First Sunday After Christmas John 1:1-18

Many of us are acquainted with the lovely, fairly modern (1991) Christmas song, “Mary Did You Know?” It poses questions, asking them of Mary the Mother of Jesus. We all know the answers Mary would give to many of them would be, “Yes”, she knew – but that isn’t the point of the song.

The point is to impress on us, the listeners, the amazing miracle of a human baby who is also Incarnate God. At one point, the song paints a picture of a young mother holding her infant Son, cuddling Him to her. We warm to that Baby and His mother as we do to all young mothers and their tiny infants, but sometimes we need a reminder that this Baby, fully human, is also a glorious mystery, a Person beyond our understanding. Perhaps the song is asking us the same questions it asks Mary.

“Did you know that your baby boy Has walked where angels trod? And when you kiss your little baby You kiss the face of God Mary, did you know?”

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

We have just celebrated Christmas, the birth of Jesus, the birth of God as a human being. The Bible images read to us on Christmas, drawn as they are from Luke’s Gospel, have been comforting, heartwarming, and familiar. All of us respond with understanding and compassion to the pregnant young woman and her fiancé as they travel to Jerusalem. We rejoice with them as their baby Son is born, and we stand in awe with the shepherds as an angelic choir, surrounded by the glory of God, announces the Baby’s birth.

We have no problem with the human images. They make it easy to relate to the Christmas story, but then, in today’s Gospel, we have John’s cosmic image. “In the beginning,” before time and space even existed, before life came into being, before everything, “was the Word”. We can’t comprehend this. It goes beyond the ability of the human brain to imagine nothing, and though saying the word “nothing” may create an image in our mind, it is incorrect. The Word and God exist before there is anything.

And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Because we are human, we picture two separate entities, and yet, this is One Entity, this is God – which we celebrate in Trinity and as One. But in this unfathomable mystery there is something that we do understand, if only in part. Love! We have no problem when asked to imagine the love a mother feels for her unborn child and then the love she feels for the child when it is born. Fathers too feel this deep love, this incredible bond. And so, on a much deeper level, it is with God and the Word. They are bound together by Love, which we call the Holy Spirit.

The Word was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and without Him not one thing came into being.

John does not begin his Gospel with Jesus’ birth, but with the creation, telling us that there is not one thing that Jesus did not create. This ties Jesus very closely to the everyday stuff of life. Before He was born to a poor couple and laid in a manger, Jesus had worked to create dirt, water, air, and all life, and all of this was created by and through Love.

What has come into being in Him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

John carefully and beautifully shows us how the two great ages – our time-bound world and eternity – coexist in the person of Jesus. By weaving the story of the eternal Word with the story of that Word being made flesh, we see that those two ages are not mutually exclusive. In the Person Jesus, we can meet eternity in the here and now.

Mary, did you know?”

Through Jesus’ life, His words, His actions, we see the will of God lived out in the flesh. John’s prologue tries to stand at the crossover point between this age and the next. For John that nexus is the manger, when the Word became flesh and “pitched His tent” among us. God did not send Jesus to redeem merely His birthplace in Bethlehem, or even all of first-century Palestine, but to redeem all creation.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

To see Jesus as the Light of the World is to have a small grasp of what it means to be His follower. Are we ready to accept the Light? Are we ready for the Light of Christ to shine in our darkness? What about the parts of us we hope no one notices? What about the parts we like to keep tucked away, hidden? Are we ready for the Light of Christ to shine there, too?

To be one of Jesus’ followers, we must be ready and open to having our own lives and souls flooded with the Light and Love of Jesus. Not only that, because Jesus is the Light, as His followers we must be the Light bearers and the Light bringers to the world. The Word of God came down to pitch His tent in our day to day existence, and we must both invite Him in and then be willing to do the work He gives us.

Do we know?

It is not an easy thing to accept the Light into our lives. It is much easier to go on giving lip service to our faith without accepting the work of love and sacrifice to which we are called. We are, after all, only human. It is only too easy to not recognize Jesus in our everyday lives, to neglect Him, rather than greet Him in every person we meet.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through Him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was His own, and His own people did not accept Him.

But we are the ones who are called to work against our human nature whenever it hides from us the Light of Christ, the Light of Love that shines in the world, in each of us, in every place in every person. We are the ones called to be first to offer help, and comfort, support and caring, strength and sustenance, to whomever Jesus puts in our path. We are the ones who must see Him in others, because we are the ones baptized into the mystery that is the Incarnation.

But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

Through our baptism, we have been given the power to become the children of God, but to be God’s children requires of us many changes. Blood, and flesh, and the will of man must diminish in importance; while giving, sacrificing, loving, for Jesus and in His Name, become increasingly the center of our lives. The surface, what we see, a loving mother and baby – these are comfortable images. We like comfort. But by focusing on the surface, living on the surface, we miss the mystery that is God. We are the ones called to look for, to live in, to walk in this great mystery, the mystery of Love that is Christ.

When you kiss your little baby You kiss the face of God Mary, did you know?”

What John wants us to understand is that: the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. John wants us to understand that this action on the part of God changes everything, changes us, our lives, the whole world. What John is saying is that Christmas is not an event within history. Christmas is the invasion of time by eternity.

Let us pray:

O Lord Jesus Christ come dwell in our hearts this Christmastide, so that our lives and the lives of all we love may be full of joy and peace. May no ill-temper, impatience, envy, or jealousy spoil the gladness of this blessed time. Fill us with awe at the mystery of Your Incarnation, and may Love shine in our midst, bringing warmth and light to all our hearts and minds. Grant this Lord Jesus, we pray, for Your Love and mercy’s sake. Amen.