Christmas Day Mass 2020
Isaiah 52:7-10; Hebrews 1:1-6; John 1: 1-18
Where’s the baby in the manger then? I don’t mean in the chapel: I am not that short-sighted or bog-eyed. I mean in the Mass readings. It is interesting that, each year at the Day Mass, the Church reads from one of the two Gospels (the other being Mark) which doesn’t have an Infancy Narrative.
Or does it? Well, yes, there is a hint of one when John says “the Word became flesh”, but there is no description—no angels, shepherds, or wise men. John takes them as read. Instead, he gives us what might be described as a pre-Infancy Narrative, or even a packaged history, setting the Bethlehem event very much in the context of Salvation History, and indeed of World History.
If we had only Luke’s account to rely on, we would have recognised the Nativity as the fulfilment of God’s promises to the Jewish people, the birth of the Messiah who would reconcile them to God. Matthew would then take us a step further, pointing out, through the visit of the Wise Men, that this birth, this gift of salvation, was intended for the whole world, for Gentiles as well as Jews. John though, expands our vision through all of time and space by taking us back before Creation began, declaring that the Christmas event was the fulfilment of God’s eternal plan, the entry of God Himself into time, the entry into our world of the Word who is God from all eternity, and to all eternity, the transformation and fulfilment of reality.
Long before the science fiction writers had imagined worlds beyond worlds, and long before the scientists had explored many of the truths of time and space—millennia indeed before Stephen Hawking or Richard Dawkins—John the Evangelist had expounded it all in this, the prelude to the Fourth Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...and the Word became flesh.”
In this short passage is the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything” to quote Douglas Adams, and the answer is not 42, but God the Son become man, the eternal Word born before creation and taking flesh as the man Jesus, announced by John the Baptist, and born of the Virgin. This Word comes from and within eternity into the world of time, a world which, says St. John, “had its being through Him”.
Here we have the source of light and life, the origin of all that exists. In eighteen verses, John gives us a complete cosmogony and cosmology, and at the same time keeps us rooted in earth, because this same source of Creation Himself came to be a creature of earth.
John will go on to describe, with his own particular insights, the events of the life of the Word-made-flesh, culminating in His suffering, death, and resurrection, but the meaning of it all he has already expounded here in his Prologue. Interestingly, at this point, he doesn’t mention Jesus by name; the only name to be found here is that of John the witness. At this stage, he is more interested in the meaning behind the events, in the descent of eternity into time, of God into His creation, in the true identity, as the co-eternal Word, of the one whom he will go on to name as the man Jesus.
For now, we have the setting in context of the Bethlehem event, bringing us to ponder and, to the best of our ability, to understand, what is conveyed to us by Luke and Matthew in their words, and by that which the crib presents to our sight. Let us consider that, to sight, this morning’s Gospel adds insight.
