“In him was life, and the life was the light of men”
The words of life and light counter our world of death and darkness. This is Christmas. God is life and we have no life apart from God in himself and God in us. God is light, the light which “shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not”, cannot overcome nor overwhelm the light. Darkness and death are overcome and understood only in the life and light of God. This is Christmas. The mystery of God is the mystery of God with us.
This is Christmas, the counter to our fears and hatreds masked as care and compassion or, vice versa, care and compassion masking our fears and hatreds of one another. In the mystery of Christmas we behold one another in a new and deeper way. We behold one another in God and that makes all the difference.
Christmas makes known to us with a kind of simple clarity the abiding and eternal truth of God as life and light. Word, life, and light all spiral down to the nativity or birth-day of Christ, to the making known in the world of time and space the eternal nature of God as life, light and love. God gives himself and is none the lesser for it. God’s life and God’s light belong to the self-diffusive nature of the Good. “In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him.” This is Christmas. It counters not only the fears and anxieties of our world but also our enmities and divisions that separate us from one another in our fear of the other. Herein is love, the love which bestows dignity and meaning upon our lives in the embrace of one another in the light of God’s love.
Christmas is a rich collage of images both in terms of Church and culture. It is easy to reduce it all to sentiment and emotion, the feelings of the season. The greater challenge is about the lifting up of our hearts and minds to the light and truth that the story of Christmas presents to us. That is, perhaps, why on Christmas Eve we have such thundering and magnificent words in the Epistle reading from Hebrews and in the Prologue of John’s Gospel. Nothing about the babe in the manger, nothing even about Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. The entire focus is on the life and light of God made known in the Word made flesh and upon what we behold in that eternal word dwelling with us. “We beheld his glory”, we are told in parenthesis, “the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth”. The Word which was in the beginning, which was God and which was with God is the creative Word without which nothing was made that was made. The Word which is the life and light of God is Christ Jesus, unnamed but proclaimed in parenthesis, almost as an aside, as “the only-begotten of the Father”, as the eternally begotten of the Father. There was not when he was not.
“No one has ever seen God”, John goes on to say, “the only-begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known”, literally, he has exegeted him. Theology is exegesis, a making known of things eternal and everlasting. God is God and God is with us in the mystery of Christmas. Christmas is not about our getting and our giving but about our beholding what is eternally given in God. Such is love in its deepest and truest sense and a far remove from our exploitative and manipulative use and abuse of one another. If we want to understand care and compassion we have to behold the love of God in Christ Jesus. We live through that love. It is not something for ourselves at the expense of one another. It is not a utilitarian good for some but not for others. It is omni populo, for all people. It is inescapably sacrificial. Christmas reveals to us the radical good of our humanity as grounded in God and in God’s self-diffusive love and goodness which can never be exhausted. “Love”, as Aquinas wisely notes, “is in the nature of a first gift through which all gifts are given”. The gift is life, and light, and love made known in the Word and Son of the Father.
That is the great challenge of these readings. They open us out to the radical nature of God as life, light and love, to use but one triad of concepts. Hebrews emphasises God’s Word as the eternal Word and Son of the Father which complements and explicates the wonder of the Gospel. In every way, our hearts and minds are raised up in the paradox of what has come down to us. We only live and love in the light of God’s love. This is Christmas. “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him”, we have often heard. Familiar words, perhaps, but words which belong to the truth of the Christmas message.
All of the other wonderful images that belong to the mystery of Christmas are gathered into these words of life, light, and love. All of the crowded complex and confusion of images and pictures that swirl around the humble scene of Bethlehem, the images of paradise restored, of a child and a mother, of ox and ass, of sheep and shepherd, of angels and prophecy, of a star and Magi-Kings, belong to these greater images that we behold on Christmas Eve. They reveal that the truth of our lives with one another is found in the truth of God who is God with us, Emmanuel. This is Christmas in the joy and peace which comes and only comes from God to us and for us. It is not of our making and doing. It belongs to our beholding what is made known tonight. The gift is God himself who gives himself without losing anything of himself. “Without forsaking what he was, he became what he was not”, Athanasius wonderfully says. God loses nothing of himself in becoming man. The life and light of God is never less but always more. That something more is the very nature of love. This is Christmas.
“In him was life, and the life was the light of men”.
Fr. David Curry
Christmas Eve, 2020