by CCW | 27 December 2018 12:00
The Feast of St. John the Evangelist complements powerfully the essential Christian mystery of the Incarnation expressed in The Prologue of John’s Gospel on Christmas Eve. The reading from John’s first letter underscores the essential insight into the Incarnation. It is written to emphasize the reality of God being with us in the incarnate reality of Jesus Christ. It counters what will become the earliest Christian heresy, docetism, which argues that God could not become flesh, could not engage the world intimately; he only appears to have done so but not really. As such it plays into all the forms of gnosticism, ancient and modern, which see the world in largely dualist terms: spirit, good, matter, evil.
Our own culture is riven with dualisms of this sort both politically and environmentally. We have, I think, the hardest time understanding and appreciating the essential goodness of everything in the created order and end up attributing to the goodness of creation an evil which actually belongs to us and to our “thoughts, words and deeds”. How we use the created world is the real question. Christ’s Incarnation is the strongest possible affirmation of the goodness of the world, of matter, of the flesh, of the body. But even more, the Incarnation is the strongest possible affirmation of the truth of God in whom the truth and being of all things radically depends.
The Gospel too complements the point of the Epistle. Not only is Christ’s Incarnation and all that follows from it, such as the Resurrection, real and not merely an appearance, a kind of divine play-acting, as it were, but “the world itself could not contain the books that should be written,” John says, about the “many other things which Jesus did.” In other words, the Incarnation does not mean that God is collapsed into the world, rather the world is gathered into the radical truth of God. This affirms the goodness of the created order but only in relation to God.
Christ is “God and Man,” the creeds say, and that union contains a wonderful insight into God and to God with us. Christ, as the Athanasian Creed puts it, is “God and Man, yet he is not two, but One Christ, One, however, not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, but by taking Manhood into God.” Such an insight proclaims a deep truth that counters all the forms of our dualism. It is what Christmas proclaims and celebrates, the deep meaning of Emmanuel, God with us. John emphasizes in his Epistle what he shows in his Gospel. “That which was from the beginning” is the Word, “the Word [which] was with God and was God,” “the Word [which] was made flesh”, the Word “which we have heard, and seen, and looked upon and handled”. The Word of Life.
That Word “we declare unto you”, John says, “that you may have fellowship with us” in “our fellowship with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” This is our Christmas joy, and the fullness of joy. This is the light that overcomes all darkness. “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.” Such is the great and radical witness of the Christmas mystery. We celebrate the double mystery of God and of God with us only to realize that God with us is precisely the mystery of God himself.
Fr. David Curry
St. John the Evangelist, 2018
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/12/27/sermon-for-the-feast-of-st-john-the-evangelist-8/
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