Three Johns

 

Our Latin students at Guerin Catholic High School explore a verse of the Bible in Latin each week, and this week the first-year students took a look at John 1:14, which reads, "And the Word became flesh and lived among us."  It is a verse that, especially when take with other verses from the Fourth Gospel, speaks to the divinity of Jesus, and we discussed that earlier in the week, but today we examined another aspect.

After the students spent some time reading the verse aloud to practice their Latin pronunciation, I told them to think back to the book of Genesis and then asked, "In whose image are we made?"  They quickly answered, "God's," and I pointed out that this was a pretty big deal.  After all, God could have created donkeys and then said, "Let us create man in the image of the donkey."  And then I suggested that what John 1:14 has to say is an even bigger deal than that.

From there we took a look at the work of another John, the English poet John Donne (1572-1631).  I pulled up on our large screen Holy Sonnet XV, and we spent a few minutes with the second half of the poem.  You can read the full sonnet at the link above, the but the lines on which we focused were these.

And as a robb'd man, which by search doth find

His stolen stuff sold, must lose or buy it again,

The Sun of glory came down, and was slain,

Us whom He had made, and Satan stole, to unbind.

'Twas much, that man was made like God before,

But, that God should be made like man, much more.

I invited the students to turn to the faith section of their notebooks and to jot down their thoughts on what it means to them that God became one of us.  Often this will lead to a sharing of ideas, but this time I told them that their thoughts would remain their own.  This was to be a time of private reflection.

After they had taken their time to ponder, I told them a story, one that came from a third person named named John.  In Season 2, Episode 10 of The West Wing, a character named Leo McGarry, played by John Spencer, encourages a colleague by telling him the following parable.

This guy's walking down the street when he falls in a hole.  The walls are so steep he can't get out.  A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, "Hey, you! Can you help me out?"  The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole, and moves on.  Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, "Father, I'm down in this hole.  Can you help me out?"  The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole, and moves on.  Then a friend walks by.  "Hey, Joe, it's me!  Can you help me out?"  And the friend jumps in the hole.  Our guy says, "Are you stupid?  Now we're both down here."  The friend says, "Yeah, but I've been down here before and I know the way out."

Before moving on with the grammatical lesson of the day, I suggested to the students that when they are overwhelmed in life, they should reach out to the One Who has been down here, with us, before.  He knows the way out.