The world did not know him - A New Years thought

The gospel writer John is hardly the most romantic or sentimental of the gospel writers. His vocabulary is technical and his approach seems more the work of a theologian than an eyewitness telling a story that has a beginning middle and end.

       

If you go to John’s gospel for shepherds or angel choruses, or kings following bright stars, friendly beasts, harsh innkeepers, or strange dreams, you have gone to the wrong gospel.

Jesus walks onto the stage of history full grown when John first takes any interest in his life. And John writes like an intellectual, like a philosopher... in circles. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, And immediately we know that this is not a word like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It is a Word that has theological meaning.

Of course the Word is translated from the original Greek Logos, which is more than just a word, it is more like a concept, a thought that wants to be uttered rather than a word that must be defined.

So as January begins with the Christmas decorations still around us, our minds finally clearing from the excess of New years parties we have a moment to pause and reflect on this first Sunday of the New Year, before we take up the story anew next Sunday with the beginning of Epiphany.

John’s prologue, the first eighteen or so verses of the gospel, take us back to the beginning of all time. In the beginning, John begins, and if it sounds a little more like Genesis than John, it’s supposed to. John wants us to think about the beginning of everything, when the earth was formless and void. It was at that time that the idea, the Word, was already in God’s mind. God knew from the beginning that a Word would need to be said, a Word would need to be born.

In contrast to St Luke the birth story did not begin with the annunciation. For St John the genealogy of Matthew and Luke is trumped  by tracing the lineage of Jesus not with Adam or Abraham but with God before time began. John states that from the beginning of time, God meant the Word to be. He wants to know from whence all things come. And he gives us a mystery to ponder - the fact that even though the Word was the first thought God ever had, the reception of the Word, the child born of Mary,  by God’s people was the last thing of theirs.

 “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,” John goes on, “and his own people did not accept him.”

His own people may have missed the point, but what excuse do we have?

I am struck by John’s words which echo into this new year of our Lord two thousand and fifteen.

Have we really not seen him, not known him?

He was in the world, John says, and the world did not know him. If not, then what is this annual exercise we have just been through?

We have transformed our city with lights and placed candles in our windows. We’ve hauled living trees into our homes and decorated them with strings of bulbs and bows and tinsel. We’ve spent Billions of pounds in our shops.

But maybe “knowing him” should not be confused with the gaudy display and orgy of spending that Christmas has become for so many, pretty as it may be, and relief to the longest nights of the year that it is. Because if all there was to the Word’s coming into the world were pretty lights and tightly wrapped packages, then the only people who gain are those in the business  of retail and advertising, when what Christmas holds out is hope and life for the whole of creation.

We are always challenged to look beneath the surface, to look deeper in to the Christmas story for meaning as Anghard reminded us last Sunday when she preached taking us beyond the perfect night with a nuclear family of Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus to something a little more gritty and uncomfortable, even painful but certainly more inclusive and hopeful.

It is for St John to point us to this in his beautiful words that form the first verses of his gospel, the prologue. For here is the real heart of what we have been preparing to celebrate through the weeks preceding Christmas, the coming of One who would be for us light and hope, joy and strength, the Word become flesh and dwelling among us full of grace and truth. And in the place of the inhospitable Inn keeper of Luke’s gospel John states , “He was in the world, yet the world did not know him.”

As we strive to make our New Years resolutions in a world that is still divided and torn apart by ideology, wealth and religious values that deny our common humanity let us hear the words of hope that St John gives us this morning as we look out to the year beginning in the darkness of our making as well as that of this winter season and pledge ourselves to the hope that we celebrate at Christmas even though “he was in the world, and the world did not know him.”

It’s John’s clear if somewhat minimalist message, without angels or shepherds, stars, strange dreams or magi, nevertheless a message that makes all the difference once you grasp its implications, that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of a parent for an only child, full of grace and truth.

If there is any hope for this world I am not sure that it lies in images and messages that we are constantly bombarded with but is does lie in the pages of Scripture that we turn to every day of our lives and read and meditate upon.

In a world that does not know the one sent to be its light and life; as we make our New Year resolutions let us look for the evidence that God is indeed with us. Let us commit ourselves to look for those places where there is kindness expressed, and comfort offered, and prayers are said, and people are encouraged, and the dying are soothed, and the ill are not alone.

This is how God is made known in the world, in this and every season. When the Word is expressed in flesh and dwells among us, full of grace and truth.