and rebirth, during which the potential exists to raise the level of positive spiritual energy (karma) to a higher and higher level to be passed on and reborn into a new form to carry forward this quest. The level of spiritual energy is raised through turning away from desire fulfillment to nobler pursuits. And the potential of this elevation can reach the highest of ten levels that attained by the Buddha. Transcending desire via enlightenment and meditation and asceticism is the key to raising one’s spiritual karma. Desires lodged in the body subsistence – are the cause of suffering. Desire includes what in Christian Scripture is called the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye and the pride of life. These are body desires, material desires and the desires that connect to the human spirit like pride and preeminence.

Buddhism and much of eastern religion are on the cusp of a crisis. The pursuit of happiness dogma enshrined in the Declaration of the Independence has arrived in the east with a vengeance and Buddhism is hard put to tame it. Even so Buddhism just because of this meeting of East and West is modernizing. It always knew something about the synergy between human suffering and desire and now when desire and the possibilities to realize it are really heating up in many places in the East, Buddhism is fine tuning its message to find a point of contact. Its meditation and praxis empowers a kind of transcendence of desire and ameliorates the downside of desire gone bad – psychological suffering. Buddhism was always confident that desire and the fulfillment of desire were a fickle facade and the answer was ascetic and spiritual transcendence modeled by the life of monks and nuns who eat one meal a day, earn and own nothing, desire nothing thereby endeavoring to transcend the mundane world by their meditation and by practicing their enlightenment teaching. Most assuredly Buddhism will not stem or stop the new materialistic party that the east from Shanghai to Mumbai, from Singapore to Bangkok are celebrating with great fervor and enthusiasm, but it will minister to its casualties and provide a reprieve to its exhausted adherents. Because Buddhism fundamentally impugns the reality and validity of desire and sets out to transcend material and bodily desire, it can only provide a Band-Aid. The whole world now is drinking deep of Jefferson’s libation – the pursuit of happiness doctrine. Ironically Buddhism’s ontological presuppositions (its understanding of the structure of reality) may turn out to be practically justified. Every order that supports human existence is now trembling, ready to come apart at the seams under the stress of a world that wants more – for the door of desire once opened can never be closed and can never be fulfilled. Ironically the world is becoming fuller and hungrier than it ever has heretofore. Indeed we do desperately need restraint of desire – all desires. My disagreement with the Buddhist antidote to desire and materialism is not in its call for restraint but the nihilism that lies at the root of their message (the claim that there is nothing good or meaningful or purposeful, human or divinely ordained in desire and the enhancement of the material base of life. Add to this problem the fact that the ethic of restraint, while justified and empowered by a negative assessment of desire, is pinned to and worked out by living under rules and disciplines.

It is easy to see your neighbor’s flaws far more difficult to see and face one’s own. Madonna sang a lyric in one of her songs something to the effect “if it’s so good why is it so bad”. Here I ask rhetorically, if materiality and desire satisfied are really good and not bad, really part and parcel of life, an assessment that the West has assumed is fact, why is the world in such a heap of trouble. I submit Buddhism is not far from the truth at least when it focuses its attention on desire and restraint. Perhaps it is closer than the West who has baptized desire and materiality as a simple good. But at the end of the day the East in its religious presuppositions and the West in it religious amnesia are both powerless to proffer a real antidote to the world where materialism and desire are heating up to a crisis point psychologically, socially and physically (i.e. ecologically – nature).

In my book, “Suffering the Tension Between the Seen and the Unseen,” I opened the antidote that is within the reach of the West, if the church that is Christian can put it back into play. The Christian way does not deny the goodness of food, sex, pleasure, material enhancement or anything wholesome in the sensual – physical, social realm of this world. Its call to self – denial is not a turn against wholesome bodily material existence. In order to grasp the root of the Christian ethic of restraint one must understand the nature of faith and hope and this leads us back to our text.

The eternal life that was manifested to the Apostles and proclaimed to us through them reveals the advent of something better than this life. When Zoe Aeon that has been manifested, present in Christ and coming, is really grasped the magnitude of the life as we have it here and now shrinks. Once this life as we know it ceases to become the be all and end all, ceases to charm us as it once did, because something bigger and better comes into view, restraint is born. It is sort of like Jacob’s love for Lea once he struck a new deal with Uncle Laban for seven more years of service to acquire Rachael. No doubt during those seven years he took care of Lea, he denied her or himself nothing right and proper, but his love for her was under restraint because his deepest affection and desire belonged to and waited for Rachael. Now if Jacob had never met Rachael no doubt Lea would have become the be all and end all.

Something hidden and coming has been manifested and its beauty and magnitude is so much greater than anything we have here and now that the Lea of this world cannot tempt us as it once could, tempt us to try and satisfy our bodies and souls feasting on her affections. We continue to enjoy her and also suffer her fickle love but now we cannot be drowned by her pleasures or disappointments. Restraint as such is born not from a law of restraint nor from a doctrine that desire is a bad trick of physical nature to be amputated from one’s being through ascetic heroism. Rather under the attraction of a greater reality already seen by the Apostles and proclaimed to us, desire for the good in this time, in this world as we know and experience it now, is downsized.

Here is the riddle of the Judeo –Christian view of life. Unless we have discovered the higher good namely love for God and first God’s love for us and commence to put these first in our hearts and in our service then the good in this world will be like the manna which, when the Israelite slaves tried to hoard it in route to Canaan, turned and spoiled.

This understanding does not mean that we need not live by an ethic and discipline of restraint rather it means that this ethic and discipline becomes empowered by Gospel rather than law. Both Buddhism and Christianity from their script know that submersion into desire and materialism can destroy, but how to awaken restraint in an age of excess, greed, materialism and bold and bald pleasure seeking seems to be out of reach? The Christianity in the West has almost failed to identify the problem or the cure. When the good things are put in the room of the best things then it is that good becomes evil. Take the good things out of the best room and the good stays good. This saying is ethical and a little scoop of precious wisdom but insufficient unless we discern that it is the Gospel that frees our hearts and minds for the best things us by revealing them and alluring our affections and interest. Without the Gospel witness religious laws of restraint multiply and then tether and fray and then we are back where we were and soon recommence to  adopt formal rules and discipline as if these were the essence of religion.