Our series of Advent reflections begins on Sunday. This Advent we will be pondering our way slowly through the opening verses of John's Gospel, the famous passage which starts "In the beginning was the Word". There will be a short thought each day, some questions to think or talk about, and an All Age suggestion - something practical to do, individually or as a family.
Join us for the journey! Check back here each day from Sunday Dec 1.
INTRODUCTION
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All
things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into
being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of
all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome
it.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was
John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe
through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.
The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
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 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.
And 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 1.1-14
These opening words
of John’s Gospel are some of the most familiar in the New Testament.
They feature as the climax of every Carol service, and are the opening words of
the Christmas Midnight Mass, read in a darkened church by the light of a single
candle as the service begins. They don’t contain any of the traditional figures
in the Christmas story – no shepherds, wise men, angels or stars, no Mary or
Joseph, no manger, no mention of evil King Herod – but this reading says
“Christmas” to many people just as powerfully as any nativity play might. In fact, it’s the only Gospel reading which
the Church of England insists must be read some time on Christmas night or
morning. We could, bizarrely, leave out the stories about the birth of Jesus,
but we must read this one in our worship.
But what has it got
to do with Christmas at all? The answer is that this passage, usually known
rather prosaically as the Prologue does the same job in John’s Gospel as the
familiar nativity stories do in Matthew and Luke. (It actually continues to vs.
18, but the passage we read at Christmas stops at vs 14, so I will too). They
all function like the trailer for a film or the overture to a ballet or opera, giving
hints about what is to come, what the story is going to be about and how it all
might end.
Matthew and Luke
tell stories to do this. Luke tells us about a child born to poor parents,
lying in a manger because there is “no room at the inn” and about shepherds –
ordinary, humble people – being first to hear about him. Luke’s Gospel will be full of stories about
Jesus meeting poor people, outcasts, women , those at the bottom of the heap.
He will be Good News for them. Matthew’s nativity stories are about strange
foreign Magi, travelling a great distance to worship a new king, not really
understanding what they are getting themselves into, and about the Jewish king,
Herod, who sees this child only as a rival. This story will be good news for
all nations, but there will be opposition and danger from those who feel
threatened by this.
The “trailer” in the
Gospel of John, though, gives us a series of poetic images; images of light and
darkness, of birth, of new life, of new creation. These are the themes of the
stories he’ll tell about Jesus.
Through this series
of Advent reflections, we will explore these themes, phrase by phrase and think
about the way they point forward to the rest of the story, and how they might
be Good News for us. Each day there will
be some Reflection Points, and an All Age Idea for something to do in
response to the reflection.
A note about “John”
The fourth Gospel is
commonly called the “Gospel according to John”, but like the other three
Gospels, we don’t know the actual name of the author. It was ascribed to the
Apostle John, the Galilean fisherman called from his nets to follow Jesus (Matthew
4.20), but it’s too late in date, around the end of the first century, to be
written by him. It might have come from a Christian community founded by John,
and preserve some of the stories he told, though. The New Testament also
contains three letters ascribed to “John”, and the Book of Revelation. The
letters might be by the same author, whoever he was, or from the same
community, but the Book of Revelation is rather different in style and content,
so scholars think it’s less likely to be from the same source. For convenience,
I shall refer to the author as John in these reflections, whoever actually
wrote the Gospel.
For more on John’s
Gospel see this lecture on John's Gospel from Yale University. https://youtu.be/71fOqLomzIk
