ABBOT ELIAS DIETZ, O.C.S.O.
Homily – Christmas Day Mass, Dec. 25, 2017
[Jn 1:1-14]
I Am The Alpha and The Omega
Our experience of life is always in the middle of things. We cannot remember our birth or our earliest months and years. No doubt we experience life intensely as infants and young children, but what happened for us then is not really part of the life experience we can draw on consciously from memory. The same applies to the other end of life. No doubt the passage through death can be an intense human experience. But we never have a chance to write a diary entry about it or tell our friends and family about it. Our beginning and our end completely escape our experience.
No wonder we have a fascination, if not a fear, about these moments beyond our reach. Our comfort zone is in the midst of human activities, in the middle of life as it happens. We generally avoid talking much about how it will all end. And our talk about how it all began never amounts to much, especially when we play the armchair scientist.
So it’s wonderful to notice that the first pages of the Bible and its last pages address these impossible-to-reach zones with confidence and creativity. Genesis assures us that our pre-history is nonetheless filled with God’s presence, that we are wanted and loved, and that what has emerged from the depths of time has purpose, meaning, and value. And the Book of Revelation assures us that all imaginable evils, disasters, and struggles are no more than the angry last gasp of all that is opposed to God; the Lamb already presides over the Holy City in peace.
So if Genesis deals with “in the beginning” and the Apocalypse with “in the end,” we might expect the opening words of the Christmas gospel to be “in the middle,” since Christ comes to us in the middle of things, in the midst of human experience as we know it. And yet, as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it so well, he is heir of all things, and through him the universe came about. The mysterious zones of the beginning and the end come together in him, the Alpha and the Omega.
The Prologue to Saint John’s gospel brings it all together in something we can easily relate to here in the middle of our human experience: the Word; the word, the reason, the purpose that has always been there, and the last word of all that will ever be. “What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
Instead of recalling Mary and Joseph and the manger and the shepherds, John wants to impress on us that, in Jesus, God comes to us in the middle of it all: in the middle of time, in the middle of the known world, in the middle of life as we also know and experience it. And he wants to impress on us that in this Child is the answer to all that fascinates and frightens us about the beginning and the end and all that is beyond our experience or capacities of thought or imagination.
Most important of all, John wants to assure us that one and the same light shines through it all from the “Let there be light” of Genesis to the Light illuminating the Eternal City. As familiar as it is, our life in the middle, the life we know best is usually opaque: “the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him.” Should it surprise us to be at a loss about what is happening around us in the world, in the Church, even in our own home? Our usual place is in the thick of things, and we cannot see very far back or very far ahead. Saint John’s very special Christmas message—the one the Church chooses to hear again every Christmas Day—is that those who accept the Lord’s coming, those who want to become children of God have no need to fear: the Word and the light continue to reach them where they are:
And the Word became flesh
and made his dwelling among us,
and we saw his glory,
the glory as of the Father’s only Son,
full of grace and truth.
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