“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you”
No one more fully conveys the deep wonder and mystery of Christmas than John the Evangelist commemorated on the second day after Christmas. The Prologue of his Gospel has been the great Christmas gospel for more than a millennium and a half; his epistles, too, provide the most theological apologia for the essential doctrine that Christmas celebrates, namely, the doctrine of the Incarnation.
From the blood-soaked ground of Stephen’s martyrdom we rise on eagles’ wings to the contemplative vision of John. It is his insight into what we see and hear that makes the Christmas mystery. The theological insight of John informs most profoundly what comes to be the Church’s creedal proclamation. This child is “the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light; Very God of Very God; Begotten not made.” Such creedal statements echo the words of John at Christmas. Without doubt such statements are the fruit of a theological reflection upon John’s witness. “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you,” he says. And that which has been seen and declared to us is “that which was from the beginning,” a phrase which captures at once the opening phrase of his Gospel, itself a commentary on the opening statement of The Book of Genesis. “In the beginning God”… “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
In the epistle reading for his Christmas feast day, “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life” is the essential revelation of the Word made flesh. And like the Christmas gospel, the purpose of this holy understanding is also revealed, namely, “that ye also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” The essential Christmas message is about God with us.
Theology is a dance of prepositions. The preposition of Advent is the word ‘towards;’ the whole season celebrates the idea of God’s coming towards us in the Word and divine Person of Jesus Christ. The great preposition of Christmas is the little word, ‘with’. God is with us. That mystery is also the great mystery of God himself; the Word who is with God and who is God opens us out to the very life of God himself without which his being with us is, well, rather small beer indeed. John opens us out to the mystery of the Trinity through the mystery of the Incarnation.
The miracle and wonder of Christmas lies in John’s insight that God has entered into the very fabric of our world and day in the intimacy of the humanity of Jesus Christ. All that is distinctive in Christian theology and all that connects it to the great traditions of Jewish and Greek thought are captured in John’s crucial and essential insight about “the Word made flesh,” a phrase that is absolutely central to Christian life and doctrine.
The First Epistle of John is a defense of the Incarnation. We can sense, I think, his intellectual excitement and sense of wonder about what he has come to understand and his determination to unfold that wonder to us, refusing to let it be compromised or denied. “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, That God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”
“Without forsaking what he was,” namely God, “he became what he was not,” namely man, as Athanasius, a later disciple, we might say, of the theological thinking of John puts it. It is upon such insights that the true nature of Christian fellowship with God and with one another ultimately depends. It is a divine fellowship that is about eternal life manifested to us in Jesus Christ and in which we participate even now through the sacramental life of the Church. Such is the wonder of Christmas, we might say, the wonder of Emmanuel, of God with us. It is the great gift of God to our world and our humanity.
The Collect for this day emphasizes the essential nature of John’s witness. We pray for those “bright beams of light” for the life of the Church, praying that the Church may be “enlightened by the doctrine” of John and may “so walk in the light” of that truth. No Christmastide prayer, perhaps, speaks more directly to our contemporary confusions and uncertainties. Is John’s witness just so much theological bafflegab? Utter nonsense to a people immersed in the sensual and the empirical? Isn’t Jesus whatever he means to me?
The Gospel reading for his feast day is taken from the last chapter of the Gospel according to St. John. It is a kind of testament to his own witness. An encounter between Jesus and Peter about following Christ is described within which a debate about “the disciple whom Jesus loved” who “also leaned on his breast at supper” is also related. “This is the disciple which beareth witness of these things and wrote these things, and we know that his witness is true,” we are told. But do we? And how? For the contemporary Church and for what passes for theology in contemporary circles, the writings of John are given rather short shrift historically. They are regarded as being later in their composition than the writings of Matthew, Mark and Luke and, of course, later than the writings of Paul.
That is to assume that whatever is earliest is somehow more true; a questionable assumption. Certainly for the bulk of the Christian tradition, historically speaking John’s Gospel has had a kind of primacy theologically. Distinguishing the synoptic gospels as they have come to be called, namely Matthew, Mark and Luke, from John’s gospel, is a modern way of speaking that belongs to a sense of historical narrative as having primacy. But by definition, the historical aspect of things is much harder to determine. In the long end of the day, notwithstanding an almost endless series of theories and hypotheses, all we really have are the texts themselves. About the historical Jesus, suffice to say and safe to say that there is general scholarly consensus about his existence, but who exactly he is and who he thought he was continues to be the subject area of much discussion, assertion and opinion of varying quality.
The Feast of John sets before us the theological understanding of orthodox Christianity. It provides the essential insight and understanding of the Christian faith about who Jesus is and what he means for us and for our humanity. The historical questions are located within the primacy of the theological. “This then is the message.” And it is for our joy and for our good.
“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you”
Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. John the Evangelist
December 27th, 2011