Christmas message from Christina Rees

If you were to tell someone a story about the person who meant the most to you, or who had had the biggest influence on your life, where would you begin?

Would you start with stories about what they had done or about some of the things that had happened to them? Would you talk about some of the things they had said? Would you tell people how they looked or how being with them made you feel?

One thing you probably wouldn’t do is to start writing your story about them using coded language and cosmic symbolism! Yet that is exactly how John begins his Gospel – his version of the life and ministry – and meaning – of Jesus’ life. The other three Gospels had already been written and Jesus had been gone for perhaps more than twenty or thirty years before John finally wrote down what he considered to be the most important things to say about Jesus.

And how does he begin? We are not given a story about the baby born in a stable in Bethlehem, nor told of Jesus’ early years, nor even about the beginning of his public ministry. Instead, John starts by referring to Jesus not even as a person, but somewhat cryptically as the ‘Word’! He then goes on to say that, at the very beginning of everything, before even time began or the world existed, this ‘Word’ was with God. And then, most astonishingly, in the next breath John states that this Word was God.

Within a few short sentences we have been taken back through a spiritual vortex to a time before time even existed and told that the person about whom John is writing, is none other than God, whose life would be a light for people, a light shining in the darkness, a light which would never be overcome. We have been told all of this - but we have not yet been told exactly who this person is!

And that’s what John goes on to do for the rest of his Gospel – he tells us the story of the man he came to know and trust as both friend and saviour. The man who walked and talked with people, the man who liked to laugh and eat and drink, the man who showed love and compassion for the poor and oppressed, the man who healed the sick and who challenged hypocrisy and injustice - the man who walked steadfastly to his death so that we could be given new life. This is the man John has been thinking about for so many years, contemplating the significance all that he heard and learned and saw.

As we celebrate Christmas, it is right that we should rejoice and be gladdened by the birth of Jesus, the light coming into the darkness. Let us also remember that the baby in the manger is the eternal Word, beyond space and time, the very heart and mind and soul of God, who came to show us who God is, and who, by God’s grace, we can become.