Genesis 1:1-3; John 1:1-9; 1 John 2:8b
In the traditional post-Christmas semi-surreal calm, along with thousands of others, I visited the Macquarie Centre yesterday with my family. On the cinema session board I noticed that there is a new movie showing, called Pan. I’ve heard that it is worth seeing, even for adults, but I have not seen it.
I do know, however, that Peter Pan was “the boy who never grew up,” who could not face reality, who lived in the fantasy world, “Never never land.”
The now superseded movie Hook shows the grown-up Peter, played by Robin Williams, as a not very likeable person. Things are better when he becomes a child again.
Observing some of the people I have known in my short life, I believe that many people today live with a similar attitude. A child might say, “I don’t want to leave school.” An adult may think, “I wish I could escape to my own private universe where everything is easy, where I am in control.”
It is the same with spirituality. Sometimes we don’t want the discipline that goes with spiritual adulthood. We don’t want to face the true, “grown-up” identity and claims of Jesus – the Creator in a human body, the Saviour on the cross, the Sovereign on the throne.
We want to keep Jesus passive and helpless in the manger: “gentle Jesus meek and mild.” But the prologue of John’s Gospel, where we might expect to find the story of Jesus’ birth, shakes us into reality: the little baby in the manger was none other than God.
John’s distinctive approach
John’s Gospel is distinctive in many ways, one of which is the manner in which he introduces his subject. Matthew and Luke describe the circumstances of Jesus’ birth in detail; they also provide genealogical information linking Jesus to Abraham and to Adam (see Mt 3:1-12; Mk 1:2-8; Lk 3:1-20; Mt 1:18-25; Lk 1:5-2:40; Mt 1:1; Lk 3:38).
John mentions none of this. Instead, he goes back before the miraculous conception of Jesus, back before Abraham and even before Adam, back to the beginning of time, and further, to a ‘time’ before the creation of the universe, where there was nothing but God dwelling eternally in a perfect relationship of love: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The first three words, “In the beginning,” recall Gen 1:1 – “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” But there is an important difference: in Jn 1:1 we read, “In the beginning was the Word.” John searched for and used the most richly allusive and theologically relevant word he knew as a title for Jesus: “the Word.” Reading John’s Gospel, we discover that this Word is Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
If the Word was there at the beginning (v 2), it follows that either the Word was with God, or that the Word was God. John affirms both (v 1). So we may say that Jesus was distinguishable from God, and he enjoyed a personal relationship with God, and at the same time he was God – not merely possessing qualities of God-ness, but actually God.
Someone has said that “God is Christlike and in him is no unChristlikeness at all.” If you want to know what God is like, learn about Jesus. If you want to know God, get to know Jesus.
Verse 3 teaches us that everything that has been made was made through the agency of God’s Word (that is, through Jesus) – just as in Gen 1:3ff everything that came into being did so in response to God’s spoken word.
Looking at the light
Then John proceeds from creation in general to the human creation, and its needs: “In him was life, and that life was the light of men” (v 4).
The life that Jesus possesses provides illumination to men and women: intellectual light, sharpening our powers of reason; moral light, showing us how to live well in community; and spiritual light, permitting us to know and love God, to find new life in God, and to experience the freedom, the peace and the hope that each of us longs for but cannot attain alone.
Verse 5 alludes again to Genesis 1. Just as physical light appeared in response to God’s word, banishing the primeval darkness in which the physical world was enveloped (Gen 1:2-3), so the light of the revelation of Jesus Christ appeared, and continues to shine, banishing the rational and moral and spiritual darkness in which the world of people is enveloped by sin.
Light and darkness are not opposites. Darkness is the absence of light. If you came into this auditorium at midnight tonight, and switched on a single light, the darkness would disappear and not overpower the light. The world of people is characterised by darkness, but the light of Jesus dispels the darkness and establishes truth, justice and righteousness in our hearts and in our communities. The ultimate victory of the light is certain (see Jn 3:19; 8:12; 12:35, 46; 1 Jn 1:5-6; 2:8, 9, 11).
Notice the present tense: “The light shines in the darkness” (v 5). Jesus never ceases to illuminate our world, never ceases to bear witness to the truth, never ceases to reveal God and his ways to us.
But over time this revelation becomes clearer and more detailed. Increasing illumination comes with progressive revelation. Abraham possessed greater light than Adam, and David than Abraham, and so on. And with increased knowledge comes increased responsibility. The more I know of God, the greater my responsibility to love him. The greater my understanding of God’s plan of salvation, and the deeper my awareness of who Jesus is and what he has done for me, the more urgent it is that I accept God’s plan and follow Jesus.
What about Christmas?
But where, you might be thinking, does the theme of Christmas fit in this passage? I see in verses 5 and 9 an allusion to the story of the birth of Jesus as told in the other Gospels.
When Jesus Christ came into our world, the revelation of God took on a new and unprecedented form. The life of God, and the light of God, were focused in a special way in the person of Jesus, born in Bethlehem.
Jesus bore witness to God’s truth. He revealed God’s love and mercy and grace. He shone his light into our rational, moral and spiritual darkness, and our darkness was powerless to comprehend or overcome it.
In verses 6-8, John (the Apostle) gives an example of someone, John the Baptist, who was born shortly before Jesus, and who testified to the light. We could, in fact, not only sing, “Hark! The herald angels sing,” but “Hark! The herald prophet speaks!” And what a magnificent testimony he gave (e.g. Jn 1:23, 26f, 29-34)! But that is not my focus today.
Look at verse 9: “The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.” This is a wonderful verse. To speak of “the true light” implies that there are other, false lights. Beware the false lights; there are many in this world today. Don’t believe everything you hear or read. Even the devil “masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14), and the devil has many human friends and helpers.
The true light (Jesus Christ) provides universal illumination. No one is denied access to his light. No one is beyond his reach. No one is too deeply enfolded in darkness that they cannot respond to his light.
As I said, darkness is powerless. As evil is simply the absence of good, so darkness is simply the absence of light. All it takes for the darkness to fade is for the light to begin shining; and so we sing, “Shine, Jesus, shine!”
John says that “the true light . was coming into the world.” Here is another allusion to the birth of Jesus Christ, what we call the “incarnation,” in the prologue of John’s Gospel.
We do have access to general revelation (cf Ps 19:1; Rom 1:18-20). But this verse, I am sure, speaks of access to special revelation – clear, objective knowledge about God and his ways. The true light, in the person of Jesus Christ, the baby in Bethlehem’s manger who grew to adulthood and died on the cross, reveals God to us in a new and unprecedented – though not unpredicted – way.
But the impact of the light’s illumination is that it divides humankind into two distinct groups: those who love the light, and those who hate the light; those who embrace its truth, and those who flee from it; those who receive its revelation, and those who reject it (cf 1:10-13; 3:19-21).
What is your response? Will you, like Peter Pan, remain a child, or grow up? Will you satisfy yourself with the fantasy of a secular Christmas, or will you take the risk and lay hold of reality?
The difference between light and darkness is real, and significant, and literally out of this world, because the salvation that Jesus offers is from beyond this world, and the salvation that he offers lasts for an eternity beyond this world’s end.
The good news is that, because Jesus came into our world as our Saviour, “the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining” (1 Jn 2:8b).
That is the message of Christmas. As we prepare to farewell another year [2003], let us reflect on what it means to know that, because Jesus has come, the darkness in our lives is passing, and the true light, the Light of the world, is already shining – the light of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Saviour.
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E144 Copyright (c) 2003 Rod Benson. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible: New International Version (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980). To talk with Rod about this message, email or write to P.O. Box 1790, MACQUARIE CENTRE 2113 AUSTRALIA. To subscribe, email with “subscribe-river” in the subject. To unsubscribe, type “unsubscribe-river” in the subject.
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