Sometimes the moment and the liturgy come together so perfectly, I feel like there’s nothing I can say that would add to it or subtract from it. The last two or three years, I’ve had one of those moments during the Christmas Eve service at my parish church.
It comes toward the end of a traditional Christmastime service of lessons and carols, just before everyone sings “Silent Night” by candlelight. And even watching the livestream at a distance, I get a little misty-eyed. The lights dim, and the pastor begins reading from the prolog, or first chapter of John: In the beginning was the Word […]
And a lay reader at the lectern responds from the first chapter of Genesis: In the beginning, when God began to create the heavens and the earth […] So it goes:
From John, […] and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
And Genesis, […] the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
John: He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
Genesis: Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
And John: 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 overtake it. […]
And so it goes, throughout the reading. All the while, acolytes bearing candles lit from those on the altar, go through the darkened sanctuary, lighting candles as worshipers spread the light and the readings continue, alternating from John’s gospel and Genesis. Rather than trying to rehash it it in my own words (or those of the New Revised Standard Version [updated edition] I’m quoting here), I’ll just let you watch it in the livestream video above (beginning at 1:06:24). At the end, the congregation joins in singing “Silent Night” by candlelight.
We’ve been doing it for several years now. And I’m blown away, every time.
Even in the 1980s and 90s when I was a defiant member of the “n-o-n-e-s,” adults who tell survey researchers they have no particular religion, I would tear up a little singing “Silent Night” at candlelight Christmas Eve services. One, outside the iconic lighthouse on Sanibel Island when Debi and I were visiting my parents, is among my most precious memories.
But there’s nothing like the combined effect of John, Genesis, candlelight and Christmas Eve in myparish church to hit me where I live and move and have my being.
As luck (and the common lectionary) would have it, the first chapter of John came up again the Sunday after Christmas. This time I was able to go to church in person (holidays like Christmas Eve are a little iffy since I’m immunocompromised, and so many people come in from out-of-town to visit family, bringing with them whatever bugs are going around in Chicago, St. Louis or points more distant). We have a discussion group, called Dwelling in the Word, that meets after the service and follows the lectionary a week in advance. John 1 (the pericope for Christmas II) was our assigned reading that day.
We’re asked to reflect on questions including “What captures my attention? […] What do I wonder?” What captured my attention, hearing the familiar passage from John read aloud again, was how well I think it sums up the whole bible from Genesis to Revelation. Think of it as a scriptural elevator speech.
“Why, it’s all there!” I blurted. “Why can’t we say this every Sunday instead of the creed?”
People in the group are used to hearing me go off on rabbit trails, and no one followed me down this one. So when Debi and I got home, I got out a copy of The Gospel of John: A Beginner’s Guide to the Way, the Truth, and the Life, by Amy-Jill “AJ” Levine, which we’re reading for an upcoming faith formation class. An emerita professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville who has deep knowledge of Judaism and Christianity alike, Levin says John’s light metaphors are fundamental to both faith traditions:
Jesus is for John the light of the world. According to Proverbs 6:23, “the commandment (Hebrew: mitzvah) is a lamp and the teaching (Hebrew: torah), a light.” This intertextual connection suggests that for John, and to John’s readers, Jesus and the Torah, including all the commandments, are inseparable. The earliest followers of Jesus were Jews (this should not be news), and so they both saw him in their Scriptures, from Genesis 1:1 on, and they interpretd him in light of those Scriptures. (xvi-xvii)
I’ve always had strong mixed feelings about John. On the one hand, he condemns “the Jews” in a way that helped give rise to 2,000 years of antisemitism. On the other hand, I can’t unlearn European history, but I’m persuaded by Raymond Brown and other scholars who maintain St. John the Evangelist, or whoever wrote the gospel as we have it, wasn’t mad at “the Jews” in general but felt wronged instead by the leaders of a local synagogue, perhaps in Ephesus, that excommunicated his group of early Christians. (For convenience I’m going to call the author, or final redactor, John and assume he wrote in Ephesus; it’s my little way of reminding myself he didn’t have it in for all Jews everywhere.)
Whatever else you can say about St. John the Evangelist, he (or she, or “they,” if you accept Brown’s thesis that John went through several revisions) was a skilled poet. One of the best, in my opinion.
One thing poets do is to make words serve double duty. “To bring light,” says Levine, by way of example, “to shine as light, whether the subject is Jesus, or his followers, means more than just turning on a switch, It means being like God in the act of creation” (xviii). Robert Kysar, in his Augsburg Commentary on John, notes a similar creative ambiguity in the evangelist’s metaphors for the Word of God (logos in New Testament Greek) in the prolog, which he considers a hymn possibly predating the rest of the gospel:
Many of the things ascribed to the logos in the prolog are parallel to statements made [in the Hebrew bible] of wisdom. Logos may have been a Christian counterpart to wisdom and molded in the image of that motif. But in Hellenistic thought too logos was prominent. […] It appears that the author of the hymn has deliberately chosen a Greek word with a full variety of associations. By doing this he implicitly claims that Christ fulfills the expectations of the whole of the human race, Gentile and Jew.” (28-29)
So in Ephesus in 90 CE, so today in a candlelit church sanctuary in Springfield, Illinois.
After an interpolation about John the Baptist, who “himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light,” the evangelist says of Jesus:
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.
There’s a lot going on here — what can I make of it all? For one thing, I can’t help thinking John the Evangelist (or an editor) is taking another veiled potshot at “the Jews” down the street in Ephesus. I wish he wouldn’t keep doing that! But, as Raymond Brown argues in a thoughtful 1989 essay titled “The Johannine World for Preachers,” sometimes we just have to let John be John:
By all means wrestle with such verses; ask yourself and your hearers what Jesus can possibly mean by such words; be puzzled and even offended; but do not silence this Jesus by deciding what he should not have said and what your hearers should not hear.
More basically, the first chapter of John develops what scholars (and Wikipedia) call a “high Christology,” which can be described as a “perspective that focuses on [Jesus’] divinity”; his pre-existence; and […] the cosmic significance of Christ.” This opens the door to all kinds of interesting speculation, from Fr. Richard Rohr’s cosmic, or universal, Christ to Finnish theologian Tuomo Mannerma’s concept of the presence of Christ in the faith of a believer.
But all that’s a little too much for Christmas Eve.
Brown is a pretty good wordsmith himself, and in a remarkable passage that echoes several of John’s more powerful metaphors, Brown reminds me that even armchair theologians like me can take a break, quit pontificating, and let John be John. At the end of the day, when dusk is gathering and it’s time to break out the candles, John’s message is one of great simplicity:
For the Evangelist, Jesus is not the founder of Christianity who lived “way back then.” He is alive and well, giving life to every branch on the vine, calling his sheep by name and expecting them to recognize his voice. He knows those who believe in him and he loves them; and he expects love in return, not faith alone. The sophisticated preacher who has written off “Jesus loves me” as appropriate to another style of Christianity is not going to do justice to John.
As in Ephesus in 90 CE, so in central Illinois on Christmas Eve.
Links and Citations
Raymond Brown, “The Johannine World for Preachers,” Interpretation, 43.1 (Jan. 1989) rpt. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/002096438904300106. A link to this essay, one of several downloadable articles by Fr. Brown, is available at Matthew D. Montonini, Raymond E. Brown, S.S.: A Celebration of His Life and Legacy https://raymondebrownss.weebly.com/.
Robert Kysar, John: Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986).
Amy-Jill Levine, The Gospel of John: A Beginner’s Guide to the Way, the Truth, and the Life (Nashville: Abingdon, 2014).
Review of Tuomo Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification, trans. Kirsi I. Stjerna, Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/545795.Christ_Present_in_Fait.
Richard Rohr, “Who Is Christ,” Daily Meditations, Center for Action and Contemplation https://cac.org/daily-meditations/who-is-christ-2018-12-02/.
[Uplinked Jan, 4, 2025]
Ordinary Time 