Are Our Words Made Flesh???

One of the many descriptions about Jesus was that he was the word made flesh. There have been many understandings of this saying, but for me, I like the idea that Jesus was the understanding of God taking on flesh and bone. Or we encountered God when we saw this person act, think and speak. 

However, if we think of Jesus, do we think of an action (or embodiment) in the moments that make up our daily lives or do we think of the words we are told off a page? 

I think the Bible is a beautiful document which shows the development of human consciousness and understandings. This is not just limited to how people understood their place in society but also their relationship with others and their relationship with the great unknowns. We can often be lured into the idea that the Bible is a dictated book that fell from heaven all at once. But it developed over millennia and incorporates something of the culture that each segment was written in. 

One of the common strands running through the Bible is that God is calling us to make the words flesh. The book of Leviticus is not so much about the law as it is about inspiring people to live a new way. These laws were to become the natural experiential embodiment of God amongst the people. So when we read about caring for the orphan and the widow, God is calling us to embody that. 

Which leads me to ask myself are the stories in the Bible an experiential reality or just a story on the page? Are the stories making me live in a new reality? Is the biblical story pointing me to a deeper reality, I am missing?

In the last 1.5 millennia the unfolding story of how we understand God, there has been a movement to Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the attempt to have the right belief through creating correct doctrine (doctrine is a fancy word for words we believe). It's in some ways a movement back to a word culture. That's what we know is based on the words of the Bible. 

A song which explains this is "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so". What strikes me is that love in this understanding is not experiential but rather based on words. Rather than saying I know that I am loved by God and the Bible backs it up or gives me definition we go I am loved by God because there are some words on a page. I think we have become so word oriented we have missed making our words flesh. 

We are quick to quote bible verses that will fit a solution, or to find a promise we think was written for us, rather than being that promise. We are quick to defend the resurrection rather than being the resurrection. We have somehow come to this absurd understanding that having the right words is far more important than allowing the words to mold and form us.