by CCW | 27 December 2024 10:00
Nowhere is the doctrinal paradox and meaning of Christmas more wonderfully and clearly stated than on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist. He is the theologian par excellence as the early Church recognized. Like the eyes of an eagle soaring high into the sun, John sees most deeply into the mystery of God. We largely see through the eyes of John. His Gospel symbol is the eagle, just as in many of our Churches, the Scriptures are read from an eagle lectern.
His witness and writings enlightened the Church’s understanding of “the light of [God’s] truth” that the Church “walk[ing] in the light of thy truth … may at length attain to the light of everlasting life,” as the Collect puts it. Life and light, just as we heard on Christmas Eve from the Prologue of his Gospel for “in him was life, and the life was the light of men.” This morning we read from his 1st Epistle and from the last Chapter of his Gospel. Beginnings and endings even as the Revelation of St. John the Divine, which might also be reasonably attributed to him, proclaims Jesus as Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending. It is really all about our being gathered into the life and light of God.
What that means for us is signalled in these readings. What is it? It is our joy, the joy of our fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ in the bond of the Holy Spirit. It is from John especially that we learn the meaning of the Incarnation and the Trinity. John teaches us the most about Jesus as the Son of the Father and about the Holy Spirit, sent from the Father in the name of the Son (Jn. 14.26), and sent by the Son from the Father to us (Jn. 15.26). He who is the eternally and only-begotten of the Father, comes from the Father into the world and leaves the world and goes to the Father (Jn 16.28). This exitus, going forth, and reditus, returning, is our joy and our salvation, not the “conversion of the Godhead into flesh,” thus ceasing to be God, but “by taking of manhood into God” (Athanasian Creed[1], BCP, p. 697). Such is the doctrinal paradox of the Incarnation that Christ is true God and true man.
Something of these deeper theological truths, born out of the writings of John, are signalled to us in these readings this morning. The Uncontainable becomes contained, the uncreated Creator becomes a created being but without the annihilation of either. The distinction of Creator and created, of God and Man is held together in the unity and truth of God. The Epistle emphasizes the very truth of the Word made flesh: “that which was from the beginning” – from the eternity of God – “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled” is nothing less than “the Word of life” to which “we have seen and bear witness,” John says. That life which was manifested, made known, is “eternal life,” made known for our fellowship in that eternal life of the Trinity. That life is light for “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all,” for this is “the light [that] shineth in darkness, and the darkness overcame it not.”
The Gospel reminds us that everything that is written in these writings is from “the disciple which beareth witness of these things, and wrote these things,” and whose “witness is true.” And yet the Incomprehensible made somehow comprehensible, even in terms of the limits of sense perception – what has been heard, and seen and handled – is not collapsed into the world such that divinity is eclipsed. The paradox of Incarnation and Trinity means, as John tells us, “that many other things which Jesus did, the which if they should be written, … even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.” The God who is revealed in the world cannot be contained by the world or by human thinking and writing. God is always more, always “superabundant.” And we are always more truly ourselves in our essential humanity in him.
God’s Word is more than though not less than God’s Word written. It is the living and eternal Word of God who is God’s eternal Son made flesh and man for us. And why? For our joy, our good, as found in their eternal fellowship.
John the Evangelist is John the Theologian. His Epistle counters the early heresy of docetism which makes Christ’s life and crucifixion a mere seeming, a kind of play-acting, and thus denies the great insight and truth that Christ is the Word of God who, eternally with God, becomes the Word made flesh, God with us, without the loss or forsaking of either his divinity or his humanity. For the one, his divinity, reveals to us the deeper truth and hope of the other, our humanity. What is that except our fellowship with God and in God as “partakers of the divine nature”?
Such is the restoration of our humanity in Christ to our fellowship with God in himself. John proclaims our end in that end that shall not end, that end which is our beginning and ending in him in whom is all our joy. Here is our Christmas joy made manifest through the doctrine or teaching of John the Apostle and Evangelist. Here is the radical meaning and truth of Christmas! Enjoy!
Fr. David Curry
Feast of John the Evangelist, 2024
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2024/12/27/sermon-for-the-feast-of-st-john-the-evangelist-13/
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