Day: December 27, 2021

Sermons

Meditation on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist

“His witness is true”

The intellectual and the sensual are not set in opposition but reconciled in the truth and light of God. Such, we might say, is the witness of John the Evangelist, whose feast day is one of the feasts of Christmas, along with St. Stephen’s Day and Holy Innocents. All three are placed in the Prayer Book with the Christmas season thus inescapably integrated into the doctrine of the Incarnation and its meaning for us in our lives.

With John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and who, in a lovely image of intimacy,  “leaned on his breast” at the last supper, we have love-in-contemplation. But this contemplation is not a flight from creation and the world but the highest form of its redemption. Once again, as the Feast of Thomas at the end of Advent, and with yesterday’s feast of Stephen on the day after Christmas, we see the inseparable connection between Christmas and Easter.

The Epistle for today is from 1 John 1 and acts as a commentary on the great Christmas Gospel from the Prologue of John’s Gospel, itself a commentary and further extension of Genesis 1. “In the beginning God … in the beginning was the Word”, the Word which is God and is προς τον θεον, always towards God, the eternal Word in eternal motion, going forth and returning into the principle of its eternal repose. That Word is Christ incarnate “which was from the beginning”, from the principle, and which “we have heard”, “seen and looked upon”, and “handled”. That Word is “the Word of life”. Such is John’s witness signaled in the Gospel reading today from the last chapter of John’s Gospel which concerns the life of the Church following the Resurrection. His witness to the Resurrection is a further attestation of the Incarnation. The themes are inseparably connected.

In the darkness of nature’s year and in the darkness of the uncertainties and fears of our own world and day, John teaches us “that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” His witness is a profound insight into the radical nature of God as light and life, the twin themes which belong to the pageant of Christmas and Easter and which illuminate, shape, and inform the Christian understanding. It is a reflective, meditative, indeed, contemplative understanding of the mystery of God in himself and with us. That mystery, and this is John’s great witness, transcends and counters any and all forms of gnostic dualism; at once aware of the immensity of God in Christ whose words and deeds “even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written,” (the word is βιβλια, biblia), and yet intimately with us. To anticipate a later creedal statement, the Incarnation is “not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, but by taking of Manhood into God … not by confusion of substance, but by unity of Person” (Athanasian Creed). Such is the legacy of the witness of John in a kind of direct succession of thought. It is revealed in a parentheses: “(for the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us)”. It is something made known which changes how we think about everything.

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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

Tilman Riemenschnieder, 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.

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