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Conversion during Advent
Homily
Meditation on the "Word"
King and God and sacrifice;
So from the song, We Three Kings, in reference to the meaning of the gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Three gifts which reveal the truth to the eyes of faith, a truth which the eyes of the flesh cannot see. I always await with great joy the Christmas day Mass, most especially because of the reading of the prologue of the Gospel of St. John. “In the beginning was the Word.” Does not the book of Genesis also start, “In the beginning”? And God said, “Let there be light.”[1] Much like the creation story of the beginning of the world, John’s prologue is a sort of New Genesis for the New Beginning of the New Covenant of life in Christ. For much is said about light in this prologue. Jesus is the “light of men,” or “light of the human race” in the rather deficient yet official translation left to us in the sacred liturgy. The Greek reads, “The Light of all men,” “ho photizei panta anthropon.” Jesus is the light[2]; John bears testimony to the light[3]; and now, because of the light, we see his glory,[4] the revelation of the Father.[5] This poses a riddle. Jesus is the word. Often we think of a word as something we read; yet many know what a word is, even those who cannot read. So really, we all experience a word universally as something heard. When we hear someone say a word, we hear them express something, for that is what a word does and is, the expression of a reality. The word manifests what the idea has, and a true idea has what a thing is. So if a word is something we hear, how can the eternal Word be “light”? Light is for our eyes, it seems, and words for our ears. Let us begin solving this riddle in the following way. Since Jesus is the Word, what does he express? St. John tells us, that the Word, who is the “Unbegotten God,” reveals “God,”[6] that is God the Father, to us. He is the perfect expression of the Father, so much so that there is nothing in the Father which is not also in the Son, except his relationship to the Father. So in Jesus, God the Son, we see and hear God the Father. This is why St. John adds, “he himself told us,”[7] that is, the Son, who is the word, narrated to us, enarravit, exegesato, the Father. That said, how is it, then, that the Word is also light? Light is the object of the eye; the eye doesn’t see sounds or see flavors, it sees light. And when light pours into the eye, man comes to know what he previously did not know. If you are in a dark room and a piece of furniture is there, you might never know it’s there until there is enough light for you to perceive it. The truth and reality of all the things that surround us pour into our eyes like a great waterfall into a lake. And when we see a thing, our mind is informed with that thing, and we know it. What happens with the Eternal Word, who is Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary on Christmas Day, is that he pours divine truth into our mind. He is the Word whom we touch and see, as St. John writes in his Epistle, “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon and touched with our hands concerns the Word of life.”[8] For the Father, in his immense love for us sinners, did not speak to us only in the words and deeds of the prophets, as we just read in Hebrews this Christmas day, which in some sense are abstract; rather, he spoke to us through his Eternal Son, and not just through his Eternal Son’s actions, not just through his words, but through his very Incarnation, his being a man. “He spoke to us through his Son,” the epistle reads, “whom he made heir of all things and through whom he created the universe.”[9] And so we kneel before the manger, and what do we see? Do we see the Word? What word does the light of this world deliver to your eyes? The Word became Flesh, and God walked upon the earth. You can See the Father’s one and only Word, come forth eternally from within him. Decades later, Philip would ask the Son of Mary, “Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us; yet Jesus corrected him, saying, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father. Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?”[10] A light bursts forth into our dark world this Christmas day, and this light is the revelation of the Father. Jesus Christ’s light dispels the darkness of the world. This is a darkness of the love of self which rejects the love of God; and this darkness is dispelled by the light which is the revelation of the Father. To the darkness of sin, the light says, “Believe in the Incarnate Son of God!”[11] To the darkness of ignorance, the light says, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”[12] To the darkness of the heart full of malice and distrust, the light speaks, “Repent, and believe the Gospel.”[13] So this Christmas day is an opportunity to make this choice: will I believe the light or not. Oh, my dear brothers and sisters, if only we believed that God became man, how we would live only for God and stop chasing after so many vanities full of darkness and despair! There is nothing that the darkness has to offer you. Jesus is the light, he will take nothing from you, and give you everything! With hearts enflamed with love for Jesus Christ, the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary on Christmas Day, let us not block out the light, but let the light of the divine word fill our minds with the truth about God, about salvation, and about the hope to which we are called. Amen. |