31 December 2021
Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas
In a literary work, we often are trained to expect the ending of the story at the end. Authors tend to build suspense and tension in a story that leads to a moment of insight when all the pieces of the story fit together. Maybe no other genre does it better than the mystery novel in which the author has left clues for the reading sleuth to discover the way the crime occurred or the identity of the criminal. A reader only knows that the crime has occurred, but he or she must keep reading to understand what exactly happened.
The Gospel of John takes a different approach on shedding light on Jesus. In our gospel passage today, we have John’s prologue which contains many themes that will frame the subsequent narrative. The world has become alienated from its Creator, and God sends the Word to testify to the light and life from which the world came. To achieve this mission, the Word becomes flesh, taking on the messiness of our human nature. The world puts up resistance to this mission, but the Word overcomes the darkness that is at the root of this opposition.
The identity of the Word is clearly Jesus Christ from the first lines of this Gospel passage. John the Baptizer, while important, is someone who announces someone greater than he who is to come. The prologue would seem to leave no suspense or tension for what comes in the rest of the Gospel. It summarizes what the reader should expect and gives the identity of the main protagonist. For John the evangelist’s community, the mystery that would get them to keep reading was not the unveiling of Jesus’ identity. It was the Mystery of God’s love with its depth shown in the Cross and the Resurrection. The questions of “who,” “when,” and “what” of a traditional mystery novel pass over into the “how” and “why” of a love story.
No matter how many times we read it, this Mystery does not fail to have an effect in our lives who are committed to its continuance. As we celebrate the ending and beginning of a new year, let’s pray that Holy Spirit might renew us by recalling the depth of God’s love for us. It is the source of true human freedom as we begin to write the next chapter of our lives with God in the new year.