The reading of the gospel lesson
according to John for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day sounds really deep.
Philosophical. Heavy. It’s not at all warm and cuddly like Luke’s account of
shepherds tending their wooly sheep under a starlit night, or singing angels or
starstruck teenagers — one of whom is noticeably with child — who cannot find a
place to crash for the night.
John’s version has none of this. As
the last of the gospelers to write, perhaps he thought it was a story that had
already made the rounds. So now, given that the facts are a matter of
public record, he intends to explain, at least in part, the meaning of
the story. And to do this, he has to provide context; he has to go back to the
beginning.
“In the beginning.” Those three
words take him and his first-century readers back to the first words of the
Torah: “In the beginning, God ...”.1 It’s as though at the start of
the Bible, God intends to remind us about beginnings, and that John, echoing
this format, likewise affirms that humans have a history — a history that
begins with God, continues with God, will conclude with God and in which God
and Jesus Christ his Son are the major players: “All things came into
being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”
It’s difficult to imagine that sort
of linear chronological distance. For most of us, history begins when we are
about 5 years old, give or take. Everything else is ancient history and
must be studied, interpreted and assimilated through tedious work in a
classroom.
Still, we can go back to our own personal
beginnings. We remember the significant events of our lifetime, like the
invention of the smartphone, the internet, personal computers, 9/11, the
Challenger explosion, Armstrong on the moon and so on — although, if you’re
under 25 you won’t remember any of that stuff.
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