“In him was life, and the life was the
light of men”
Behold the
mystery of Christmas! Now you weren’t really expecting Santa Claus and
his team of dancing reindeer just yet, were you? But perhaps, just
perhaps, you might have expected, reasonably enough, the story of Mary and
Joseph and the wee child, “cradled in a stall was he with sleepy cows and
asses”. Please don’t take that last reference personally! And
yet, the great and resounding Gospel which you just heard is the gospel
which lies at the heart of the mystery of Christmas, reindeer, sleepy cows
and asses and ourselves notwithstanding.
“In the
beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”
and, if that were not marvelous enough, “the Word was made flesh and
dwelt among us”. This is the mystery of Christmas, the mystery of the
life of God opened out to us in the very being of our humanity, the
mystery of God himself now become the mystery of God with us.
It is no
discredit to the sweet wonder of Bethlehem, to the strange and touching
picture of the pilgrimage of Mary and Joseph, to the scene at the inn where
there was no room, to the stable and the manger where the holy child is
born, that we should hear the Gospel from the Prologue of John rather
than the familiar nativity stories from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. We
hear those stories as well in the Christmas season, of course, but what
gives them poignancy and meaning is what we hear in this great gospel.
If we had
nothing else of the whole of the New Testament, but only the Prologue of
John, it would almost be enough, it seems, which is not to say that
everything else is so much straw and nothing worth. Instead, it emphasizes
the surpassing wonder of what is seen and heard in this gospel which
illumines so much and, indeed, everything of the mystery of Christmas and of
the heart and soul of the Christian faith.
As the
poet/preacher John Donne observed in his magisterial sermon preached on
Christmas day in 1621, the “whole gospel” of John “is comprehended
in the beginning thereof”. And more. In some sense the whole of
divinity is captured in this beginning. “For here is first, the
Foundation of all, the Divinitie of Christ”. And yet, in this lies the
greatest challenge to our world and day. It has altogether to do with two
things: first, the idea of God; and second, the divinity of Christ
present in the reality of our humanity; in short, the Word and
the Word made flesh. This is the teaching which belongs to the
heart and soul of Christianity.
“Without
forsaking what he was, yet he became what he was not”. God became man
without forsaking his divinity and yet became altogether what belongs to our
humanity in the integrity of its spiritual and physical truth. And yet, is
not this the very paradox, and therefore the unexpected glory of
God with us, which lies at the very heart of the Christmas mystery and
celebration? Is not this the teaching which redeems all the sentiment and
sensuality of our lives and of this season in our all-too-secular and
all-too-atheistic world? It redeems the sentiment and sensuality of
the season by gathering it into the great something more of God’s Word
signaled so profoundly in John’s gospel, and especially in the splendid
prologue of his gospel, which proclaims so clearly the great and distinctive
principle of the Christian faith, ‘the Word made flesh’. The Word
that is God engages our humanity in the intimacy of Christ’s holy birth
without which we are left in the dark unreason of our all-too-sentimental
and all-too-anxious sensual lives.
And yet our
text, drawn from the prologue, too, makes the point in another way and in a
way that challenges the existential pragmatism and institutional follies of
our world and day. “In him was life and life was the light of men”.
Life and light. These are the two great metaphors and images of our
spiritual life. “I have come”, Jesus says, “that they might have
life and have it more abundantly”. Abundant life is opened out to us in
the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. The life is light, the light of holy
understanding, the light of creedal doctrine. Christ, after all, is
“Light of Light, very God of very God”. He is the light that has come
into the world.
It makes no
sense, of course, unless we appreciate and honour the reality of the
idea of God and the reality of the idea of the divinity of Christ.
In a certain way, the celebration of Christmas concentrates for us the
idea of the reality of God with us, the God who does not abandon his
people but seeks their restoration and perfection, the God who engages our
world without simply being collapsed into the world, lost in its confusions
and uncertainties. Ultimately, that is what is signaled in the celebration
of the birth of the holy child. Ultimately, it is about life as light.
Something is made known in the darkness of human experience. God makes
himself known and reveals us to ourselves at one and the same time, both for
good and for ill.
“He came
unto his own and his own received him not”. There was no room in the
inn. Do we have room for God in the inn of our souls? In a way, the stark
and sorry answer is no. Instead we must seek him where he wills to be born
– in the lowliness of a barn among the lowliest of creation, among the
simple beasts of the field, and only in us provided we are humble and open
to the wonder of his coming, only in us provided we repent of the pretence
of our pride and the arrogance of human experience which demands that God be
accountable to us and subject to our bidding. We are not the measure of
reality. God is. That, of course, is the point without which we can make
no sense of the mystery of Christmas. We are too much with ourselves in the
‘inns’ of our pride, in the follies of our own self-assertions about
our sexual, social, economic and political identities, in “the devices
and the desires” of our all-too-foolish hearts. Better to sing with the
shepherds.
The nativity of
Christ signals the wondrous humility of God and calls us to a reasonable
humility about ourselves, to ourselves as the ‘mangers’, as it were,
in which Christ comes to be born, in the quiet darkness and the naked
reality of our humanity, stripped of all pretence, at one with the simple
creation. Bethlehem, after all, recalls paradise. The God who called out
to us “where are you?” has come to us and suddenly the wilderness of
our disobedience has become the paradise of heaven. Bethlehem is paradise
restored.
It presents a
picture of the harmony of the created order in all of its distinct and
ordered moments, but even more, it shows the harmony of God with his
creation. Here is the life of the world, the source and creator of the
universe at home in the world, at one with us in the truth of our humanity,
at one with us illuminating the darkness of the world which has turned its
back on God. Here is the life that is the light of men. We are meant to
know God as the source of the world’s being and life. We are meant to live
in that light of divine understanding.
“But as many
as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God”. The
mystery of God with us bestows a new dignity and a new freedom upon our
humanity. But only if we are willing to live in that light that is life.
It means to feed on the Word, to come to the manger of the Church where the
light of Christ is all our life. To receive him who is our life and our
light means to live in the light of his teaching. And that is the
challenge for our world and day, for the church and for each of us. It
challenges the world morally, socially, economically and politically; in
short, spiritually. It challenges the Church and each of us to be faithful
to what we have received, to make the Word the measure of experience and not
experience the measure of the Word.
Without the
Gospel of the Word made flesh, Christmas is but a simple folk tale,
quaint and picturesque, perhaps, but of no real meaning and of little
worth. Without the Word, we are left in the dark unreason of our
sentimentality and sensuality. There is no redemption of the sensual and
the sentimental, no engagement between God and us; in short, no mystery, no
Christmas. There is only the darkness and the death of ourselves. But in
this holy Word, there is light and life, grace and truth. He who comes is
the light of men who opens out to us the light of God. “We beheld his
glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and
truth”, John tells us, in a kind of almost parenthetical ecstasy.
Such is the great joy of Christmas, if only we will see. And then,
perhaps, too, we shall sing with the shepherds and dance with the reindeer.
“In him was life, and
the life was the light of men”
