The True Message of Christmas

In the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, which we held in celebration of Christmas on New Year’s Eve as we always do, the great sequence of readings culminates in the very famous prologue to St. John’s Gospel (1:1–18).

These words stand together with the prophecies of Isaiah as among the most theologically profound passages in Christian Scripture. They comprise nothing less than “the hermeneutical key” to understanding not merely the Gospel itself but the Church’s understanding of Christ and his mission of salvation. 

Behind the text there stand multiple layers of Jewish biblical tradition, Hellenic philosophical framing and Christian theology combined in a manner that has shaped our understanding since the earliest patristic time. The prologue establishes a cosmic Christology in which the eternal Word of God becomes incarnate in human flesh, thereby inaugurating a new creation and offering salvation to all who receive him in faith.

The passage opens with statements of unequalled theological grandeur and echoes, evoking nothing less than, the story of creation itself from the opening words of Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word” (ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος). This signals an immediate and new understanding of creation in the light of the revelation brought to us in the person of Christ. The Greek word logos carries the weight of both the Hebrew dabar (the creative word of God) and Hellenistic philosophical understanding, and denotes all at once that Christ is both the eternal self-expression and self-disclosure of God the Father.  Thus is articulated nothing less than an understanding of how the eternal, divine Word can become an historical human being without contradiction or loss of divinity.

The three successive clauses of the opening verse proceed in a crescendo of disclosure. The first declaration that “the Word was with God” (πρὸς τὸν θεόν) emphasizes both the distinction of persons and simultaneous intimate communion. The declaration that “the Word was God” (θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος) asserts complete identity of nature, establishing that the Word does not merely possess godlike qualities but is intrinsically divine, sharing in the very being of God. (A formulation that avoids the heresies later known as modalism (confusing persons) and subordinationism – that would reduce the Word to a lesser divine being). All this points firmly to the affirmation that would become the classical trinitarian theology of the Church, which upheld both the real distinction of persons coupled with the identity of the divine nature. Thus, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI does the Prologue make clear that “the Word, who has always existed with God, who is God himself and through whom and for whom all things were created,” establishes Christ as the creative principle of all reality. And the third verse explicates this cosmic Christology further when stating that: “All things came into being through him, and without him was not anything made that was made”. 

This asserts the Word’s instrumental causality in creation, establishing that the Word as the rational principle (logos) underlying all existence, the divine intelligence that sustains and orders creation, while the emphatic negation repudiates another later heretical notion that evil could somehow represent a cosmic principle equal in power to God. 

And the prologue next shifts from cosmology to soteriological revelation by declaring that: “In him was life, and the life was the light of all men.” Where life is not mere biological existence but the life of the world to come such that the very life of God is now accessible through the Word. This life is simultaneously “the light of all people,” as reflects the connection between life and light deriving again from the creation narrative in Genesis 1, where light is God’s first creative act, establishing the possibility of vision and understanding. Theologically this light signifies revelation — God’s self-manifestation that alone renders reality intelligible and orients human existence toward its proper end. 

Yet some have walked in darkness which is to be spiritually blind, unable to see God’s self-disclosure in Christ; while to receive the light is to encounter saving truth that transforms all our relationships through God down to our neighbor so it is essential to understand that: “The light shines in the darkness yet the darkness comprehended it not.” And here the Greek word katalambanō carries the sense of both “comprehend” (intellectually seize) and “overcome” (conquer militarily). The prologue thus opens with the observation that the world into which the light comes remains darkened, resistant, often hostile to revelation. This affirmation grounds the Christian eschatological hope in the very nature of God’s creative and redemptive power which leads to the dramatic heart of the prologue in verse nine declaring that now: “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” 

The words “true light” (τὸ φῶς τὸ ἀληθινόν) distinguish Christ from all other possible claimants to illumination and then in the next verse confronts the world’s dark response: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.” 

Here the layered irony is devastating: the world exists through the Word, yet remains blind to its source, yet far from negating the incarnation’s significance, this actually serves as the condition for the prologue’s climactic and triumphal affirmation that nonetheless: “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” – the structural climax of the prologue.

And here again the words are so very important for “received him” (lambanō) and “believed in his name” (pisteuō eis to onoma) represent an active human response to divine self-disclosure. Yet the capacity for this response flows from God himself: for believers are “born of God,” for authentic faith is itself a divine gift and a new birth 

So indeed can we then rejoice in the ultimate affirmation of Christmas that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” 

Let this stand for us all as the ultimate message of peace, joy and redemption that is the true message of Christmas!