READINGS

John 1:1-18

HOMILY

The Church proposes for the four Masses associated with Christmas Day four different Gospels:

For two of the masses, it's the Lucan account of Jesus's birth;
For one of the accounts, it's Matthew's account, which we actually had last week, but including the genealogy - so the whole of the genealogy and the passage we had last week.
For the other mass, we have the reading of St John's Gospel.

Since for the last two Christmases I've used the Lucan passage and we had the Mathian passage last week, I thought that I take a quick look at the beginning of John's Gospel, even though in one sense it seems the furthest removed from what we're used to at Nativity, which is focusing down on the very practical issues of baby manger, beasts, swaddling clothes, stars, shepherds - all those very particular human or human and animal things, which attend a birth.

What we get in John's Gospel seems so extra-planetary that we pass it off with something like dismay and having to interpret it.

I don't want to attempt a full interpretation, which course would be quite impossible - these 18 verses are some of the most remarkable words ever to have been written in any human language.

What I would like to do is to say how much closer I think they are to more concrete, more human, more historical sense of a little baby in a precarious situation in Bethlehem than perhaps we might give credit for.

I'm taking it as many do that there is a basic chiastic structure in St John's prologue meaning that the first and the last verses reflect each other and so on through the middle until you get to the central point.

The chiastic structure has been slightly altered by the putting in of the bits of John the Baptist, which were probably not in the original poetry, but were put in so as to help make sense of what was coming about.

The first verse:

in the beginning, was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God...

After we've been through the history, comes out as no one has ever seen God.

Why do I say that so the two explain each other in this strange way?

The beginning was the Criterion, was the word, the beginning for us of creation. This does reflect Genesis.

It would have been understood to a Jewish audience or anyone who knew anything about how the Temple worked, and how the Holy of Holies was the microcosm of the heart of creation outside, which God and God's angels were.

Of course, no one could see God.

It was only as God's Criterion showed itself and the Criterion shows itself the word in creation.

Genesis starts as 'and God said'. The creative word, the word that creates.

So the word was at the very beginning of all things, word was with God, and the Word was God.

The creative thing is not simply an extra thing that God happened us to do, it is God's criteria for God.

We are actually learning something about who God is when God makes God's Criterion available to us in and as and through creation.

We pair that off with the very end: no one has ever seen God.

That's absolutely standard, of course: God is not an object that can be seen.

That's not at all what is meant by any use of language about God by anybody rational really, that would be a god who could be seen.

No one has ever seen God, it's God's only son who is close to the Father's heart who has made him known.

So the Criterion that was with God, and the Criterion was God, was in the beginning with God.

It turns out that the Criterion for everything being is his son.

That's, in a sense, the most extraordinary claim for us to understand and from which to get a glimpse of what's going on in the Christmas story.

God's only son is God's Criterion who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.

In other words, the criteria for bringing everything into being is that of a Father's love for us all.

The underpinning reality of everything that is is this sort of affection, the very structure of reality made available to us through this sort of love.

Given that it is perhaps less surprising that at the midpoint of the chiasmus is: he came to his own, and his own people did not accept him, but to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.

That's the central line:

but to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.

Here's the suggestion that the very structuring force of reality, which is a loving structure, finally came into our midst, came into our midst as something that can enlighten us, light us up from within, was the light, was the source of our seeing, has come in.

And for those who receive him, who believe in his name - his name is the same as of the name - he gives power to become children of God who are born not of bloods (which might refer just to the two people involved in conceptional work, might refer to the way in which mythical stories of creation, and therefore of birth, happen through massacres) or the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.

The notion that there is a being brought into being according to who the Father is, who the God is, and what God's love is that actually seeks to bring us into being as children of God.

That means us being aligned with what really is.

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.

He's talking about people being brought into being so that we may actually participate on the inside of creation, and discover what really is.

That the way that this was made available to us started - of course, John doesn't say this, we only get this in Matthew and Luke - started with the bizarrely powerless seeming sign of the babe born in Bethlehem.

This was a wholy fully human sign, it's us learning to detect the love of the only begotten Son, God the only begotten.

It also appears to be a way of referring to Isaac in the Abraham story - he was referred to as God's - in one translation it's the - only begotten Son, which wasn't true of course because Abraham had Ishmael, another son, and often is translated as I love it.

So clearly it does not refer to something numerical, it refers to a quality of love.

That there is a purpose to everything which happened who like the friendliness towards us humans of everything that there is not known to us.

We are so often stuck in darkness, not able to see what is really happening.

The law tried to enable us to stand upright a little bit, to learn what is true, to understand something about how the Creator wanted us to see and participate in the creation.

With grace and truth and through Jesus Christ, the sense of the tenderness and not out to get us, the friendly quality in the backdrop to everything that that there is that this is a friendly gentle adventure.

Strangely, it's that the background colours to the Nativity picture that are some of the most difficult things to get.

The background colours, which are of the whole of creation actually being vastly more friendly to us.

If only we could learn to find our way into being sons and daughters of God, those who are actually on the inside of creation as it says, to use Paul's language, but the same message is here.

So, as you come to the Christmas celebration this year, think not only of the 3D figures in the crash, what they say about a God's power being shown forth in being exposed to be absolutely weak in the middle of a precarious situation, in the middle of some people who are going to make his life difficult and ultimately going to kill him.

But also the vast backdrop of the sheer friendliness of creation, that which we're becoming used to learning about and seeing ourselves as sons and daughters.

This is not a moral thing, but us being shown who God really is.

He said: no one has ever seen God, it's God's the only son who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known everything that we learn about God is going to be learned through following the human life of Jesus.

It's going to show us that there is extraordinary power in weakness, an extraordinary joy in our discovering our likeness with apparent others, and that all these actually tend to show a vastly richer project, adventure, a friendly adventure, which is creation; and that this is the constant background to everything that is.

It's the difficulty of receiving and living from that backdrop, which is one of the real challenges of our lives and one of the real joys of Christmas asking ourselves: am I a little bit closer to that this year, is the world a little bit friendlier, is it out of gratitude that I'm able to give presents.

Just because I'm so pleased to be in part of this world rather than how I've got to go through the usual drag of presents and all that.

For me, that's the question that was brought to my mind by these astounding verses from St John.