Fr Dexter Brereton, CSSp ThM STL
On Christmas morning, the church always offers for our reflection, the first 18 verses of the Gospel of John, also known as John’s “prologue.” In the minds of scripture scholars, these 18 verses serve as a kind of overture for the rest of the gospel. They will proclaim all that John believes about God and about Jesus, all that is said here in these verses will be spelt out over the next 21 chapters of the gospel. These first words of John’s Gospel reduce the mystery of Christmas to its bearest elements – “et verbum caro factum est” – “and the Word was made flesh.” God, who existed before time, has entered into time.
John’s proclamation of the Good News of Jesus Christ, my dear brothers and sisters affords us the opportunity to reflect on a particular aspect of the Christian message that stands in danger of being eroded amid the difficulties of our current coronavirus pandemic. The entire 18 verses of scripture, is really a celebration of God’s presence and action in and through his son Jesus Christ. We read in the final sentence: “No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”As Catholics, we believe that it is always God’s wish to make himself known. We believe however that God’s presence to us, this ‘making himself known’ to us, always occurs in a mediated way, in other words God speaks to men and women through created reality, through people like ourselves and most significantly, through the man Jesus of Nazareth.
Yesterday, I was on my way to anoint someone at Los Bajos and I happened to be listening to I 95.5fm and heard what I believe to be an evangelical Christian call in to the station, and give the classical Protestant position on the relationship between God and the world. Translating her words, she said basically that God is not in strong drink, God is not in ham or drinking or partying or eating or carols or singing, or parang or laughing or anything like that. God is in heaven and we must prepare for our soon coming King. Let me begin by saying that at the heart of what this sister was trying to say is an insight emphasized by much of the Christian tradition. The insight is this, that the all-Holy God is radically unlike the world and should not be confused with the world. Martin Luther and his spiritual children at the time of the Protestant Reformation in Europe found much hope and light in this insight as they rebelled against what they saw as the corrupted “merely human” practices of the medieval church.
The Catholic understanding and experience of Christianity expresses another insight that moves in the opposite direction an insight that expresses itself in the Catholic principles of sacramentality and mediation. As Catholics, we believe that Creation is FUNDAMENTALLY GOOD. Creation, to borrow the words of Pope Paul VI is “a reality imbued with the hidden presence of God.” In the words of Fr Richard McBrien: “A sacramental perspective is one that sees the divine in the human, the infinite in the finite, the spiritual in the material, the transcendent in the immanent, the eternal in the historical. For Catholicism, therefore, ALL REALITY IS SACRED.” In other words, all things, people, places, events are potential carriers of the divine presence. We encounter God in and through these tangible, visible realities.
A necessary corollary of the principle of sacramentality is the Catholic principle of MEDIATION. Let us listen again to Fr McBrien: “…created realities not only contain, reflect, or embody the presence of God, they make that presence spiritually effective for those who avail themselves of these sacred realities. Encounter with God does not occur solely in the inwardness of conscience or in the inner recesses of consciousness (i.e. it is not something ONLY IN THE ‘HEAD’). On the contrary, Catholicism holds that the encounter with God is a mediated experience rooted in the historical, and affirmed as real by the critical judgement that God is truly present and active here or there, in this event or that, in this person, or that, in this object or that.’
This is why John can so confidently assert that “Jesus who is nearest to the Father’s heart, has made him known.” The presence of God the Father is mediated through Jesus. Jesus is the ‘sacrament’ (i.e. outward sign of inward spiritual reality) of God’s presence, just as the Church is the ‘sacrament’ of Jesus himself. This is also why for us Catholics, the ideal form of worship for us is when we gather together on a Sunday around the table of the Eucharist. Sacraments are personal encounters with sacred realities. In the contact with these sacramental realities, we encounter the living God. For us Catholics, and for Christians in general, worship ‘by zoom’ or worship ‘on TV’ is always a GREATLY REDUCED FORM OF WORSHIP.
This morning I was reading a column in the New York Times by a Protestant Minister which expressed the same insight: If bodies and physical spaces are really means by which we attempt to encounter God on earth, something immeasurable is lost when worship goes virtual. This loss becomes all the more acute during the holiday season, a time when churches are usually filled with candles, flowers and flowing vestments. Instead, the choir stalls and pews will be largely empty. [“Why you can’t meet God over zoom” – Esau Mcaulley New York Times, December 24, 2020]
The opening words of John’s Gospel this morning, should remind all of us of the sacredness and beauty and wonder of all created things and the sacredness and infinite worth of the human beings, especially of our brothers and sisters with whom we worship, and without whom our worship is greatly impoverished. My prayer for us and for our country as we celebrate Christmas and as we look forward to 2021, is that we come as a people to an enhanced appreciation for the sacredness of human life and that each of us in our own way acts in ways that protect the sacredness and value of human life at all its stages. This means practically our prayers against the practice of abortion, our care for the mothers of these babies, our care for the poor and for their human dignity, our care and solicitude for the migrants among us, our care for the elderly, our care for the earth, the physical environment which sustains us all, and our turning away from, and rejection of the culture of violence which has given rise to so many wars in the world.
