“These things write we unto you, that your joy may be full”
Endings and beginnings. They focus on things heard and seen, things handled and touched, things written and passed on. They open us out to what is always more than what we can completely and fully grasp. They open us out to the mystery of God with us, the mystery of the Incarnation
It is, to my mind, one of the most wonderful of the little feasts of Christmas week that reveal so much of the wonder of Christmas. The feast of St. John the Evangelist falls on the 27th of December and is part of the celebration of Christmas. It reminds us of the important role that John the Evangelist plays in the Christian understanding of Jesus Christ. And so we read from the beginning of his First Epistle and we read from the end of his Gospel. What is written, he tells us in the Epistle is for our joy, indeed that “[our] joy may be full.” What is written, he tells us in the Gospel, is about the things which Jesus did and yet, as he says, “the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”
&In and through both readings, there is a remarkable kind of intensity and insistence on two things: the message and the messenger. The latter is John himself. He is testifying to the integrity of what he has heard and seen. “This is the disciple which beareth witness of these things, and wrote these things.” We aren’t told a lot about him because the greater emphasis is on the things heard and seen and witnessed to in his writing. What is that? It is the idea of the Incarnation.
It is not too much to say that it is through the eyes of John that we understand the great mysteries of the Christian Faith. His Gospel is often referred to as the Fourth Gospel but we would be mistaken in thinking that it means his is the last of the Gospels, the latest to be written, as it were. In modern times that has been assumed and it may be true but is largely irrelevant to the ultimate coming together of the Gospels and Epistles to form the New Testament. The idea of historical priority is a very late and modern preoccupation among scholars and is fraught with a number of questionable hypotheses. Earliest does not mean simplest, for instance, as if there is a necessary and logical progression from the simple to the complex. And certainly for many, many centuries of the Christian Church, John’s Gospel has exercised a kind of priority of reflection for no other reason than the quality of the ideas and their expression which his Gospel affords.
In the iconography of the Christian Faith, there are certain symbols which have become attached to each of the Gospels. Drawn from The Book of Ezekiel and from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, those symbols are a way of capturing some theological aspect or emphasis associated with the character of each of the Gospels. In other words, they are each seen in their integrity and are valued as such. The winged lion for St. Mark, the winged man for St. Matthew, the winged Ox for St. Luke, and for St. John, the eagle, are the symbols that signify so much of what is characteristic of each.
In the developed iconography of the Christian Church, the symbol of the eagle alone takes on an additional emphasis. The Scriptures come to be read from lecterns that bear the image of the eagle. The Scriptures, not just John’s Gospel, not just the New Testament, but also the Old Testament, are read on the eagle wings of John. The image of the eagle is not just about the imperial power of ancient Rome but signals the vision and insight that is characteristic of John’s Gospel. That helps us greatly in understanding the Scriptures as a whole. In a way, they achieve a sense of doctrinal unity through the wisdom of John, through the intensity and the integrity of his witness, we might say. As Augustine notes, “John [in contrast to the other evangelists] soars like an eagle above the clouds of human infirmity, and gazes upon the light of the unchangeable truth with those keenest and steadiest eyes of the heart” (De consensus evangelistarum).
This sensibility has unfortunately become obscured in the contemporary church. Various historical hypotheses about authorship and dating of the books of the New Testament have resulted in a kind of priority being given to the Synoptic Gospels as they are called. The term itself is revealing because it highlights how John’s Gospel has a significantly different character to it. Ironically, however, this modern sensibility about historicity is itself unhistoric in terms of the shaping of Christian doctrine and the patterns of liturgical reading that are themselves more than a millennium and half old.
John’s Gospel and his Epistles bear eloquent testimony to the idea of the Incarnation. It is not too much to say that this central Christian principle is largely shaped by John’s written words. John undertakes especially in his Epistles the task of arguing for the Incarnation of God against the docetic tendencies that are among the earliest heresies or willful errors of early times and which remain and often recur throughout history. Docetism claims that the idea of God’s actual embrace of our humanity in becoming flesh and bone, soul and body, is nothing more than an appearance, a kind of divine play-acting. Why? Because the idea of any kind of connection between God and the world is seen as simply impossible. The material world is suspect, even evil, and beneath the contempt of the Almighty.
That thinking denies the idea of the redemption of the physical and material world and the greater idea that it is embraced and known in the mind of God really and truly. It denies too the greater theme of God’s transcendence which is actually greater by virtue of God’s immanence. In other words, the remoteness and the nearness of God belong to a deeper wisdom about the power and the nature of God. This kind of thinking will lead to the creedal understanding of the Christian Faith which provides and upholds the doctrinal unity of the Scriptures as well as the majesty and the truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ. John ends his Gospel on just such a note. What has been written opens us out to the mystery of God with us but cannot exhaust that mystery however much it shapes our understanding of it. “The world itself,” he writes, “could not contain the books that should be written.”
He proclaims in his Gospel both what has been written and its purpose. It is for our joy and blessedness. We see into the highest mysteries of God through the eyes of John and on the eagle wings of his Gospel.
“These things write we unto you, that your joy may be full”
Fr. David Curry,
St. John, Dec. 27th, 2012