Session Notes

Opening Question

John opens with not a story or laws or commandments, but with the word. According to him, Jesus is ‘word become flesh.’ He ends with ‘it has been written so you will believe.’ Many of our previous reads have attempted to explain God through intermediary objects: prophets, prophecy, parables, laws, covenants, allegories, spectacles, miracles, etc. But for John, the medium (that is to say the word itself) seems to be an integral part of the message. So, what is a word? And what changes when it becomes flesh?

Coming through the Old Testament and the Synoptic Gospels, we arrived at John with a familiar question renewed: what kind of thing is God trying to communicate, and what kind of vessel can carry it? The group quickly homed in on the Greek word underlying the English translation. Logos means not just “word” in the flat sense, but reason, logic, rationality, an accounting, a sense-making, the substance from which Platonic forms are drawn. John uses it as his opening gesture, and it immediately placed us in a different register than Matthew. The question was whether the “word becoming flesh” is allegory for some other thing, or something stranger: an allegory for our relationship to logos itself, to the deep organizing principle that makes language mean anything at all.

The distinction the conversation landed on was the one Jesus himself keeps pressing, particularly in his confrontations with the Pharisees. There is a difference between the words on the page (the law, the guidelines, the literal commandments) and the logos underneath them, the understanding that gives words their reason for existing in the first place. The company handbook was offered as an analogy: you can always find a technical loophole in any written policy while violating its spirit so obviously that everyone in the room knows it. The Pharisees attending church grudgingly and performing the letter of the requirement while not meaning it are doing exactly this. Jesus’ argument about the Sabbath circumcision works the same way: if you can cut flesh on the Sabbath, you can make a man whole on the Sabbath. The logos of the law was never really about the specific prohibition. The medium of the law had become mistaken for the message.

This opened into the question of whether actions can lie. Someone had shared Nietzsche’s essay on truth and lies before the session, and it crystallized something: if words are arbitrary signifiers with no inherent meaning beyond what we assign them, then technically everything we say is a kind of lie, and the actions we perform in order to be seen can be lies too. We pushed on whether this held as a distinction. The Pharisees going to church and hating it, the televangelist enriched by preaching what he doesn’t practice, the person praying on the street corner to be seen (a detail Jesus directly addresses): these are actions that lie. But there was also the question of earnestness, of trying and failing genuinely. The person wrestling honestly with what love means, going to church to figure it out rather than to perform it, doesn’t quite fit the same category, even if they haven’t arrived. What seemed to matter was not just whether words and actions align, but whether there is integration underneath both. The Greek word for sin, someone noted, is the same word used for an archer missing the mark (hamartia: error, the target aimed at but not hit). Sin isn’t necessarily malice; it’s the split that opens when you want one thing and do another.

This notion of integration, and the suffering of its absence, threaded through most of the conversation. Lying to yourself or others creates two tracks running in opposite directions, and that doubling is where suffering lives. This felt unexpectedly compatible with what we had been reading in the Tao and in Plotinus: the suffering of multiplicity, the peace of alignment, the idea that the good for a particular kind of being is always oriented toward coherence. Wholeness, in John’s terms, seemed to be not the destination of virtue but its precondition. The Greek for sin doesn’t just name wrongdoing; it names a missed aim, which implies there was an aim to begin with.

One participant pulled the conversation toward contemporary digital and surveillance culture: we no longer need a concept of God to feel observed from every angle. The algorithm performs something like the omniscient watcher that theology once imagined, reflecting our desires back to us, predicting our inner monologue from our eye movement. Someone pushed back gently: there is always a venue where the performance drops. There is always a capacity to be straight with ourselves, even when we’re trying not to be. The pre-verbal thing is always present, whether we want it or not. What animated deeper concern was something else: the offshoring of thought toward systems that have no access to that pre-verbal register, the flattening that occurs when thinking gets replaced with outputs. Whatever it is that precedes speech and makes it mean something (something like John’s logos-before-the-logos, the breath that hovered over the waters before any words were spoken) begins to be crowded out. We lose not the capacity but the contact.

After the session lost some of its members, the remaining conversation turned more explicitly to the flesh side of John’s equation, and the group found something fractal in it. The blood sacrifice logic of the Old Testament runs from Cain and Abel onward: the more costly the offering, the more it atones. Taken to its limit, that logic demands literally God-as-flesh. And that logic, running underneath all the harsh-dad commandments and covenants, implies that God was designing the entire architecture of sacrifice already knowing he was going to be the sacrifice himself. Abraham and Isaac is legible as a gesture toward this. The Tree of Life in the garden echoes forward into John’s claim that whoever eats of him will live forever. It is fractal in the way someone described: the same story appears in the tabernacle, the temple, the body, and the crucifixion, and they all converge at the Word becoming flesh.

We ended on a question John presses relentlessly: whether belief or action comes first. Jesus asks people to believe in him, and the group kept turning over what that would actually require, and whether genuine belief is even distinguishable from action. We landed somewhere like: belief, if it is real, begets action, not the other way around. Performing the actions in order to produce belief is the Pharisees’ error, replicated down through every hollow institution since. Someone offered a C.S. Lewis line near the close: “I believe in Christianity just like I believe that the sun has risen. Not just because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.” Whatever belief is, what it provides is not a conclusion you can rest in but a light by which everything else becomes visible. And the question that carried us out of the room was an honest one: what would it mean to truly never believe in lies? What kind of fruit would come from that?