Good morning, on this quiet morning. Snow still on the ground on a sunny Christmas Day, then more snowfall the day after—it couldn’t have been more perfect. I hope you all are having a peaceful and restful long weekend.
Our Gospel reading from John can be either the Christmas Day reading, or the reading for the Sunday after Christmas Day (today). In either spot, it’s a welcome change in tone from the bustle and chaos of the Christmas Eve service.
This is John the Evangelist’s glorious prologue to his Gospel, sometimes called his account of the Christmas story. The first thing you notice in John’s version of events is what’s not here: there are no donkeys or sheep, no shepherds, no manger, nor stars or innkeepers or census. Forget about Quirinius, or Herod, even Joseph and Mary aren’t here. There’s not even a baby. There’s just the Word, becoming flesh. It’s a sparse and orderly account of how Jesus came to be, inspired in part by the creation story from Genesis:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
John’s Gospel was the last to be written, and many people think he wrote this as a corrective to those messier versions of the nativity from Matthew and Luke. His was an educated, more philosophical audience, unlike theirs, an audience without much appreciation for the crude chaos of stable and babe. The “Word” of which John speaks was an ancient, animating force long known to the Greeks and to Greek-speaking Jews--sort of a great, invisible spirit that’s timeless and changeless and that, at a given point in history (in John’s view), slipped into flesh in the person of Jesus: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”
Compare that to the crying baby, the rough shepherds and bleating animals of the stable and you see why some might have preferred this cooler, more abstract presentation of Christ’s entry into the world. In any faith there are those who find comfort in knowing that this messy life we lead down here is shared intimately with God, perhaps even with God him (or her, or it)self living and experiencing it with us; and those who would rather believe that God is removed from all this, apart in another realm unphased and unaffected by what goes on down here.
In Christianity, it’s both. You don’t need to look any farther than our Gospels to see this.
From birth to death, John’s Jesus is more removed, floats slightly above the earth and its troubles. A problem presents itself and rather than get agitated like he might in the other three Gospels, in John’s Gospel, Jesus takes in the problem, reflects on it--sometimes even sermonizes about it--as if he’s not really there or affected by it, almost as if he’s looking at it from the perspective of heaven or of someone who saw this problem unfold eons ago and knew exactly what was coming.
This Gospel’s opening words make clear the cosmic perspective of the man whose story it’s about to tell. This is not someone who came into the world like we came into the world--non-existent emptiness to sudden existence. For John, it’s not enough to trace Jesus’ lineage back 41 generations to King David, like the Gospel of Matthew does. Nor is it enough to trace it all the way back to Adam the first human, like we get in the Gospel of Luke.
For John, Jesus’ life goes back to the beginning of all time; he was the firstborn of all creation, present (as the Word) with God before the day was divided from the night and the dry land made separate from the seas.
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As we end a year, and I hope for you it was a good year but I know that (always) for some it’s a year you’d just as soon forget, John helps us by casting the world in this larger framework of all of history and time. It’s reassuring. The early modern philosopher Spinoza made famous the phrase sub specie aeternitatis: “under the aspect of eternity.” Or in the words of the contemporary American poet Franz Wright, “Set your mind before the mirror of eternity, and everything will turn out fine.” Sub specie aeternitatis.
That’s what John is doing for us, his readers. Telling us to take a larger view--a much larger view. The farther out you stand from something, the smaller it becomes, and for some things in our lives, that’s exactly the perspective we need to make them better.
Yet for all this, still, still, John manages (and this is the brilliance of today’s Gospel reading and what I want to leave you with) to throw in one of the homiest, coziest, most reassuring, God-is-with-us lines in the entire Bible. “From [God’s] fullness we have received grace upon grace.”
This comes from a theological idea, in Judaism and Christianity, that God’s being is so full of goodness that it just spilled over and that spillage made earth and everything in it--at first glance consistent with John’s cooler, more distant presentation of God. And it is. But “grace upon grace”--that seems to me going out of his way to make us more than an accident of God’s goodness. Somehow this image always makes me think of God layering blankets on us when we’re cold, grace, on grace. Personally asking sure there’s always plenty, always enough for each of us, whatever happens.
So as we end another year, here’s John’s prologue, once again. Giving us the perspective and comfort it’s given Christians for nearly 2000 years, and will again 2000 more.