Day: December 27, 2014

Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. John the Evangelist

“We have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you that eternal life,
which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us”

So much in a parenthesis! It is not by accident that the great Gospel of Christmas is from the Prologue of John’s Gospel and I think that it is most fitting and providential that The Feast of St. John the Evangelist is a Christmas feast. For with John we are provided with a royal feast of words that have deep spiritual meaning. His Gospel and his Epistles offer a profound insight into the theological meaning of Christmas.

He bears eloquent testimony to the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” his Gospel begins, locating the Christian understanding already within an intellectual and spiritual milieu that our rather prosaic and materialistic culture finds hard to comprehend. Such wisdom, Augustine notes, for instance, is found already in the philosophical cultures of pagan antiquity and he would probably allow in the wisdom of the Hebrews. He could not know that it would also be regarded as the received wisdom of Islam. But the point of Christian emphasis lies in what is not to be found in the libri platonici, the books of the Platonists, but which lies at the heart of the Christian understanding, namely, “and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” It is the great Christmas mystery articulated so profoundly in the words of John.

John’s First Epistle bears strong testimony to that insight and truth, echoing the theme of the great Christmas Gospel. “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,” he says, that is what he declares unto us. “These things,” moreover, “write we unto you, that your joy may be full.” There is a kind of intellectual intensity to his argument, and a sense of something new and wonderful, the intensity of truth.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint John the Evangelist

The collect for today, the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

MERCIFUL Lord, we beseech thee to cast thy bright beams of light upon thy Church, that it being enlightened by the doctrine of thy blessed Apostle and Evangelist Saint John may so walk in the light of thy truth, that it may at length attain to the light of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 1:1-5
The Gospel: St. John 21:19-25

de Smet, St. JohnJohn and his brother James (St. James the Greater) were Galilean fishermen and sons of Zebedee. Jesus called the two brothers Boanerges (“sons of thunder”), apparently because of their zealous character; for example, they wanted to call down fire from heaven on the inhospitable Samaritans. John and James, together with Peter, belonged to the inner group of the apostles who witnessed the Transfiguration and the agony in Gethsemane. It was John and Peter whom Jesus sent to prepare the final Passover meal.

In the lists of disciples, John always appears among the first four, but usually after his brother, which may indicate that John was the younger of the two.

According to ancient church tradition, St. John the Evangelist was the author of the New Testament documents that bear his name: the fourth gospel, the three epistles of John, and Revelation. John’s name is not mentioned in the fourth gospel (but 21:2 refers to “the sons of Zebedee”), but he is usually if not always identified as the beloved disciple. It is also generally believed that John was the “other disciple” who, with Peter, followed Jesus after his arrest. John was the only disciple at the foot of the cross and was entrusted by Christ with the care of his mother Mary.

After Christ’s resurrection and ascension, John, together with Peter, took a leading role in the formation and guidance of the early church. John was present when Peter healed the lame beggar, following which both apostles were arrested. After reports reached Jerusalem that Samaria was receiving the word of God, the apostles sent Peter and John to visit the new Samaritan converts. Presumably, John was at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15). He is not mentioned later in the Acts of the Apostles, so he appears to have left Palestine.

Christian writers of the second and third centuries say that St. John lived in Asia Minor in the last decades of the first century, acting as a kind of patriarch to the churches there. Both Justin Martyr (c. 100-165) and Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130-200) say that John lived in Ephesus and wrote his gospel there. It is believed that he died a natural death at a very old age around the end of the first century. That would make St. John the only apostle who did not die a martyr.

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