Perfect passive participle, nominative singular masculine....
"Sent...."
Sometimes the English seems so feeble in it's familiarity. A four letter word, "sent," encompassing the fact that something happened in the past -- with the fact that this past action has an emphatically enduring impact on today, because it was this person in particular that was sent...
How can one translate a perfect passive participle into English better than "sent" -- which gets read even by good churchgoer Joe Schmoe today as a simple past tense verb? Does one italicize sent, make sent bold, or somehow change the font for sent in order to bring that out in the English translation of the text?
There's a whole sermon in that perfect passive participle.
The fact I can see that makes me an extreme Bible geek. Sometimes I don't like that very much, precisely because it means I could write a whole sermon on this participle and have the people in the pew saying, "Huh? I don't get that from this verse...."
And they don't. And they can't. And that's not their fault, or even a shortcoming in their faith.
As a general rule, I try exceedingly hard not to preach a sermon more meaningful to me than it is to the people who hear it and can read the words for themselves (even in translation). I know that most of the people sitting in the pews don't even have the foggiest notion what a perfect passive participle is in their native language, let alone what the theological implications of such a Greek verbal noun are in a verse like John 1:6.
Frankly it's part of what irritates me about the whole scientific mindset -- who cares about the laymen? Isn't it enough that the elite can discern such things? Why ought one ever even attempt discourse with the laity, so much less evolved intellectually and philosophically than the rest of us...
Yet I strive to come to this text like I do every other ancient text given me to preach, I myself but partially (as best my research and study can apprehend) aware of the original grammatical, historical, cultural and theological implications of this Word -- determined to do what I can to let it be heard in the here and now as it was then, so that it means something more than "he was sent there, did that." So what? Here is the claim of the ancients:
God sent this particular fella to testify to something, indeed Someone particular
Shouldn't that matter to me? It does. More than I sometimes think it ought...
Every stinking, blessed word of Scripture is "alien" to me, strange, removed ... every word an effort to apprehend correctly, and believe... How can that be for a guy like me, who grew up in the Church, reading the Scriptures all my life? How can it still sound so new and unusual? The fact that so long ago God sent this guy named John....
