“NATIVITY DAY LOVE”
Saint John 1. 1-14
Populus Zion: 25 December Anno Domini 2013
Father Jay Watson SSP
Of course God has no birth day. The Holy Trinity has no nativity or moment of conception, delivery, or arrival. God is not just omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent, God is both infinite and eternal. God is without beginning, middle or end. God is. I AM. The Lord is truly alpha and omega but not in a way that we could ever understand.
“In the beginning” doesn’t mean that God had a beginning but that the created universe did…Scripture as reduced to stone, animal skin, papyrus, and paper had a beginning. The Church had a beginning. The Scriptures, the Bible, had a beginning…but THE WORD had no origin. The Word which you confess in The Creed… “was begotten of His Father before all worlds…God of God…” This is deep primary theology, “God talk” that bespeaks the Son of God’s existence outside time and His total sharing of the Godhead in essence and substance. There is One God in three persons. There has always been a Triune One Lord and God. The Word was before Genesis 1.1…but not in a time-line kind of way, in a Godly I AM kind of way!
The blessed Apostle and Evangelist Saint John the Divine, “the theologian,” the beloved Disciple, did not know the Son of God when He was the pre-incarnate Malek Adonai, the “Angel of the Lord” the way Adam and Eve did; the way Abraham and Jacob did; the way Moses, Aaron and Joshua did; or the way Samuel and David did. John was blessed far above all these Old Testament titans of the faith. Or as John’s contemporary fellow deacon wrote to the Hebrews in diaspora: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He hath appointed Heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds; Who being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.” [Heb. 1.1-3]
John’s prologue is the appointed Gospel for Christmas Day because Christmas is about the Incarnation into the Flesh of God the 2nd Person. God the Father is Spirit. God the Holy Spirit is Spirit. But The Son enfleshed is both God and Man.
The Son, as God, was before Genesis 1.1 and in Genesis 1, along with the Spirit and the Father was active and working creation. “All things were made by Him,” Him being the Son of God, “and without Him,” the Son, “nothing was made that was made.” This God Who was born in time, in a place, according to the plans of the Trinity: “but when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.” [Gal. 4.4-5] He was given the Name above all names: Jesus—which means Savior, but He was the Christ, the Anointed One sent to Redeem…buy back by the purchase price of His physical work and obedience and by His own Body and Blood. This is what the Christ Mass is all about. You don’t have Spirits, the 1st and 3rd Persons of the God Head, fixing the mistake, the sinful treason and destruction of Eden, the poisoning of all mankind, and the attempted murder of God, by being the Second and Perfect Adam…they can’t…they are not flesh and blood. But the Son of God could and did obey where Adam, Abraham, the Israelites, David, the Baptist, John the Evangelist, and all of you do not obey. The Son of God with His Body was nailed to the Tree—did bleed the cleansing Flood of Grace to wash away all your sinful trespasses. The Christ Mass makes possible the Easter Mass, The Ascension and Pentecost Mass, and all of your Communions with the Godhead and it’s Apostle of your Peace—the God/Man Christ Jesus!
The Baptist, says John Zebedee, was the Voice for that’s what Angelic Heralds do—they announce, trumpet, and broadcast the Good News of the Good One! The Evangelist wants you to know that the Son of God is not only Our Man/God, the Crucified Suffering Servant of Esaias, but also the God/Man Who is “light of light, very God of very God, begotten not made.” John’s Gospel uses this motif of “light” wherein the other Three Evangelists do not. Light…something fallen man understands.
The experts tell us that all babies are born with three instinctual fears: the fear of falling, the fear of loud noises, and the fear of either reptiles or the dark…which is the same thing as Satan the serpent is darkness, spiritual black. Darkness has no positive being but is the absence of light. Before Genesis 1.1 when all there was, was the Beatific Inter-Trinitarian Love and Communion of the Godhead…it was pure Light. Light gives light, life gives life, and love shares love with the beloved—all of you, beloved of your Father, In The Son, + through the Spirit. Blackness, darkness, is the sinful decay and rot of the good, true, and beautiful.
Adam and his offspring was not just plunged into a world of thorns, pain, dust, sweat, and decay leading to death, but also into the dark…the cold and lonely dark. Jesus reverses all of that. Jesus takes away the long dark night of your soul by filling you up with Light: The Light of His tender touch—His soothing Word of forgiveness and acceptance. Everyone wants to belong, to have a home that is warm and welcoming. Everyone needs food, water, clothes, and shelter…everyone needs medicine for pain and balm for wounds…yes, but more than all of these things everyone needs to be needed, to be embraced and kissed and loved. The Light of Jesus’ face giving faith to receive His Grace is Your Christ Mass.
As a plant, a sunflower for example, turns towards the sun up in the sky, indeed, follows it during the course of the day—turning to always receive its warming and growing rays of radiance, so too the Christian, the brethren of Christ and children of the Father, turn by the Holy Ghost to receive Jesus’ countenance through His Word and through His Sacramental Word. The Word is always the same: “I love you, I have made all things well, come to me and have Peace—have Me!”
“And the Word was made Flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of Grace and Truth.”
Come now and have Him dwell in you again: A Blessed Christ Mass.
In the Name of The Father and of + The Son and of The Holy Ghost
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