Second Sunday after Christmas
The Reverend Canon Celia Thomson
As a present for one of my nephews this Christmas I bought Tim Peake’s book, Hello, is this planet Earth? And I have to confess that it was rather hard to part with it. So I was delighted to see that after Christmas it was reduced to half-price at Waterstones and I bought it for myself with a book token I’d been given recently. The book is a collection of stunning photographs of the earth taken by Tim Peake from the International Space Station. In the introduction he writes “one of the remarkable things about seeing the Earth from space is that by day, with the naked eye, it’s very hard to spot any signs of human habitation. Instead, our planet reveals itself as a vast geological puzzle, its features spanning entire continents, sculpted by nature’s forces and the passage of time....By night it’s a different story. You can easily trace the pattern of human migration and settlement by the lights of towns, cities, motorways and manmade structures.... It’s impossible to look down on Earth from space and not be mesmerised by the fragile beauty of our planet.”
We need this perspective on our planet in facing all the challenges that lie ahead of us, we need to see the bigger picture, we need to see the world we inhabit as part of the wider universe so that we can wonder and be grateful for the conditions that allow life on earth in all its forms, that allow human flourishing, in contrast to the other planets we know of. Science explains the how of our existence, but it doesn’t explain the why. The why is God, our creator, and this is the connection John’s gospel makes for us in speaking of the Word of God made flesh, dwelling among us. I’m sorry that the first part of the gospel reading was not printed on the service sheet, but I really wanted you to hear it, in case you weren’t in church on Christmas morning. This is because the Christmas story as told by Luke and Matthew focuses on the people involved in the birth of Jesus, which of course is what we want to know about. We like to hear about the annunciation to Mary, the birth at Bethlehem, the angels appearing to the shepherds and their hurrying to the manger crib, and the visit of the wise men to the throne of the new King. God is truly come among us, our Emmanuel, God-with us, and Joseph is instructed to name the child Jesus, the one who saves us from our sins.
But John’s account of the coming of Jesus is completely different. John gives us no details of the people involved – even John the Baptist appears out of nowhere as our connection in space and time; instead the appearance of Jesus among us is put into the overall perspective of God’s creation and redemption. While we’re in the midst of our busy lives, caught up in the challenges of working and living in the communities we inhabit, it’s hard to remember that in us God is fulfilling the whole purpose of creation. It’s even harder when we read in the newspapers and see on our TV screen the troubles that beset our world to remember that there is even a purpose to the world at all, let alone that it is in the process of being fulfilled. But both John and the letter to the Ephesians, with their wider perspective, assure us that it is so.
“In the beginning was the word”. As we look down on the pictures of earth from space, we wonder at the scale and beauty of the cosmos; but John’s words take us beyond the beginning of created time, as we know it, to eternity. And John tells us that God’s purpose for this world is in-built from the moment of creation. As the theologian Jane Williams writes: “We are created through our redeemer, and redeemed through our creator. God in Christ is our source and our destiny. As the Father creates us in the image of the Son, through the agency of the Son and the Spirit, already the purpose is born that through them we will be recreated, so that we can share in the true life for which we were made, the life of God.” Or as it was put more simply by Irenaeus in the second century: “He became human that we might become divine.”
The reality of this is celebrated in the great hymn of praise that opens the letter to the Ephesians. The joy overflows from the text. We are given every blessing, we are chosen by God in Christ, we are adopted, redeemed and forgiven, we are gathered into our inheritance in Christ in whom all things in heaven and on earth are gathered. And none of it is our doing – it is all pure gift, given by God alone in love, so that we might live for the praise of his glory. And that glory is revealed in Jesus Christ, who shows us the Father’s love by making his dwelling among us. As someone once said, Christmas is divine love compressed into a song that humans can hear.
This passage from Ephesians, just like John’s prologue, gives us the wider perspective, the overarching narrative to God’s coming into the world. We need to have this perspective, even when we’re so caught up in the daily concerns of our lives, the difficulties and uncertainties of our world. Looking at our world from space, the earth is both so much greater in its scope and compass, and so much more fragile, than we imagine as we go about our lives. It is only at night that the extent of our human activity is visible. John’s gospel has a great deal to say about light, light shining in the darkness, a light that the darkness did not overcome. The light of Christ is the true light, which enlightens everyone, and lights up the darkness of our world; yet the world did not know him. Just as looking down from the space station at night here are many patches of darkness on earth, so there many metaphorically dark places in our world today, places where love and light are driven out by war, greed and exploitation.
Even in his prologue, John sets out one of the main themes of the gospel, the choice between darkness and light. The gift of the true light is ours to live by, but we have the freedom to choose not to. We can, and people do only too easily, choose the darkness, the darkness that represents not only evil, but also the state of unbeing, the void that was there in the beginning, the darkness that was over everything before God called life into being. Or we can choose light. To choose the light, according to John’s gospel, is to walk forward confidently as God’s beloved children, alive in his love. God is the only source of life, and this life is offered us in the Word made flesh, what we call the incarnation, Jesus coming among us as the human face of God. The light can seem a fragile flame, just as a new born baby is both beautiful and fragile, just as our earth from space is both beautiful and fragile, yet the light keeps hope alive that God’s purposes will be fulfilled and his reign of justice and mercy will break in wherever we reflect that light, the true light that has come into the world.
Amen.