A Good-Enough Myth

First Sunday after Christmas, Year B
Scripture: John 1:1-15
Contemporary: Journey of the Magi, T. S. Eliot
December 31, 2023

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
Church of the Redeemer Episcopal
Morristown, NJ

A myth is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. This runs counter to the usual way we define “myth.” We usually define myth as a story that is false (and involves the gods in some way). It’s myth versus science. Myth versus history. Myth versus fact. But the way I’m using myth here has little to do with whether it is true or false or fact or fiction and more to do with why we tell stories, as we certainly do. The way I’m using the word also means that myth is not a particular kind of story, but rather an aspect of every story we tell.

Approaching the Bible as a collection of myths is helpful for giving us a way into the text without having to be professionally trained experts in the original languages, ancient history, or the many theories of how the text came to be the way it is. Then, the central question about interpretation becomes, what is the puzzle about themselves that the writer(s) of the text confront and how do they answer it? We also want to see how all that bumps up against our own myths, both as individuals and as a community. That is almost always what I am about whenever I stand here.

So, John 1:1-18, what scholars call the Prologue to John. After starting with a cosmic view John brings us readers down to earth so that by the end of the chapter we’re dealing with the baptism of Jesus, the calling of the first disciples, and then, in the next chapter, the wedding at Cana. I say down to earth, but, really, John hardly ever really gets there. The stories are hardly more than pretexts for Jesus’ sermons. A hard line emerges in those sermons between “the world” and the “spirit” and it is clear where Jesus is and where we are supposed to be. John finds “down to earth”an uncomfortable place to be.

The abstract statements of John’s Prologue have yielded thousands of pages of more abstract theology. But rather than move from John’s abstract text to even more abstract theology, I’m committed this morning to moving in the other direction: from the abstract text to a story.

On that score John 1 doesn’t fare very well. It’s not much of a story. There is a story arc of sorts: it’s a creation story that moves from God to creation through this mysterious Word and ends with the same Word entering into the creation: “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” This does fit into Aristotle’s definition of a story as requiring a beginning, a middle where something gets changed, and an end. But it’s not much of a story is it? It entirely lacks the sort of details that make a story come alive. It is devoid of emotion. We don’t really even have much of an idea of who the characters are and certainly we don’t have enough to develop any sympathy for them. It’s not much of a story.

That’s especially obvious to us because of where the story has been placed in the lectionary. On Christmas Eve we heard Luke’s birth story with its shepherds and angels, its holy family at the mercy of the powerful but pitifully ignorant Caesar Augustus. On Epiphany we will hear Matthew’s story of the toddler Jesus, the ruthless Herod, and the mysterious magi. Today we have, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Okay. So there is not much of a story in the text. When this happens, one of the things we can do is to turn to the story behind the text. John’s gospel was written somewhere, at some time, by someone, even if we can’t say precisely where, when, or by whom with confidence. It was written for a reason and intended for an audience. This audience faced particular circumstances, had their own struggles, and suffered in their own way. John was written for them in those circumstances and intended to have an effect. This is the stuff that makes for story-telling.

I have long thought that a key understanding John’s gospel is realizing that John’s community has suffered a deep trauma. I realize that this reading of mine has little corroborating evidence that would anchor my claim in history. But I’m willing to make the claim anyway, because it provides a plausible background story for the Gospel and its introduction. Almost everything we know about John’s community other than its general time period we have to infer from the gospel itself. I think it’s especially useful to start with the story in John 9 which contains the story of the healing of a man who had been born blind and what happened to him afterwards.

Blindness and other traits that are perceived as limitations are fraught topics. We have begun to realize that our understanding and our habits of expression about so-called handicapping conditions can be harmful and impose greater limitations on people than the conditions themselves. John has had no such realization (although we will have to credit him at least with recognizing that congenital blindness is not punishment for the sins either of the man born blind nor his parents).

The story is simple: Jesus and his followers encounter a man who had been blind from birth. Jesus makes a muddy paste of spit and dirt. (This is John’s earthiest moment.) Jesus applies the mud to the man’s eyes, and orders him to wash it off in the pool of Siloam. The man does and can see for the first time.

One would imagine that this healing would be received with joyful amazement. One would imagine wrongly. The religious leaders grill the man for details about the healing, but all he knows is that the man who healed him was named Jesus and that he can now see. The scholars summon the man’s parents who testify that, yes, this is indeed their son; and yes, he was born blind; but, no, they don’t know anything about how he has come to have sight;and; would they please refer all questions to their son because they don’t really want to get involved in his disputes, thank you very much. When the leaders go back to the man, he gives them a theology lesson which do not receive graciously. They expel him from the religious assembly, so that he can no longer associate with his faith community.

This is a real story. The little details bring the story to life for us. It resonates with the pain of betrayal and exclusion. This is a story of the trauma suffered no doubt by many Christians. Even in the absence of official persecution, being a follower of Jesus often meant scorn and rejection by friends and family and a loss of the connections to a wider community that give life a sense of meaning. What I believe is that this story is a version of what happened to the whole of John’s community. They had lived as a part of the Jewish community. Their embrace of Jesus as God’s anointed led to tension with their community. Argument led to polemic. Differences of opinion became mutual rejection. The synagogue finally tired of the conflict and resolved it by tossing these followers of Jesus from their midst. Many families may have done the same. We might have done the same. Everyone knows how annoying converts can be.

The band of Jesus followers found themselves bereft of family and community, stripped of their connection with their identity as Jews, and deprived of the protections that come with having a social place in the world. Trauma indeed.

Read as myth, the story of the man born blind might be summarized as “we are a people who have lost our place in the world, who live in exile in our own town, cast out by the spiritually ignorant because we have seen God’s light in Jesus.” I think that this is the myth that lies behind all of John’s gospel, John 1:1-18 included. This is a deeply traumatized community. And it’s responding as people often do to trauma. They have a polarized view of their world. Their fellow Jews have become evil enemies. They take refuge from their traumatic history by taking flight into abstraction. We can see all three of these moves in this short reading.

Now, in our day, when we suffer deep trauma that gets in the way of living we try all sorts of things to stop our suffering. We wall off our feelings behind psychological barriers; sometimes we drink too much; we pass on their trauma to others; we engage in high-risk behaviors; we may even take our own lives. Sometimes, though, we will seek help in therapy. The purpose of the therapy, whether said in so many words or not, is to help us write a different story, a different myth. The object isn’t to erase the old myth by ignoring the trauma. The goal is rather to complicate the old myth with more complex stories, so that our story of trauma becomes just one story among many that together build a world in which other outcomes than misery and suffering are possible and leave us able to make meaningful choices that move us toward better ends. The antidote to bad myths is better myths, more nuanced myths that correspond more closely to the real world of hard objects we can bump into. The goal is a good-enough myth.

What I believe about John’s gospel is that it is an attempt at better myth-making to help John’s community move toward healing from their trauma and toward new life lived right here in this world. One of the strategies that the gospel uses is to complicate the old myth. The Prologue is a case in point. It’s stamped by the old myth. The story of their trauma has been abstracted almost out of existence. The world is polarized between light and darkness and the two halves cannot be reconciled. Emotions have been banished.

But, there is a complicating element and it comes at verse 14: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” The very abstract Word reverses abstraction and enters creation by becoming flesh. God has suddenly started taking an interest in bodies. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to imagine that God might take an interest in trauma, too, in which case John’s community might eventually be able to turn its attention back toward the memory of trauma it has been trying to avoid. If I’m right, we’re still in the early days of therapy for John’s folk. This is by no means a perfect myth. But, for where they are and what they are facing, it is perhaps, a good-enough myth. Wisely, John has not demanded that his community bite off the whole trauma in one bite. But he is insisting that they start to nibble around its edges. Trauma cannot be allowed have the last word. For this to happen, trauma must at some time be allowed to speak and to be taken seriously. In the Gospel of John that process has begun with a good-enough myth.

Now. I hope you’ve made a few connections to your own experience. But there is a connection that I am unwilling to leave to chance and that is the connection to our own recent experience. I think I understand some reasons why a short lame-duck period might be beneficial and why it might be diocesan policy. But that doesn’t change the fact that we are freshly wounded by Cynthia’s retirement and departure. This is true whether we consider ourselves to have been her supporters or her opposition. Relations have been severed at a stroke. We have suffered individual traumas and a collective trauma. There are various responses possible. I even find myself wondering whether I could stay in touch with her, make myself an exception to the general rule since, you know, I am a colleague. No, I recognize that for what it is: an attempt to minimize or evade the trauma. Or we can try to throw a switch and focus entirely on the very real need to meet the future head-on. I think we will be ill-served if we fail to honor our loss and allow the space for healing (which need not prevent us from making plans).

As part of our planning we will be asked to gather a lot of information about ourselves and our community. The point of that will be to come up with a clear view of who we are and who we are ready to become. And, that, my friends, sounds suspiciously like an invitation to rewrite our shared myth. We will then share that information with the diocese and through it with any prospective new clergy leader. But let’s not do this because that’s what the diocese tells us we have to do in order to find new clergy leadership.

No, we tell myths for our own sake, and I hope we will seize this as an opportunity to do consciously and deliberately what we usually do unawares: to tell ourselves a story about ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. It doesn’t have to be a perfect myth. If there were a perfect myth, the prologue of John certainly would not be one.

I am asking that we commit to telling not a perfect myth, but a good-enough myth. Let’s reject myths that are too simple. Let’s make it as complex and as honest as we can bear. Such a good-enough myth will serve us well on this next stage of our journey.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.