The Cross and the Crib: A Homily for the Feast of S. John the Evangelist

Genesis 1:1-5, 12-19
Psalm 92:1-2, 11-14
1 John 1:1-9
John 20:1-8

St. Thomas's Anglican Church

Toronto, ON

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Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb; he saw the linen cloths lying, and the napkin, which had been on his head.

+In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

There is a certain discordance when the church transitions from Advent into the Christmas season. For four weeks we hear prophecies of God’s judgement of the Earth, calls from John the Baptist to repent, and hymnody and music that invokes the imminence of the eschaton and the majesty and grandeur of Heaven in our very midst. As the hymn Conditor alme siderum puts it.

At whose dread name, majestic now,

All knees must bend, all hearts must bow;

And things celestial Thee shall own,

And things terrestrial, Lord alone.

There is an imminence and closeness of the apocalypse in Advent with the proclamation that God’s judgment is near and that this world is temporary and will end.

We cut and pivot then to Christmas, and the smallness of the Holy Family attempting to find a place for Mary to give birth because there is no room in the inn. The bombastic “Let all mortal flesh keep silence,” gives way to “Silent Night”. The thunderous “Lo he comes with clouds descending” gives way to “O Little Town of Bethlehem”. The Feast of Saint John the Evangelist falls in this Christmas season, and while we celebrate the birth of Christ the lectionary gives us not the prologue of Saint John’s Gospel which explains the incarnation of Christ that lies at the heart of the nativity—the entry of the Divine Logos into the world and taking on our fleshly and human substance. Instead we jump ahead to the end of John’s Gospel and witness Mary Magdalene discovering the empty tomb, and Peter and the Disciple whom Jesus loved entering the tomb and discovering only the burial cloths Jesus was wrapped in.  There is no body to be found here.

What one might first consider to be a thematic discordance however reveals the great depth and mysteries of Jesus’s incarnation in its totality. Jesus’s incarnation embraces the fullness of the human experience from his birth, to his childhood, through his adulthood, into his passion and death, and concluding in his resurrection and ascension. These events in Jesus’s life are not isolated events or stories from one another, each are related to one another and define and give meaning to each other. 

Jesus’s birth in great humility is informed by the humility of his passion, death, and resurrection; and Jesus’s triumph in his passion, death, and resurrection inform his triumphant birth. Bethlehem points to Golgotha, and Golgotha points to Bethlehem. The two events are wrapped up and connected to one cannot be separated. You cannot have the intimacy of the creche without the isolation of Calvary. An Eastern Orthodox hymn for Feast of Saint Joseph of Arimathea speaks of Jesus’s incarnation in a powerful way that links Jesus’s birth to his passion:

A virgin womb, conceiving thee, revealed thee;

a virgin tomb, receiving thee, concealed thee.

Eastern Christian theologies of time do not make hard distinctions between temporality and eternity. God is eternal and is constantly working through all things and all events. He is present in and through all. God as he is manifests in his activity. God is the life of the living and the being of things eternal. There is no beginning or end in God, every aspect of Jesus’s life is a theophany and is linked back to its source in God.

There are many parallels that we can find between the nativity story and the empty tomb in John’s Gospel (and indeed in all accounts of the empty tomb). Jesus as an infant is cradled by Mary his mother, Jesus in death is cradled by Mary his mother as seen in Michelangelo’s Pieta. Eastern Orthodox iconography on the nativity and resurrection bring this into greater perspective. Jesus as an infant is wrapped in swaddling clothes, Jesus in death is wrapped in linen cloths. Jesus as an infant is laid on a stone box in a rock cave, Jesus in death is laid in a stone coffin in a rock cave. Jesus at the beginning of his life and at the end is wrapped in cloths and laid in a coffin-like box. 

Professor Noel Terranove of the University of Notre Dame comments on this, “Who would lay a child in a coffin? What macabre motive would make an artist paint a baby as a mummy and give him a tomb as his nursery?  Indeed, the motive is not macabre, but joyful and eschatologically triumphant: we only understand the significance of the incarnation if we hold it in tension with Jesus’ saving death; we may not separate the two. This also reminds us that the liturgical year commemorates events in the life of Jesus, but it never parses the paschal mystery.” The paschal mystery is the fulfilment of the incarnation and the two are linked together.

The seeming discordance of Advent, Christmas, and the Feast of Saint John the Evangelist are actually a harmony that brings the fullness of Jesus’s incarnation to us. These different elements come from the same light. Fr. Al Rodriguez from the Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, TX likens this incarnational reality to light shining through a prism. The Light of God coming into the world shines and is filtered and refracted through the prism of humanity and the human experience. Through Jesus we see the beauty and splendor of the human experience as that light embraces, redeems, and restores our humanity. No matter what part of the story we encounter we can see the fullness of Jesus’s humanity and God’s splendor and light in all of its colourful brilliance.

John’s Gospel bridges these disparate elements together even though it lacks the usual images of the nativity story. This is because, quoting again from professor Terranova, “The birth of Christ and his salvific death form the cosmic fulcrum upon which the beam of human history rests, with creation and eschaton at each end.  In a nativity icon this is super concentrated.” We see both the beginning and the end in the nativity, and we see that the beginning and the end are invariably linked together. The messiness, the challenges, and the difficulties of the human experience are therefore held as precious in this space and time, and in that moment, we see God in his dread and glorious majesty, wrapped in linen cloths and laid to rest in a cave while the world passes by. The eschaton is both triumphant and silent.

Our hope lies within these mysteries. As the prologue of John’s Gospel puts it, “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known,” and Jesus later says “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also; henceforth you know him and have seen him… Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me” We cannot fully perceive or understand God, we as humans cannot behold the totally of the divine, but through Jesus, through God the Son we are able to behold the Father because Jesus’s incarnation becomes the bridge that unites God and humanity. Through Jesus, the Word of Life is made manifest and we can encounter that which was from the beginning, we can hear, see, and touch God. 

Humanity is no longer shrouded in the darkness of a cave because the light of the world came into that space and illuminated it. Our humanity becomes luminous and we can walk together in that light with one another and with the whole of that creation that God called good in the beginning. 

The end and the beginning are not the same. Time is not cyclical. The very nature of our world is one of beginnings, growth, change, and endings. Even the beginning and end of Jesus’s time on Earth are not the same, and yet the great wonder of this eschatological revelation is that the end and the beginning are linked to each other and point to God’s redemptive work to make and restore creation because that beginning and that end, that light that is refracted through the prism of human experience all comes from the same source—God. God is manifest and present in each and every moment of our lives because Jesus experienced the totality of human existence in all of its wonders and its limitations, and in doing so made our humanity limitless through his birth, life, death, and resurrection. Just as Jesus embraces the fullness of the human experience, we too are invited to embrace the fullness of Jesus’ existence. 

As we contemplate on Jesus’s humanity in the crib and in the coffin, we see the fullness of his divinity, and from that we see what our own humanity is when it is fully redeemed and restored by God’s love. God sent his son Jesus to be born and to live and die as we are born and live and die so that through the resurrection, the revelation of God’s love is made manifest in this world. This world began with God’s love, it is redeemed by God’s love, and it will end in God’s love only to be made anew in God’s love. Jesus is the manifestation, promise, and object of that love for God and for us. The same Jesus who embraces our humanity, in all of its wonders and all of its limis.

Worthy is the lamb who was slain, and worthy is the lamb who was born. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Amen.

James+