Christ Church

“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.

It is this teaching which counters the idea that the life of Christ is but an appearance, a kind of mirage, what is called “docetism” and which  insists on the radical opposition of the sensible and the intellectual. We have in our own day various forms of such an opposition that diminish the fuller understanding of the Christmas and Christian message. God as light and life is the love of God in whom we find the truth and dignity of our humanity. We are enfolded in that love and light for such is the meaning of our life with God.

This is the disciple, as John tells us in a kind of autobiographical and rather personal note, “which beareth witness of these things, and wrote these things, and we know that his witness true”.  Just because he says so? No. The words are strong words, a witness is, like Stephen, a martyr; and truth is an unveiling, an unforgetting, and as such a making known of what always is. It is not invention or assertion,  mere opinion. The witness of John in his Gospel and his Epistle is the fruit of contemplation, a holding to the wonder of God in the wonder of God with us which counters the reductive simplicities of the opposition between God and world, God and man. The paradox, as this feast shows us, is that the distinction between Creator and created is not extinguished and erased but heightened through which there is the greater unity. For this is “our fellowship the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ”. Such is the taking up of our humanity into the life of God who always is “that [our] joy may be full”. This is the witness and “we know that his witness is true”.

Fr. David Curry
Meditation on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, 2021