Son of God, light that shines in the dark,
child of joy and peace,
help us to open our eyes to you,
and be born anew this day. Amen.
Christmas Day,
and the Gospel is what is called the Prologue of John,
the first 18 verses of John’s Gospel.
This is the Gospel from the third set of readings
that can be read on Christmas Day,
and it is also the Gospel for the first Sunday after Christmas Day,
as well as showing up 6 times
as the assigned reading in the Daily Office lectionary!
So you can get the idea of its significance just from the frequency of its use.
On Christmas Eve we are absorbed in the Christmas story from Luke 2,
and attention often is more focused on Mary and Joseph,
on shepherds and angels,
that we can miss Jesus,
so this Christmas gospel reading shifts the focus back to Jesus.
The first chapter of the gospel of John
has been very significant for me personally
in my own understanding of who Jesus is
and all the reasons I feel such love for him
and am devoted to him as teacher, savior, Lord, Truth, and Life itself.
It is a passage in which I am always finding new depths,
and about which I could easily spend an hour or more preaching on,
although I will spare you that today.
For the last several months I have been teaching a course on
Meditation and the Gospel of John.
I think we spent three weeks on this first chapter,
and about every session I make some reference back to the Prologue
and these 18 verses.
In this profound passage is the heart of the mystery of our faith
in regards to creation, incarnation, death, resurrection, salvation, and life in Christ.
We are told in this passage how everything has been taken care of.
In the beginning…
in the words of Genesis 1:1…
in the beginning, the origin, the source…at the source of it all
there is always God, the Divine Self,
and this Divine Self is continually expressing, giving expression, creating.
The beginning or origin point, the source is always present here and now,
as creation continually comes into being.
You see, God did not just create at some temporal beginning point
and then leave it all to evolve on its own.
Creation is continuing to happen moment by moment,
continuous Divine Self-expression.
Is it not self-evident?
The whole passage then becomes more and more rhapsodic
about the lo/gos, the Word, becoming flesh,
that is, entering into the created order,
a one-time begetting by the Father,
so that all living beings, all of us can see for ourselves
the glory, the richness,
the weightiness of abundance, honor and splendor,
the fullness of one grace after another
showered upon us,
revealing to us the very essence of God manifested in this Only-Begotten.
In the whole passage the only thing we have to attend to
is receiving, owning for ourselves,
what has been provided for us –
our adoption as children of God.
The adoption done for us is what brings us into union with God through Jesus.
The Resurrection Spirit of Jesus fills us,
envelopes us,
swallows us up,
and we live and breath and have our being within the Heart of Christ.
All we have to do is receive, take the Word, lay our hands on
the lo/gos, the Life, the Light,
by having faith in his Name.
Verse 12: “As many as received him, who believe in his name,
to them he gives power to become children of God.”
Faith is a participation in the creative power of God,
the ability of God’s creativity in us.
Faith is fundamental and essential to our being human;
we are beings of faith.
But it is God who empowers faith in us;
there is a huge potency of faith in us.
And Jesus is the One who lived that potency of faith as light for us all.
“As many as received him, who have faith in his name,
to them he gives power to become children of God.”
Finally the Name is revealed in the 17th verse: Jesus, in Hebrew: Yeshua,
the Name that means salvation, to deliver, to make wide, spacious,
to be or live in abundance, freedom, liberty.
The Name Jesus, as we are graced to experience it,
incorporates within it tremendous depth.
You see, adoption into the family of God is only the beginning.
There are the benefits of adoption
– salvation, resurrection life, union with God –
but there is also the rest of what goes with
belonging to a family when one is adopted:
the obligations and the way of life and the work of the family.
And – note this –
the work is the same work that Jesus had to do – the will of the Father.
The way of life is the same as the way Jesus walked – the way of the Cross.
Discipleship is the way of life in this family for those adopted into it.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us,
and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son,
full of grace and truth.
Glory, that is, expansive presence, radiance of life potency,
that which is primary in importance and of greatest worth.
Full of grace and truth
Grace – the spontaneous flow of unbounded generosity,
the very nature of divine creativity
and Truth – actuality, what is finally and fundamentally real.
Jesus the Word, full of grace and truth,
whose whole being expresses the very nature of divine creativity,
who is Living Truth.
The whole passage, the Prologue of John, is about the primacy of Jesus,
and that who he is, we also are meant to become,
to actualize,
to act the way we truly are, God-begotten.
So the context for our life together at Emmanuel
is faith awakening and ever burgeoning within us,
as light shining in the darkness
as ever increasing awareness of who and what we are.
Coming to see this,
coming to greater understanding of this,
coming to grips with this
is the spiritual work before each of us.
This then is the full implication of the meaning
of the Incarnation and Nativity
coming upon us.
Merry Christmas!
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