This year, the 7th day of Christmas falls on the first Sunday of Christmas. The Gospel appointed for this Sunday is John 1:1-18. Here is a reflection on that passage by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury:
It's a slightly strange way to start a Gospel you
might think. We expect something a bit more like the beginning of the other
Gospels: the story of Jesus's birth perhaps or his ancestry, or the story of
Jesus's arrival on the public scene.
But at the beginning of St John's Gospel what St
John does is to frame his whole story against an eternal background. And what
he's saying there is this: as you read this Gospel, as you read the stories
about what Jesus does, be aware that whatever he does in the stories you're
about to read is something that's going on eternally, not just something that
happens to be going on in Palestine at a particular date.
So when Jesus brings an overflow of joy at a wedding,
when Jesus reaches out to a foreign woman to speak words of forgiveness and
reconciliation to her, when Jesus opens the eyes of a blind man or raises the
dead, all of this is part of something that is going on forever. The welcome of
God, the joy of God, the light of God, the life of God – all of this is
eternal. What Jesus is showing on Earth is somehow mysteriously part of what is
always true about God.
And that's why it's central to this beginning of
John's Gospel – that he says the light shines in the darkness and the darkness
doesn't swallow it up. How could the darkness swallow it up? If these works of
welcome and forgiveness, of light and life and joy, are always going on, then
actually nothing can ever make a difference to them.
And that's why at the climax of this wonderful
passage, St John says, the Word of God, the outpouring of God's life, actually
became flesh and blood. And we saw it – we saw in this human life the eternal
truth about God. We saw an eternal love, an eternal relationship; we saw an
eternal joy and a light and a life.
So as we read these stories we know that nothing
at all can make a difference to the truth, the reality, they bring into the
world. This is indeed the truth; this is where life is to be found. And this
explains why at the end of St John's Gospel, he famously says that if we tried
to spell out all that this means, there would be no end of the books that could
be written.