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The Gospel passage read at the Christmas Mass “during the day” – the beginning of John’s Gospel — does not, at first glance, sound much like Christmas.
That Gospel does not mention the circumstances under which Jesus was born. By the time this account was written, the first three Gospels had fully reported those details.
Instead, John explored theological ideas, beginning with these verses:
“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 were made by him; and without him was made nothing that has been made.”
It is no accident that the Gospel opens with the three words that begin the Hebrew Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
The writer’s point is that the God who created the world is the God who took on the form of a human being in the person of Jesus, born in the stable in Bethlehem.
By calling our attention to the Book of Genesis, John reminds us of what we learn in the tradition of Moses, that the all-powerful God who could exist alone in eternity in perfect happiness; who needs nothing outside of himself; chose — as an act of his inexhaustible love — to share his existence with other beings.
And by creating humankind, God has shared more of what is properly his — understanding, a free will, a spirit that will never die.
This is what John evokes with those words “in the beginning” as he sets out to record another act of love, God’s appearance in the world in the form of one of his own creatures.
God did this, in a sense, in order to create men and women anew; in order to remind men and women in the most tangible way possible of his desire from the beginning to share with them the eternal peace that only he has claim to.
He did it in order to give men and women access to that peace through their communion with the child in the manger and the man on the cross.
Beyond the Book of Genesis, we find the history of God’s relationship with the Jewish people — a relationship in which God repeatedly fulfilled his promise to rescue his people from the consequences of their own failings and from the fury of their enemies.
Beyond the first verses of John’s Gospel, we find the history of Jesus’ ministry in which he responded with compassion to the needs of other people — the embarrassed groom at the wedding feast; the man born blind, the woman accused of adultery, the hungry crowd on the mountainside, the father whose son was near death, the sisters of Lazarus.
The observance of Christmas has taken on characteristics far removed from these traditions.
The furious retail season, the excesses of food and drink — these things come with each Christmas, but at times seem almost opposed to Christmas.
Amid all this, a feeling does arise that makes Christmas, as Charles Dickens put it, “a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time . . . of the long calendar of the year when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely ….” But as Dickens suggested, this elevated condition of human beings does not last the year ‘round.
By proclaiming John’s Gospel at Christmas Masses, the Church asks us to think not only about the scene in which a child was born to poor parents in an obscure time and place but also about the whole sweep of God’s relationship with humanity, and to see that it consists of repeated acts that demonstrate that the Father cares for his children.
What better carol could we sing about such a God than the words of John’s Gospel: “Of his fullness we have all had a share, love following upon love.”
Charles Paolino is a retired permanent deacon for the Diocese of Metuchen