A Christmas reflection from the Archbishop of Canterbury: In the beginning was the Word

Friday 21st December 2012

Archbishop Rowan Williams reflects on the start of St John's Gospel which focuses on the eternal light and life of God.

The Archbishop's encouragement to look beyond the Nativity comes in a video reflection for Christmas Day to conclude the Church of England's Reflections for Advent series of podcasts.

Dr Williams observes that the famous opening passage - which begins "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" - is a surprising place to start the story celebrated at Christmas: "We expect something a bit more like the beginning of the other Gospels: the story of Jesus's birth perhaps… But at the beginning of St John's Gospel what St John does is to frame his whole story against an eternal background."

"And what he's saying there is this: as you read this Gospel, as you read the stories about what Jesus does, be aware that whatever he does in the stories you're about to read is something that's going on eternally… So when Jesus brings an overflow of joy at a wedding … opens the eyes of a blind man or raises the dead, all of this is part of something that is going on forever. The welcome of God, the joy of God, the light of God, the life of God - all of this is eternal."

A transcript of the video follows:

It's a slightly strange way to start a Gospel you might think. We expect something a bit more like the beginning of the other Gospels: the story of Jesus's birth perhaps or his ancestry, or the story of Jesus's arrival on the public scene.

But at the beginning of St John's Gospel what St John does is to frame his whole story against an eternal background. And what he's saying there is this: as you read this Gospel, as you read the stories about what Jesus does, be aware that whatever he does in the stories you're about to read is something that's going on eternally, not just something that happens to be going on in Palestine at a particular date.

So when Jesus brings an overflow of joy at a wedding, when Jesus reaches out to a foreign woman to speak words of forgiveness and reconciliation to her, when Jesus opens the eyes of a blind man or raises the dead, all of this is part of something that is going on forever. The welcome of God, the joy of God, the light of God, the life of God - all of this is eternal. What Jesus is showing on Earth is somehow mysteriously part of what is always true about God.

And that's why it's central to this beginning of John's Gospel - that he says the light shines in the darkness and the darkness doesn't swallow it up. How could the darkness swallow it up? If these works of welcome and forgiveness, of light and life and joy, are always going on, then actually nothing can ever make a difference to them.

And that's why at the climax of this wonderful passage, St John says, the Word of God, the outpouring of God's life, actually became flesh and blood. And we saw it - we saw in this human life the eternal truth about God. We saw an eternal love, an eternal relationship; we saw an eternal joy and a light and a life.

So as we read these stories we know that nothing at all can make a difference to the truth, the reality, they bring into the world. This is indeed the truth; this is where life is to be found. And this explains why at the end of St John's Gospel, he famously says that if we tried to spell out all that this means, there would be no end of the books that could be written. In the light of that overflowing joy and everlasting truth, I wish you every blessing and happiness for this Christmas and the year ahead.

© Rowan Williams 2012

In the Reflections for Advent podcasts, the Revd Angela Tilby reads reflections on Revelation 19 to 22, and the Revd Prof Jeff Astley looks at passages from 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, Jude and 2 Peter.

The reflections are based on the Reflections for Daily Prayer series from Church House Publishing, an iPhone/iPad app which launched in late 2011.

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