Church as Chosen Lady #5 of 7:

Jesus Christ has Come in the Flesh

(Second John vs 7)

Still can’t leave Second John. At least one more post. That gets us to five—a better number than four, don’t you think? I keep thinking about those deceptive teachers making their way towards the chosen lady. If they have their way, John warns, the chosen lady will no longer be the chosen lady. When does the church become something other than the church?

For John, it happens whenever we fail to “confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” (vs 7). We might think the greater concern would be the failure to confess that Jesus is Immanuel—God with us. John’s hymnic prelude to his Gospel lifts up praise to the wonder of Christ’s divinity and humanity:

 In the beginning was the Word,

      and the Word was with God,

      and the Word was God…  (Jn 1:1-4).

That’s the opening stanza of the hymn most likely sung in those house churches—those chosen ladies, pastored by John the Elder. The third and final stanza is the one threatened by those deceptive teachers making their way toward the chosen lady. This is the stanza the deceptive teachers refused to sing:

The Word became flesh and lived among us,

      we have seen his glory,

The glory of the One and Only of the Father

      full of grace and truth.

From his fullness we have all received,

      grace on top of grace (Jn 1:14-16).

The second stanza, the one in between the first and last, is about us (Jn 1:12-13):

All who receive him,

      who believed in his name,

      he gave power to become children of God…

That’s us. We need both stanzas; the first about Christ eternal divinity, and the second, about his actual humanity. The first stanza, of itself, won’t get us there. We need, as John tells the chosen lady, that final stanza praising the wonder of how “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” As Gregory of Nazianzen, one of those early church fathers (4^th cent.) taught us: “That which is not assumed cannot be healed." Meaning, whatever part of humanity that the Eternal Word has not taken on, has not been saved, salvaged, healed.

This Christ of our flesh, is too thick and real and earthy for those deceptive teachers. They prefer a thin, wispy Jesus—a Christ that’s not so thick and real. It’s our real, flesh and bones Jesus that salvages the whole of us and makes us real.

The incarnation not only salvages the whole of us, but the whole of creation. We can never view God’s creation apart from Christ and how he became flesh and lived among us. As the hymn goes:

For dear to God is the earth Christ trod.

No place but is holy ground (Last lines of This is My Father’s World).