First Sunday After Christmas Day
28 December, 2008
The Rev’d Dr. Richard Corney

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... And the word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1 1.4).

Christmas, like all of the great feasts of the Christian year – indeed rather more than the others — has, over the course of the centuries, gathered to itself many different customs and traditions. We would, I think, find it very difficult to imagine Christmas without a Christmas tree with its lights and ornaments, without wreathes and holly, without the exchange of cards and presents, and the like. So much a part of this season they have become — indeed in much of our present culture they seem to be more a part of Christmas than what we do here in the church to celebrate the birth of our Savior; my guess is that a great many more people have gone to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center than went to a Christmas Eve or Christmas Day service here in the City — so much have these different customs and traditions become a part of our Christmas celebration that we can forget that originally many of them had nothing at all to do with Christmas or Christianity. That Christmas tree out in the courtyard and the greenery on our windows are probably direct descendants both of the greenery on our windows are probably direct descendants both of the greenery which decorated the temple of Saturn, the ancient Italian agricultural deity, during his December festival as well as the evergreens associated with pagan worship in Northern Europe. Mistletoe, if I remember correctly, was thought by the Druids of pre-Christian Briton to have magical properties. Or take the word “Yule” (as in “yuletide” and “yule log”); that term may derive from the cry which in pre-Christian northern Europe greeted the return of the sun after the winter solstice, when the long hours of darkness began slowly to decrease and the daylight hours began to grow. Indeed, one theory about he origin of the date of Christmas is that it was chosen to provide a Christian feast which would replace the ancient Roman celebration associated with the winter solstice, replace the feast of the Unconquered Sun. That yule log and perhaps the lights on our Christmas tree are thought to stem from the bonfires lit in honor of the sun-god in northern climes.

So what are all these pagan symbols doing connected with the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord? Do they have anything at all to do with the Christian Gospel, with the proclamation of the birth of our Savior? Actually, I think they do. I think they represent in their way the same point about the significance of the birth of Jesus Christ that the first chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, which we just heard read, says in its way.

“In the beginning was the Word,” wrote John, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Now this word “Word,” as the evangelist uses it here, has a long history in the Mediterranean and Near-Eastern world, that world in which the Gospel of John was written. Since the earliest days of the human civilizations in those regions about which we know anything, human beings have considered the word “Word” a fitting term to use in connection with the divine’s relation to the world, particularly in the contexts of creation and of communication between the divine and human realms. This is true not only of the religion of ancient Israel, where, as the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, “at many times and in many places ... God spoke to our ancestors in the prophets” (by which the author of Hebrews meant not just those persons we think of as prophets, but the whole of the Old Testament understood as God’s word) – this is true not only of the Old Testament, but of much of the literature of the ancient religions of Egypt and Mesopotamia, religions whose adherents have long since turned to dust. In writings from both Egypt and Babylon, for example, we read of certain acts of creation performed by the words of one or another of their gods. And when we turn from the ancient Near East to the philosophers of Greece and Rome, there too we often find that, when those philosophers wanted to speak of a relationship of that which was beyond the world to the world, wanted to speak of a relationship of human beings to something beyond themselves, they would frequently use the word “word” to signify that relationship. And if one looks at all the uses of “word” one can see, speaking generally, that in that ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean world the word “Word,” signified the association of that which lay outside the created order with the created order, signified both the means by which the divine made itself known to humankind and the means through which the human race could have access to God, however that “god” might be conceived in any particular religion or philosophy.

Thus, when St. John wanted to give expression to the tremendous act of God in sending the only-begotten Son, when he wanted to find some way to introduce his Gospel which would convey to its readers in his world the true significance of the One of whom his gospel would be speaking, when he wanted to find some way by which he could distinguish its account of the life of Jesus from the many other accounts of teachers and miracle workers in circulation in his time, when he wanted to find some way of talking about what the crucial significance of the coming of Jesus of Nazareth meant for the world — thus St. John too turned to this word “Word.”. And so he began, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” A non-Christian who might happen upon a copy of John’s Gospel and read that statement would have found that fit with ideas that he or she would recognize. And so throughout the prologue until he or she came to the words, “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That would have been the shocker. For what John is saying to his non-Christian reader is something like this: “You have some grasp of the relationship between the divine and the human realities, and there is that in your understanding which is right and good and true. But now something extraordinary has happened. The Word that you know is no intellectual abstraction, for in Jesus of Nazareth that Word has become flesh. Everything for which you have been groping can be grasped not in theory but in a human being. All for which you and the world has been waiting since the beginning of time, as embodied in its various uses of the word “Word” as expressive of divine activity and will — all that has entered the world in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is God’s ultimate communication with the human race, and in him God has united the divine and human realms.

It is this understanding of the significance of the coming of Jesus Christ into the world, this understanding of Jesus as the Word become flesh, which has made it possible for Christians to take the greenery of Saturn and northern Europe, the mistletoe of the Druids, the lights and yule log of the unconquered sun and use them as suitable adjuncts to the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord. If it is true — and we believe that it is — if it is true that Jesus Christ is the true fulfillment of the best hopes and aspirations of the entire human race, it seems only natural to take symbols

associated with these aspirations, these hopes — take them and give them new meaning in the light of the fulfillment of the hopes, the insights, that those who first employed them.

And so, as we see our celebration of the birth of Christ surrounded by these relics of older hopes and aspirations, we might recall the truth about the event we celebrate this Christmastide which they can convey, the truth expressed so eloquently in the prologue of the Gospel according to St. John, that the birth which we celebrate this season is the birth of the One sent by God to answer the deepest longing of all humankind — and that includes us — a longing, a prayer, no matter how poorly or wrongly expressed, for some one who can be for us and for all humankind the One through whom we and they can be brought into the presence of God. And we could also pray that those for whom the symbols of Christmas have essentially lost their connection with the birth of Christ — all of those for whom the tree at Rockefeller Center rather than the manger has become the center of this season — that they too may come to recognize “the Word” which “became flesh and dwelt among us.”28