Don’t you think it a bit odd that, when the is a good story to tell, a story that we never tire of hearing, in today’s Gospel we have are given St John’s mysterious and rather obscure philosophising about Jesus’ birth. John is not at all interested in visits by angels, the virgin birth. There are no shepherds or wise men and certainly no oxen or asses. But as we’ll see John’s ideas do work their way through to storytelling in pictures.
John wants to explain why Jesus came into the world. It’s a daring project; how can any mere human being understand what God wants? John, however, has plenty of self-confidence. He takes us into the mind of God and tries to tell us what God is doing. But his language is difficult and leaves open a number of questions. The main question for me is: What was the Word which was in the beginning and started the whole project?
The writer of Proverbs thought it was WISDOM. He says (Chapter 8: 22-23) of Wisdom
“The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works,
before his deeds of old;
I was formed long ages ago,
at the very beginning, when the world came to be….
Then I was constantly at [God’s] side.
I was filled with delight day after day,
rejoicing always in His presence,
rejoicing in His whole world
and delighting in mankind.
I think Wisdom was behind the ordering of the world, the putting in its right place, that takes up so much of creation, but the writer of Proverbs also suggests that Delight and Love motivate the Wisdom. In Genesis we are told God thought his newly created world was good and we are frequently told that he loves the world that he made. Is LOVE the word we are looking for?
John himself does not mention Love here although he talks a lot about love elsewhere. In the passage we heard as our Gospel he talks about Light. Is LIGHT the word that was in the beginning?
Some of you will probably have spotted that in this opening to his Gospel, John is plainly referring to or echoing the very first words of the Bible and you will remember that Light was the first thing that God created. So LIGHT can’t be the word, but it is in a way the most important creation, because it started time. With light separated from darkness, there could be days, and with days weeks and years and hours and minutes. With time comes the possibility of remembering the past and hoping for the future. When John, possibly the same John who wrote the Gospel, envisages the end of the world and eternity, he imagines no more night and day, and no more need to remember and be sad or to hope for better things.
I promised we would have some proper Christmas story and it’s time to look at the picture in the service booklet. It’s a picture by Guido Reni called The Adoration of the Shepherds. I think Guido Reni was thinking of John’s Gospel because if you look carefully, you will see that all the light in the painting is coming from the baby Jesus. He’s like a light bulb- in fact he’s more like a light bulb than a newborn baby (new born, even recently born, babies are much smaller – there is one in the congregation to prove this.)
The baby shines out in the painting. Look at the faces of the shepherds around the baby. This is called The Adoration of the Shepherds, but the faces look more hopeful than adoring to me. These are shepherds, poor people who have a wretched life, and they have come to see a what might very ordinary scene- a newborn baby, but they are full of hope that this baby may change their lives. The light shining from the baby is indeed beginning to do that. Because light is often a sign of hope; we talk about light at the end of the tunnel when things that are going badly, begin, just begin, to look as if they may get better. Or when a lost traveller sees a small light far in the distance and thinks he may at last find somewhere to rest.
This is the light shining in the darkness and I suggest it’s the Word that was with God and was God. That word is HOPE that includes love and light and wisdom and it can make us hopeful, however dark the world is around us, just as it did those shepherds. Amen.