Walk This Way

Psalm 80 • Psalm 77, [79]
Judges 6: 25-40 • Acts 2: 37-47 • John 1: 1-18

When David Jolliffe wrote that my assignment included the opening verses of the gospel of John, I wrote back, “Thanks a lot.” I do not do emojis, but if there were one for sarcasm, I would have used it. By my lights there are no passages in scripture that combine such beauty, mystery, and spiritual and intellectual provocation. For me, no others have so continued to unfold into new meanings and challenges as the years and life experiences have accumulated. I would feel more foolish than usual reaching for some way to capture the essence of the message here.

Instead I’ll mention one of the earliest insights I found in it, quite a while back. I figure you all know that “the word” in Greek is logos, which also means “order” or something like “the fundamental structure under all things.” In teaching American Indian history I’ve studied (superficially) more than a few Native religions. They can be very different from ours (“religion” often doesn’t really apply), but all that I know of rest on the idea that there is an order underlying all life, everything that is, and, in all the ones I can think of now, the hope is to become one with that order, to align oneself with it as fully as possible. 

It struck me that perhaps we are all aware of the same thing but that, being human, we are all seeing it obliquely, imperfectly. What sets us apart as Christians is our belief that in an act of immeasurable love (and, I really wonder, exasperation?), God came in human form, a sort of divine visual aid, to show us how becoming one with that order, the logos, translates into living our lives, day to day, act by act.

There’s a classic vaudeville routine with a man ringing the bell of a mansion and telling the answering butler that he is there to see the master of the house. “Walk this way,” the butler says, and the man follows, mimicking of course exactly the butler’s walk. The cliché of “following Jesus” quickly took on a new, more vivid and slightly comic meaning. The hope is to follow, to walk that way, and to be grateful for the Christian gift of seeing more clearly the path toward what I’ve come to believe is a universal human impulse and, however hidden, a universal understanding of the word, logos.

Written by Elliott West

Elliott teaches history at the University of Arkansas. He has been a member of St. Paul’s for more than twenty-five years.