St. John is
not the first of the Four Evangelists that we usually think of in association
with Christmas. It is St. Matthew and
St. Luke who provide us with the narrative of our Lord’s nativity. St. Luke tells of the census of Caesar
Augustus that required Joseph and the Virgin Mary to journey to Bethlehem where
they found no room in the inn and so had to lodge in the stable where the Lord
Jesus was born. St. Luke also tells us
of the angelic choir who appeared to the shepherds and directed them to where
they might find the newborn Messiah.
St. Matthew tells us of the visit of the wise men from the East bringing
the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
It is St. John, however, who plainly states the importance of these
events:
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (Jn. 1:14)
This is a
theological statement. It, and the
words which immediately follow after in which the Evangelist testifies to his
and others (SS Peter and James at the Transfiguration) having beheld the glory
of the Word, conclude the extended theological discourse about the Word that
serves as a preamble to the fourth Gospel.
That the
celebration of the birth of our Saviour is a time for deep theological
reflection was evidently an opinion shared by the writers of the most familiar
and loved of Christmas carols. Think of
these words from what Charles Wesley called his Hymn for Christmas Day later retitled Hark the Herald Angels Sing by George Whitefield:
Veil'd in Flesh the
Godhead see,
Hail th' incarnate Deity!
Pleas'd as Man with Men t'appear,
Jesus our Emmanuel here.
Since the days of Wesley and Whitefield the last two lines
have been further revised to “Pleased as Man with Men to dwell/Jesus our
Emmanuel” but the import is the same and it is also the same as that of John
1:14 – God came down and took on human flesh and dwelt among us.
Or think of the second stanza of Adeste Fideles, known in English as O Come, All Ye Faithful, the composition of which is uncertain but
which was first published to our knowledge by John Francis Wade in the eighteenth
century (Frederick Oakeley was the translator for the English version):
Deum de Deo, lumen de
lumine
Gestant puellæ viscera
Deum verum, genitum non factum.
Or in English:
God of God, light of
light,
Lo, he abhors not the Virgin's womb;
Very God, begotten, not created.
This is largely taken from the Nicene Creed. It comes from the section of the Creed that
addresses the Arian heresy that the Nicene Council was convened to deal with.
(1) These words were put in to make it absolutely
clear that the Jesus in Whom the Church places her faith is God, co-equal and
co-eternal, with the Father. The middle
line references the ancient hymn Te Deum
Laudamus traditionally attributed to St. Ambrose of Milan.
Later in the carol we find this more direct reference to
John 1:14:
Patris aeterni Verbum
caro factum.
A literal translation would
be “The Word of the Eternal Father made flesh”. In the usual English version it is rendered:
Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.
This, the Incarnation, is the key theological truth of
Christmas. While the Gospel message is
focused on the events of Good Friday and Easter, in which Jesus took our sins
upon Himself, paid the penalty as our Redeemer, defeated the foes who had long
held us captive – sin, the devil, death, hell – and rose triumphant over them
from the grave, none of this would have been possible without the events of
Christmas, without the Incarnation.
Just as the joy of the empty tomb and the encounters with the risen Lord
could not have been had there not first been the sorrow and the suffering of
the Cross, so there could have been neither Cross nor empty tomb, had there not
first been that birth in the stable in Bethlehem. The road to Calvary – and what came after –
began at the manger.
There are some who like to tell us that “Logos” in John
1:14, and the entire Johannine preamble to which it belongs, should not have
been translated “Word” in English. The English
word “Word”, they tell us, does not do justice to the Greek word. While they are partly right in that the
Greek word has a lot more meaning to unpack than is suggested by its English equivalent
it is very wrong to say that any word other than “Word” could properly render
Logos in the Gospel of St. John. To
render it otherwise, as Reason perhaps, or Logic, might bring out some of the
philosophical implications of Logos, but would lose the significance that St.
John himself attached to Logos in using it to identify Him Who became Incarnate
and was born of the Virgin. The very
first words of the preamble “En archei” are an obvious allusion to the first
words of Genesis – “in the beginning”.
After asserting of the Logos that He was with God and that He was God –
two Persons, co-equal, co-eternal – , and repeating for emphasis that He was in
the beginning with God, the very next thing St. John says of the Logos is “panta
di’ autou egeneto kai choris auto egeneto oude hen ho gegonen”. The Authorized Bible faithfully and
accurately renders that as “All things were made by him, and without him was
not anything made that was made”. This
too alludes to the first chapter of Genesis.
The first verse of Genesis says “In the beginning, God
created the heaven and the earth”. This
introduces us explicitly to the Father, the God with Whom, the Logos/Word was in the beginning according to John
1:1. God the Son, the Logos/Word
through Whom all things were made is implicit in the verse. The Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy
Ghost, is introduced to us in the second verse “And
the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Then in the third verse He Who was implicit
in the first is brought out into the open and introduced to us explicitly “And
God said, Let there be light: and there was light”.
These words “And God said”
occur throughout the Creation account.
The sixth verse “And God
said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it
divide the waters from the waters.” The
ninth verse “And God said, Let the
waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry
land appear: and it was so.” The eleventh verse “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding
seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in
itself, upon the earth: and it was so.”
Verses fourteen to fifteen “ And
God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the
day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days,
and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give
light upon the earth: and it was so.”
The twentieth verse “And God said,
Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and
fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.” The twenty fourth verse: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth
the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of
the earth after his kind: and it was so.”
Finally the twenty-sixth verse “And
God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them
have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over
the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth
upon the earth.”
When St. John says of the Word, “all things were made by
him, and without him was not anything made that was made”, this summarizes the
entire first chapter of Genesis. God the
Father created all things by speaking them into existence. God the Son is the living Word thus spoken
through Whom the Father created all things. This is Who St. John tells us “was
made flesh and dwelt among us”. So, as usual, the translators of the
Authorized Bible got it right, and the preachers who like to think they are a
lot smarter than they actually are have it wrong. (2) Word, and only Word, is the right word
for Logos in the English of John 1:1-14.
The All-Powerful Word of God, Who was with God the Father
from the beginning, and sharing His divine essence is Himself God, became flesh
and dwelt among us. He was, as He
Himself told Nicodemus in John 3:16, God’s gift to us – the first Christmas
gift.
The response that this calls for from us is that of the refrain of Adeste Fideles:
O come, let us
adore Him
O come, let us
adore Him
O come, let us
adore Him
Christ the Lord.
Merry Christmas!
(2) Preachers who think they are a lot smarter than they actually are tend to come out of the woodworks at this time of the year. There are those who like to tell us that Jesus couldn’t have been born in December and that the Church borrowed a pagan holiday when she made December 25th Christmas. Hippolytus of Rome, who died almost a century prior to the first Council of Nicaea wrote that Jesus was born eight days before the kalends of January, and a December birth is the implication of the account of the angel’s visit to Zechariah in St. Luke’s Gospel. Zechariah was of the division of Abijah that served in the Temple during the week of Yom Kippur in September/October. The sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, therefore, would have been March/April, when the conception of Jesus took place, making His birth in December/January. Then there are those who claim Jeremiah 10 forbids Christmas trees. These might have a point if anyone burned incense to a Christmas tree, offered it a sacrifice, or prayed to it, but as this is not what is typically done with Christmas trees, which are decorations not idols, these preachers merely prove themselves to be Pharisaical clowns of the worst sort.
A beautiful post. I almost wanted to update the headline of the aggregator as a result. My anglophile take is that if the KJV used Word, in its fullest sense, then it's the Right word.
ReplyDeleteIt is to be much lamented that the typical hymnal tends to omit the verse you quoted from O Come, All Ye Faithful in your post. It and Hark! the Herald Angels Sing are gems worthy to be sung elsewhere in the Christian year. All thanks and glory and honor be to God!
ReplyDelete-Tim