Christmas Day: Exposed to the Light
Christmas Day: Exposed to the Light
Isaiah 52.7-10, Hebrews 1.1-6, John 1.1-14
In the name of the living God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
In the Prologue of John’s Gospel, the evangelist weaves together two very disparate subjects.
You have the subject of the beginning, the roots of existence in eternity. In the beginning, there is God; and there is One who faces God: the Word. There is a relationship between them, a face-to-faceness, through which all things come to be. So, there you have one subject – the Origin of origins in a sacred relationship.
Then, you also have this reference to a man named John, who “came to testify to the light”. Suddenly, we are no longer speaking about the root of everything, we are speaking about something and someone very particular. John. The subject in question is probably John the Baptist, the holy man and prophet of first-century Judah, who is introduced a few verses later in the Gospel; although the reference could, of course, also be a bit of a play on the fact that John is the name of the apostle behind this Gospel—he, too, now coming to witness to the Light.
If the reference to the first of these figures seems to any of us rather opaque, if one wonders, ‘why bring that wild holy man up now, before you have even mentioned Jesus? why is he so important?’, well, in a sense, that is all well and good. In a sense, that is even the point. We are being taken from the universal to a very specific point in history. It is not the details of that moment that matter yet. It is the knowledge that we are now talking about a concrete moment and person at all.
For only here, do we begin to see where all those ideas about God and Logos have come from. They are not born from speculation or imagination alone. Rather, they are coming from flesh-and-blood people who have experienced something in time—namely, the person of Jesus, referred to here at the Father’s only Son.
The pivot of the Prologue is the central statement: “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (1.12). Here the evangelist takes up the first person of shared experience: ‘we’. He “lived among us”, “we have seen his glory”. At this pivot, one realises that the rather grand mythos is coming from a whole community who have encountered the light of Jesus. What these witnesses believe about God in eternity has come through their experience of Christ, and of his relationship to the God he calls Father. They have been led through that experience to the relationship that has existed at the heart of reality, within God the Trinity, from before the beginning of time.
The plural ‘we’ is really very important in all of this. The individual experience has never been supreme for Christians when it comes to our beliefs about God or Jesus. Our belief has shaped by the experiences, not of a witnessing “I”, but of a witnessing “we”. The first witnesses to our faith form a collective, a whole community, with each experience being tested and calibrated by the others. The Faith of the Church today is still moulded by them. For those experiences are conveyed to us through the texts of the “Bible” and also through the Church’s worshipping life, where we stand in the shoes of all the persons of sacred history, encountering the Person of Christ through their eyes; learning to receive him.
At Mass last night we blessed those figures behind you, of Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and sheep all turned to the baby in the hay. The tradition of the crib scene as we know it, goes back to a saint named Francis of Assisi and the brothers formed by him. 800 years ago this year, in 1223, he assembled a choir of oxen and villagers in a cave in rural Italy, in a town called Greccio (Gretch-io), and had a priest celebrate the first mass of Christmas there. He desired to bring home to himself and his people the reality proclaimed by John. The reality that the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us, revealing the face of God in the language of our very own being. St Francis sought to awaken in himself and his companions the kind of love with which we do love the persons we see and spend our lives with – affection and sensation, alongside intellect and will – the same intimacy that that exhausted young mother shared with her newborn son.
Each year now, in St Peter’s Square in Vatican City, they make a crib scene. This year, they have assembled more the shepherds, angels and holy family. They have placed St Francis of Assisi in the midst of the scene. They have carved the crib to resemble the Grotto of Greccio (Gretch-io), eliding the scene of Bethlehem with that of Francis twelve hundred years later. This is, I believe, a really powerful thing to do. What it can bring home to us, is that when we remember the birth of Christ, bearing witness, receiving, acclaiming and adoring him, the crib doesn’t simply become part of our mental furniture; we become part of it. We are “incorporated” into that most holy of moments in all of history. St Francis, across the span of centuries, stands next to St Joseph. He gazes with Joseph at the Sun. So much so, that you cannot really “see” Bethlehem anymore, without “seeing” all the others, like Francis, who have entered the room since. The first person of the shared experience continues to expand as we, generation by generation, are “gathered in” to the mystery of Christ.
How extraordinary it is. That we should enter the room, taking part in the work of God in time. How wonderful. That we should have a God who would draw us in to his own Incarnation.
The only limit is that of our own willingness to identify with the Word, entering his story and letting it mould our own lives. And of course, we are not up to it. Of course, we are too flawed or too brittle to even testify to the Light given us, let alone enter it… But it is only by entering that we are ever made capable. In the Light of Christ alone are we redeemed. In him are we redeemed, and in him we trust.
What greater privilege than to address the face of Eternity, with a delight that, we know now, is mutual.
Mthr Kathryn Bellhouse