Sermon for the Feast of St. John the Evangelist

admin | 27 December 2016

“Even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written”

“Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” Ecclesiastes observes, an observation, no doubt, with which many a student would concur. John, too, at the very end of the last chapter of his Gospel reflects on the writing of books; somehow the reality and full meaning of Christ would comprise more books than what the world could contain. There is always something more and more to the meaning of Christ as Word.

The Word proclaimed “at sundry times and in diverse manners … unto the fathers by the prophets”, Hebrews reminds us, “hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son.” That Word and Son is the Word made flesh, as John reminds us in his powerful Prologue read as the great Gospel of Christmas Eve. There is a focus on Word; Word proclaimed, Word made flesh, but also the Word as written “even if the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”

The Feast of John the Evangelist belongs to our Christmas observances. His Epistles and his Gospel provide the strongest testimony to the idea and reality of the Incarnation, the greatest insight into the mystery of God with us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. “That which was from the beginning,” he says, echoing at once the opening words of his Prologue but also the opening words of Genesis, “which we have heard,” he says, “which we have seen with our eyes,” he says, “which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life,” he says, that is what “declare we unto you.” And to what end? “That ye also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” It is a remarkably concise and stirring theological testament to the Incarnation and the Trinity, to the deeper mystery of Christmas.

We can only have access to this understanding by way of the Word written. True, the Gospel passage refers to the “many other things which Jesus did” that have not been written, things which go beyond the scope of books that the world could contain. Many other things done and said, too, we may reasonably infer, allowing room for the various oral traditions alluded to in the New Testament, perhaps. But the deeper point is that Jesus as Word cannot be contained either by books or by the world or by us at the same time as it is only through the Word proclaimed, Incarnate, and written that we can know these things. “These things write we unto you,” John says to us directly in his First Epistle, “that your joy may be full,” concluding with the coda “that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” Light and Son conveyed through the majesty of the divine Word proclaimed, Incarnate and written.

We can only have access to the mystery of God with us through the mediation of the Word. John in his writings is the Evangelist of the Word par excellence who opens us out to the great wonder of the Incarnation and to the means of our engagement with it. The divine Word is inexhaustible and yet it is our joy and privilege to let that Word shape and move our hearts and minds, to let that Word take flesh in us as the moving principle of our thoughts and actions. John counters the easy gnosticisms, ancient and modern, which view the material world as a static evil from which we seek to escape in some flight of spiritual fantasy. That is to deny the truth of the Word made flesh, the Word proclaimed and written which bears eloquent testimony to the divine Word which creates and redeems, the divine Word in which we have fellowship with the mystery of God as Trinity.

That the world could not contain the books that should be written is testament to the inexhaustible mystery of God. It does not mean that God is unthinkable; only that God is far more and beyond all human knowing. John’s last word is a check on our human hubris that tries to reduce all things to ourselves. The witness of John the Evangelist is about the mystery of God with whom we have fellowship and joy by being possessed by God rather than presuming to possess God ourselves. Through his witness “we beh[o]ld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father”, the one who is “full of grace and truth”. That is more than all the books that could conceivably be written and that the world could contain. The mystery of God is always more.