Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy
The First Sunday after Christmas Day, December 29, 2024
Click here for an audio of the sermon
I seem to remember years ago how daring it was in a Christmas sermon to point out the revolution promised by the nativity story. Instead of painting a picture of conventionally comforting images, our brave preacher would try to shock us all: The Angel promising that the holy child will by social standards seem illegitimate; a very young but by no means unaware Mary saying Yes to all that may imply for her future; and her Magnificat: This is how the world will be set right, by turning everything upside down.
The royal heir of David, born in David’s city, but excluded from even the most elementary human hospitality. The poverty of Mary and Joseph - their seeming lack of relatives and resources landing them away in the manger, no crib for a bed. What a counter-intuitive way for the King of Kings to make his entrance! And yet this is the narrative form in Matthew and Luke of God’s chosen entrance into his world. Every Christmas we take heart that God’s transforming work will start to be done in a small, obscure place by people of seemingly no account. The real transformation is a revolution, replacing the rich with the poor, the powerful with the weak, the noble with the humble.
John doesn’t even hint at a nativity scene. No angel, no shepherds, no magi, no meeting with Elizabeth, no Bethlehem, no manger, in fact, no Mary and no Joseph. John starts his story at the top: Echoing Genesis he writes: In the beginning.... Beresit.... En arche.... The term John uses here, arche, means not simply the beginning of something in time, but also that which gives each thing its essential being: its structure, its innate properties. The Word, the Logos, is not just a particular vocabulary item but is its underlying discoverable, communicable, rational pattern.
John seems to say, This is really how things have been, are, and always will be. This is where the world really came from. This is what it really is. This is where it really is going, Because the Logos is its origin, its structure. The Incarnation brings the Word itself into our lives, into our world, and in that process, changes everything.
This story, John implies, is going to tell us about reality. Not the beginning of a social revolution, but a revolution in how reality itself is perceived. In a world whose pagan culture, whose religious ideology, is fixed on beings, natural, animal and human qualities writ large and sculpted into believable images, this story will dethrone and remove every idol. John sends us to what seems to be an empty room, to a holy of holies, where the One who is above all and through all and in all is found in quiet silence and in waiting. And there we wait for the Word. And we find that Word in a human person, the Word made flesh. Jesus.
In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
In learning this, in knowing this, in believing this, something entirely new is brought into our world. No longer is the world complete in itself, self-explanatory. Nothing in the world has its being in itself. Nothing has power in its own essence. Because everything is made by and through the Word, everything is contingent on the Word. The strange thing is that this contingency sets human knowledge free: We need no longer be captive to things, or captive to our own images of truth as though they themselves are complete and eternal, but we are free to change our understandings of them as our minds lead us, as we stand secure in the knowledge that the Word alone is all truth. The rest can change, will change, will always change, but our firm foundation is in holding fast to the Word who has created and sustains all that is, not holding fast to our already existing understandings.
Every act of greater understanding brings us closer to the Word. The search for knowledge is a search for the Word, and that search is holy. And that search is never, can never be, finished. Just when we think we “know” all there is to know about something, something new appears. The world brought into being by the Word is alive with the creating act of God and we are continually invited by the creative Word into a process of discovery.
And like the up-from-the-bottom birth of the savior, this too is a revolution. The Incarnation of the Word opens our eyes, opens our minds to understand that the material reality we live in is not itself ultimate, that there is another referent, a different stance which allows us to step aside and become observers, analysts, theorizers, communicators with each other, of a material reality whose essential nature we are always in the process of discovering. Not that it itself changes, but that our understanding, always striving to come closer to the Logos in its arche, its beginning, is never complete for us. Our journey is alive to the Word as long as we choose to be open to it. To the person who follows the Word, the world is alive.
When we think we have a grip on something, we discover it is actually something else. For thousands of years the experts were sure that the heavens were a shell surrounding us and the stars were holes where the light came in; they were sure that human personality is determined by the four humors; they thought diseases were caused by nonphysical entities, sometimes demonic. They were wrong. What are our present day confident but actually contingent certainties?
This happens in history. For millennia we have depended on written sources, and when they are lacking, on narrative supposition, for knowledge of our past. These sources give us stories but rarely cooperate in giving us truth. But something strange has begun to happen. Careful archaeology, carbon 14,plant pollen, tree rings, long-buried disease bacilli, pandemic eruption tracings, DNA and its every-increasing and fascinating applications, have moved many historical narratives out of the realm of fable and attached them to knowledge. Who knew that DNA would show that a human population could be stable, rooted in one place for 10,000 years, when DNA proved that Adrian Targett, a teacher in Somerset, England, was a direct descendant of the so-called “Cheddar Man”, a local skeleton which survived for ten millennia? The imagined story becomes a fact: Their people came and stayed.
What has changed and is changing our perceptions of reality? The growing understanding that John is right: that the Word is at the beginning of all things and defines their essential structures, that the Word is the essence of what is knowable and rational, and that we are invited to enter into its light, to follow its sacred and holy path to knowledge, to uncover it and theorize about it and test it and communicate it, as best we can.
Knowledge is holy. The pursuit of knowledge is holy. Study is holy. Libraries are holy. Every act of the increase of knowledge brings us nearer to the Word who created the world and for that reason is holy. The entrance into the world of this Word is the other revolution of the Incarnation.
But of course, for John, the Word, the creative, sustaining, pattern-giving Logos, is not an idea, but a person. Jesus of Nazareth is the Word incarnate. It is he who brings light into a dark world. It is he, and all he embodies, who makes possible our choice to follow these revolutionary paths to greater and greater understandings of what is real, bringing us into the truth of our own lives and into the truth of the world itself. Or not.
So it might be interesting to pay attention to what Jesus says. It would seem that when Jesus speaks, the Logos itself is speaking, opening the mind of God to us.
And so I find the very first words Jesus speaks in the Gospel of John interesting. In the first thing he says in John’s gospel, Jesus asks two of John’s disciples who are following after him, “What are you seeking?” A question which had a specific setting at the time, but which echoes again and again, and will open infinite worlds to us if we hear it asking us: What are we seeking?
