What does it mean for the Divine to become Human? Would the human in question then be perfect in every way? And what does it even mean to be perfect? A well-known Christmas carol claims that the baby Jesus didn’t even cry. Really? That would be a perfect baby indeed, but it wouldn’t be a human one. A far better way into the question is the scripture stating that even though Jesus was the Son of God, “he had to learn obedience by the things he suffered.” And so I’ve written this play in which I juxtapose the most cerebral and exalted of all the descriptions of the Christ in the Gospels with an account of an ordinary, uneventful day in the life of Jesus, in which he struggles with fatigue, physical clumsiness, discouragement, and pain.
I also take this opportunity to demonstrate that the opening verses of the Gospel of John are not ordinary prose, but were either intentionally or by indirect influence written in the style of ancient Hebrew poetry, which is organized in couplets where the second line echoes or expands on or sometimes contrasts with the first. We’ll see this a few more times in the Gospels, in the songs of Mary, Zechariah, and Simeon in the Gospel of Luke. In those cases, however, the poems are clearly intentional, clearly meant to be poems in the traditional style presenting material that, though factually new, is not actually all that different in tone from the usual subjects of the Psalms and other poetic Old Testament scriptures. This “poem” at the start of the Gospel of John is a different matter. It’s much more abstract and theological than anything in normal Hebrew poetry, starts off in an even tighter parallel structure than normal, with the couplet within a couplet of the first stanza, and then slowly unwinds as it goes along, becoming more and more prose-like. To me, this feels less like intentional mimicry of the ancient style and more like something that just came about because of the pressure of the subject matter. When writing about the Eternal Word, you can’t just stay in ordinary prose. The words will naturally want to organize themselves into structures that transcend the everyday, that yearn toward the Timeless. But you can’t sustain it for long. Eventually, the Word becomes Flesh and you’re back in the world of flesh and blood and the strike of the flint against metal. Back in the world of this play.