What Is This Word?

N.T. Wright

One of the greatest journalists of the last generation, the late Bernard Levin, described how, when he was a small boy, a great celebrity came to visit his school.  The headmaster, thinking perhaps to impress, called the young Levin to the platform in front of the whole school.  The celebrity, thinking perhaps to be kind, asked the little boy what he’d had for breakfast.

 

That was easy, or so it seemed. ‘Matzobrei’, replied Levin.  It’s a typical central European Jewish dish, made of egg fried with matzo wafers, brown sugar and cinnamon; Levin’s immigrant mother had continued to make it even after years of living in London.  It was, to him, a perfectly ordinary word for a perfectly ordinary meal.

 

The celebrity, ignorant of such cuisine, thinks he must have misheard; he asks the question again.  Young Bernard, puzzled now and anxious, gives the same answer.  The celebrity looks concerned, and glances at the headmaster.  What is this word he’s saying?  The headmaster, adopting a there-there-little-man tone, asks him once more what he had for breakfast.  Now dismayed, not knowing what he’s done wrong, and wanting to burst into tears, the boy says once more the only thing he can say, since it’s the truth: ‘Matzobrei’.  An exchange of strange glances on the platform, and the now terrified little boy is sent back to his place.  The incident is never referred to again, but it stays in his memory as a horrible ordeal.

 

The Jewish

word spoken to an incomprehending world; the child’s word spoken to incomprehending adults; the word for food of which the others know nothing . . . it all feels very Johannine.  What is this Word?  ‘In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was made flesh.’  We are so used to it, to the great cadences, the solemn but glad message of the incarnation; and we risk skipping over the incomprehensibility, the oddness, the almost embarrassing strangeness, of the Word.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness didn’t comprehend it; the world was made through him but the world didn’t know him; he came to his own, and his own didn’t receive him.  John is saying two things simultaneously in his Prologue (well, two hundred actually, but let’s concentrate on two): first, that the incarnation of the eternal Word is the event for which the whole creation has been on tiptoe all along; second, that the whole creation, and even the carefully prepared people of God themselves, are quite unready for this event.  Jew and Gentile alike, hearing this strange Word, are casting anxious glances at one another, like the celebrity and the headmaster faced with a little boy telling the truth in a language they don’t understand.