WHEN HEAVEN TOUCHED EARTH

Feast of St. John and Christmas I

27 December, AD 2009

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”  (St. John 1:1, 14).

Now that Christmas has begun and all the presents St. Nicholas brought have been opened, and the feast marking this blessed season has been held, and family and friends have visited, and we begin to recover from the beginning of the holiday festivities, we are given time in the space of these twelve holy days to contemplate and reflect upon the great miracle that God the Father has wrought among us in the birth of His Son, Jesus Christ Our Lord.  In this world of pre-Christmas sales and all the hype that begins as early as September which reminds us it is time to go into debt for the next sixth months buying things we don’t need, the Babe of Bethlehem, the real reason for this holy season, is often very easily overlooked and overshadowed unless we make a conscious effort to try to find Him as did those Magi from the East.  All in all, it is a good thing that Christmas is twelve days long, for while all the merchants have retired to their money-changing holes and are counting all of their profits so they can report their earnings for the Gross Domestic Product for the end of the year quarter, they leave us alone, even for a little while, to let us ponder who is at the center of this holy season – Jesus, who gives our lives meaning, joy, and hope.

It is, then, that on this St. John’s Day, we remember the beloved Disciple, the one who leaned on Our Lord’s Breast at the Last Supper and who wrote of the Heavenly Banquet in his Apocalypse; the same Apostle who informs us, in his Gospel, of the eternal impact and importance of the event when Heaven touched Earth, which we call Christmas.

As you know, St. John’s Gospel is different from the other three.  The Synoptic Gospels, whose name means “as seen through one eye” record the events of Our Lord’s human birth, His earthly ministry, and His Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension all in a roughly similar chronological order.  While St. John’s Gospel, written all the way at the end of the first century, reports and records some of those events as well, he does so through a theological lens – giving us the spiritual significance of Our Lord’s words and actions from the perspective of one who has had time to reflect and consider the impact of Our Lord’s ministry and His coming to be among us in the flesh.  Hence St. John’s Gospel is not concerned with Jesus’ earthly birth or lineage but from the outset of his Gospel, he concerns himself with who Jesus was and is – “In the beginning”.  It is from St. John’s perspective, after he had written his Apocalypse on the island of Patmos, been released from that exile, and then returned to Ephesus, that he was moved by the Holy Ghost to write his record of Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, at the end of his life.  Being inspired by the Holy Ghost, he begins his Gospel with the words, “In the beginning”, reminiscent of and corresponding to the opening words of the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, in order to, at once, connect the Word, whom we later come to know as Jesus, with the Word who was eternally begotten of the Father and existed with Him and the Holy Spirit of God from before the dawn of time.  St. John Chrysostom says of the beginning of St. John’s Gospel from one of his homilies, “John, passing by everything else – (Jesus’) conception, his birth, his education, and his growth – speaks immediately of his eternal generation.”(Homilies on the Gospel of John)  

From St. John’s Prologue, we come to know two things about the Word – It is the Word of the Lord by which everything that was made, was made – that the Word is the Author of all Creation; and we come to know that the Word is the Rational Principle which gives significance and unity to all existing things in the universe.  St. Augustine teaches us that our human words are a helpful, albeit, imperfect, analogy.

“Whoever, then, is able to understand a word, not only before it is uttered in sound but also before the images of its sounds are considered in thought . . . may see enigmatically and as it were in a glass, some similarity with that Word of which it is said, “In the beginning was the Word.”  For when we give expression to something that we know, the word used is necessarily derived from the knowledge thus retained in the memory and must be of the same quality with that knowledge.  For a word is a thought formed from a thing that we know.  This word is spoken in the heart, being neither Greek nor Latin nor any other language, although, when we want to communicate it to others, some sign is assumed by which to express it. . .”(On the Trinity 15.10.19 – 11.20)  

The sign, St. John tells us, which God the Father assumed in order to communicate with humanity His love, redemption, passion, and eternal Life is all a part of Him and that sign is Emmanuel – God with us, whom we know as Jesus Christ – eternally begotten of the Father from the beginning, not created, but of the Father, Himself, from the first.  

And then it was, as St. John tells us, that the Word, Jesus Christ, was made flesh, that is, He became Incarnate of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and was made Man and dwelt among us as True Man and True God.  As Archbishop William Temple tells us, “The Word did not merely indwell a human being.  Absolute identity is asserted.  The Word is Jesus and Jesus is the Word. . . . In Jesus the flesh is the completely responsive vehicle of God’s Spirit.  The whole of Him, flesh included, is the Word, the self-utterance, of God.”  Archbishop Temple’s words reflect the words of St. Athanasius who said, “God was made Man so that we might be made God.”, meaning thus, that we might be reunited with God, who created us, after we had been estranged from Him by reason of original sin, our first disobedience.  And we, now, have beheld God’s Glory through His Son, Jesus Christ; the Glory of the only-begotten of the Father, full of Grace and Truth.  It is through and by the miracle of the Incarnation at Christmas that we human beings have beheld and experienced for ourselves the revelation of God’ eternal character and Love for His Creation.  The Glory that Jesus revealed to us of the Father is not His own, although He eternally shares in it with the Father and the Holy Ghost, but it originates from the Father who sent Him.  Remember that Jesus said in the fourteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”(St. John 14:9)  So it is within these two verses of the Christmas Gospel, that the Evangelist’s purpose of writing his Gospel is revealed, which he finally states in Chapter 20, verse 31, “But these words are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through His Name.”  But there is still one more step.

Eternal Life didn’t just automatically become a part of our human condition; it didn’t just “boing” into “Is-ness” because of the Incarnation.  We have to believe.  Pope Benedict, in his Christmas Eve Homily, spoke of Origen who, speaking of the difference between pagans and Christians, especially at Christmas, said, “Paganism is a lack of feeling, it means a heart of stone that is incapable of living and perceiving God’s love.”  He says of the pagans, “Lacking feeling and reason, they are transformed into stones and wood.”  Benedict goes on to say, “Christ, though, wishes to give us a heart of flesh.  When we see him, the God who became a child, our hearts are opened.  In the Liturgy of this holy night, God comes to us as man, so that we might become truly human.  Let us listen, once again, to Origen: ‘Indeed, what use would it be to you that Christ once came in the flesh if he did not enter your soul?’  Let us pray that he may come to us each day, that we may be able to say:  I live, yet it is no longer I that live, but Christ who lives through me.”  It is that great miracle we celebrate – not only through the twelve days of Christmas, but always throughout the year – when God became flesh in Jesus, perfect Man and perfect God and Heaven, itself, touched Earth.  Pray, during this Christmastide and always, that the Word of God, Jesus Christ, would continually change us all from stone and wood into living people so that we would come to share in the never-ending Life that awaits us.  Let us close with the words of a prayer from Archbishop Temple:  Let us pray.

O Lord Jesus Christ, thou Word and Revelation of the Eternal Father, come, we pray thee, take possession of our hearts and reign where thou hast right to reign.  So fill our minds with the thought and our imaginations with the picture of thy Love, that there may be in us no room for any desire that is discordant with thy holy will.  Cleanse us, we pray thee, from all that may make us deaf to thy call or slow to obey it, who, with the Father and the Holy Ghost are one God, blessed for ever and ever.  Amen.

And now, unto God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost be ascribed all might, majesty, power, and dominion as is most justly due this day both now and forever; world without end.  Amen.

SOLI DEO GLORIA – JEU+