How St. John Brings Us Nearer the Crib, Feast of St. John the Evangelist, December 27, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Feast of St. John the Evangelist
December 27, 2019
1 John 1:1-4, Ps 97, Jn 20:1-8

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• Today the Church celebrates the feast of St. John. Yesterday on the feast of St. Stephen, we were able to get beyond the irenic melodies of silent night to ponder the fact that the baby in swaddling clothes in Mary’s arms had taken our humanity in order to offer it to save us, and St. Stephen testifies to how we are called to follow Christ and give witness of him and his saving plan to others. Today the Church turns to St. John the Evangelist, Jesus’ beloved disciple. If St. Stephen is the saint liturgically nearest to Jesus’ crib, St. John is second, because he teaches us other lessons that help us enter far more deeply into the mystery of the Incarnation and the birth of the Son of God.
• The first thing St. John helps us to grasp is the reality of the Incarnation. Today we begin his first Letter, which we will ponder throughout the rest of the Christmas season. St. John was writing to Christians at a time of the Gnostic (docetist) heresy that believed that all matter was evil and hence taught that God could have never assumed matter to himself. Therefore, they taught that Jesus only appeared to have a body but was more like a disincarnate ghost. He only appeared to be wrapped in swaddling clothes. He only appeared to eat. He only appeared to walk on water. He only appeared to die on the Cross. He couldn’t have given us his body and blood to consume because he didn’t have real body and blood. For the Gnostics, the incarnation was a philosophical impossibility. St. John wrote underlining the sensible reality of the Incarnation. He said, “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerning the Word of life,  for the life was made visible, we have seen it and testify to it.” During these days of Christmas, it’s key for us to use the senses God gave us to grow in faith. It’s important for us to meditate, with the help of crèches, paintings, music, newborn babies and various other realities the fact that the Creator of the world became a little baby in a sense just like us except original sin, he was fed, he was bathed, he was embraced and kissed, he slept, he squeezed onto fingers and everything else. Many times we don’t ponder enough the sacred humanity of Jesus and the first thing St. John helps us to do is to use our senses to approach the Word of Life made visible, audible, and tangible.
• The second thing St. John helps us to grasp that why Jesus came. St. John reminds us of it: “I came so that they have have life and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10).  This life, he tells us, in the prologue to his Gospel, was the “light of men.” It’s not just “bios” or biological life, but “zoe,” or supernatural life. This is why, Jesus testifies in St. John, he came to give witness to the truth. This is the life for which God out of love sacrificed his own son so that we might not perish but have it eternally. St. John helps us to seize that gift of life in abundance that Jesus brings, that gift that the world can’t bestow or rob.
• The third thing is how we experience that life, which is through the experience of God’s love. God so loved the world. In the heart of Jesus’ words during the Last Supper, Jesus tells us, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you. Remain in my love. You will remain in my love if you keep my commandments. This I command you, love one another just as I have loved you.” We must allow Jesus to love us. We must not run away from that gift. And we must grow in it precisely by letting it overflow into the love of others.
• This life and love are not incompatible with suffering. As we will mark tomorrow on the feast of the Holy Innocents, from the beginning Jesus’ life was one in which Mary, Joseph, and many others suffered. But that suffering is not the end. We see this powerfully in today’s Gospel scene of the Resurrection. After the Crucifixion, we see that John entered into the empty tomb, saw and believed. Faith is a different type of vision, a different type of hearing, a different type of touching and tasting. It’s built on the sensible but it transcends it to a different form of sensation. St. John wants us to see, touch, and hear but also go beyond sensible appearances to what they signify. When we look at this Baby in the manger with the eyes of faith, when we look and see his flesh and the sufferings it will endure, then we understand our own sufferings in light of his, and that we grasp by means of his resurrection that that’s not the last word! In fact to have life to the full, we must behold the one we have pierced and follow him, giving our own humanity out of love for others, in expiration with Christ. As Jesus says to us in St. John’s Gospel, unless we become like the grain of wheat, falling to the ground and dying, we will bear no fruit, but if we die together with Jesus we will bear fruit in abundance (Jn 12:24).
• That brings us to the fifth and last point we’ll mention today. We need to live, die and rise with Jesus. Jesus came to bring us into communion. We prayed on Christmas day in the opening collect about how Jesus had taken on our humanity in order to make us partakers in his divinity. We’ve been made in his image and likeness and we know that God is a loving Communion of Persons. Jesus has come into this world to bring us back into communion, the communion that was severed by sin. St. John writes at the end of today’s passage from his first letter, “What we have seen and heard we now proclaim to you, so that you too may have communion [koinonia] with us, for our communion [koinonia] is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.” To enter into the true spirit of Christmas, the reason for the Season, is to enter into communion with God and communion with each other. Jesus came to be God-with-us, not God-with-me. He came to restore the familial sense of human life that we will be celebrating this weekend. And this is not just some type of horizontal “fellowship,” as if reality of the Church is a type of fraternal club. It is rather an ontological communion: we become one with each other through becoming one with God. The real “good news of great joy” of Christmas, the true “joy to the world,” is based on our entering into Communion with God-with-us and bringing others to enter that communion as well. St. John wrote, “We are writing this so that our joy may be complete!” Anyone who loves someone else wants the absolute best for that person and that best is God. Our joy will be complete when those we know and love are in communions with us and communion with God.
• The best way we enter into this two-fold communion is here at Mass. The Eucharist is the continuation of the Incarnation and all of the lessons St. John teaches us about Christmas are applicable to the celebration of the Mass. Under the appearances of bread and wine, the eternal Son of God, who dwelled in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was held in St. Joseph’s arms, who walked the paths of Palestine, who gave his life on Calvary and who rose from the dead is here. We can touch him. We can see him. We can taste him. But just like the appearances in ancient Bethlehem to some degree revealed God but for the most part hid him — because he looked on the outside just as any other child did — so the same thing happens in Holy Communion. We need to exceed this reality by faith, by “seeing and believing” as St. John did in the empty tomb. That’s why St. Thomas Aquinas famously wrote in his Adoro Te Devote, “Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur, sed auditu solo tuto creditur.” Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived, but it’s only through hearing that all may be believed.” And specifically hearing Jesus’ words, “This is my Body!,” “This is the chalice of my Blood!,” and “I am the Bread of Life. Unless you gnaw on my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.” We respond with faith. St. Thomas says, “Credo quidquid dixit Dei Filius, nil hoc verbo veritatis verius!” “I believe whatever the Son of God has said. Nothing is truer than the Word of Truth.” The Word that was from the beginning, that was with God, that was God, that “Word of life … made visible,” has said that it is his flesh and blood, that it is He, and we approach with faith in order that we might have life to the full and enter into communion with him and others. And our joy is dependent on bringing others to experience this same communion with God and communion with us. And so today we come with gratitude to adore Him and we ask him through our communion with Him and each other, to fill us with his holy zeal that we may go out to others to seek to bring them into the joyous Communion with God and us for which Jesus became a little baby and St. John wrote his first letter!

The readings for today’s Mass were: