I hope you have all had – indeed I hope you are still having – a very happy Christmas. Many of the cards we have received refer to the peace and joy that has been associated with the celebration of Christ’s birth from the very beginning. Glory to God in the highest, sang the angels, and peace to his people of earth. We too have sung hymns and carols of peace and joyful praise. We have sat down to a special meal with friends and family. We have given and received presents, tokens of the love we feel for one another, and many of us have been surrounded by at least some of the people we love best. There are of course, for many if not indeed for all of us, vacant places at the table, friends and family dear to us, from whom we are separated by great distances, by death, or perhaps more sadly still by some terrible rift that has become for us unbridgeable. Yet we know in our hearts, as St Paul teaches us (Romans 8.38,39), that there is nothing in all creation that can separate us or them from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. We offer him the aching of our hearts, and he reaches out to all of us in his compassion.
St John too has a message of healing consolation, bringing us that deep sense of joy, within the love of God, that no one can take from us. God is light, he reminds us in this opening chapter. But God is also love, he tells us a little later in his letter, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. He is at one with St Paul in assuring us that there can be no separation within the love of God.
But when it comes to joy, he says something that is rather surprising, so surprising in fact that some early scribes copying it out thought it must be a mistake, and took the liberty of correcting it. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete (I John 1.4). That couldn’t be right, they said to themselves, and changed it from ‘our joy’ to ‘your joy’. I dare say the original author of this epistle did hope that his readers would find joy in what he was writing for them, but it was his own joy that could not be complete until he had truly shared his message with them. What did he mean?
Nowhere does the author of this epistle claim to have known Jesus personally, in the intimate way that St John the Apostle must have known him. What he does tell us is that he has had a wonderful experience of the word of life. Not only has he heard it; he says he has seen it with his eyes, he has touched it with his hands; and now he cannot rest until he has shared his experience with us, his readers. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. Only when every member of his Christian community has got it will his joy be complete. Until then he aches for them, and indeed for us, as I’m told one may feel pain for a limb that has been severed.
St John’s experience of the word of life stands in sharp contrast to that of Moses and the Israelites, as we saw it in our Old Testament reading. God used to speak to Moses face to face, we are told, as one speaks to a friend, but the tent of meeting was placed outside the camp, because the grumbling, rebellious nature of the people of Israel so tried his patience that he could not trust himself not to destroy them, if he came any closer (Exodus 33. 1-5). When Moses went into the tent, the people stood at a respectful distance. Yet in Jesus, in the words of the prologue to John’s gospel, the Word of life came to dwell among us – literally, he pitched his tent among us – in such close intimacy that there was no longer any distance at all between God and us. He placed himself in a position of such utter dependence and vulnerability, not just as a baby, but as a grown man too, that we could indeed harm him. Even when the soldiers came to arrest him, he resisted the temptation to call on the legions of angels that could have saved him.
We are all of us different, by nature and by the way each of us has been shaped by our experience of the word of life. Moses found the courage to speak God’s word to Pharaoh, and then to lead the rabble of God’s people out of Egypt, gradually shaping them in the deserts of Sinai for their new role as God’s chosen people. John the Apostle was such a close friend of Jesus that he could ask the question no one else dared ask. In the course of a long life, he would perhaps journey deeper than anyone else into the heart and mind of Jesus, his Friend and his Lord. Peter, entrusted with the full responsibility of leadership, would find the courage and the strength to follow his Master more closely than anyone else along the road that led to death by crucifixion. All three of them, amazing role models of courage and leadership, of friendship and devotion, with one thing in common.
Follow me. Each of them was called to follow the commands of God, or the leadership of Jesus wherever that leadership might take them. Just as each of us is called to follow Jesus in accordance with our own call, our own character, our own unique circumstances. But we are also called to follow Jesus as a community of Christian people, a community whose members are all equally loved by that same God, whose joy, like that of his servant John, will not be complete until all of us truly understand that He is light and life and love. In him there is no darkness, only a longing to forgive us our sins and our failures so that, walking with him in the light, we may have joyful fellowship with one another and with him, and so make his joy complete. It is in that spirit that he invites us to enter the circle of light and love and joy that welcomes us into his table fellowship, just as once the light in and around the manger welcomed the shepherds to the stable.