Merry Christmas! Jesus is born, the gang’s all assembled at the manger. I hope your gang is assembling somewhere too to enjoy presents and dinner and chatter and love. But this is only the first day of Christmas. The world around us might jettison the trees and start putting up Valentine’s Day decorations tomorrow, but Christ followers are invited to live fully into this 12-day season of holiday holiness and cheer.
Next Sunday is the first Sunday in the season of Christmas. As always, the gospel reading appointed is the passage that opens John’s Gospel. Where Luke and Matthew begin their accounts with the birth of Jesus, and Mark just jumps in thirty years later when Jesus begins his public ministry, John goes deep into the pre-history. Way, way deep, to infinity and beyond. “In the beginning,” he begins, and by that he means before everything. Before anything was, when there was only God, God had a thought and it issued forth as a word, a word with the power of genesis.
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.
Before we get to the manger and the animals, the shepherds and the angels, the magi and the evil king, before we even get to Mary and her stranger-than-fiction pregnancy, we have this: a word. Not just any word: The Word. God’s Word – and God’s word is more than words. God’s word has the power to make real what did not exist before. God’s word is active, life-making. God’s word is creative, world-making.
How many eons did that Word exist before the time came for him to be given human life, to enter human history? And why did he come into visible being that night in Bethlehem?
There are ever more questions than answers. I only want us to hold this mystery as we worship at the manger this year: that the One whose birth we celebrate was the One who gave birth to us.
A blessed Feast of the Incarnation to you.
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