Isaiah 52:7-10 Hebrews 1:1-6 John 1:1-18
“Comfort, comfort my people!”
These words of the Lord taken from the Book of Isaiah ring out all through Advent right up to Christmas. There then come several comforting messages, including the following one: “All flesh is grass and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand for ever.”
That is a real comfort, to know that there is at least something in this world of ours, in our lives, that is actually unchanging. The word of God! Time flows relentlessly on and we keep having to say goodbye to people, to beautiful moments, to sights, to flowers, to the world as we knew it when we were young, to our country or our town as we knew it perhaps. Everything that we love seems fleeting. For generations we had been told that the laws of nature are at least immutable, that the universe itself could be eternal. But then scientists themselves withdrew even this “secular” consolation from us. The whole cosmos is passing away, cooling off, levelling out, or what have you, albeit very slowly. Everything seems to be decaying. It's good to hear that something lasts. That is a comforting message. There is God, and His word stands for ever, we can hang our hopes on that and push through life with some dignity, gathering up bits of joy and glimpses of beauty along the way.
But today we are celebrating a wonderful turn of events, which went beyond all reasonable expectation. Every preceding comfort and consolation pales in comparison to the joy of today, to the joy of Christmas, they come nowhere near. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory.” The one unchanging thing is no longer something external to life, a bridge between us and God made out of words, precepts, prophetic utterances, and divine interventions. It's no longer a peg sticking out from eternity into our world, something to hang all our hopes on, while all we look at, all that we know and love, withers and fades away. “All flesh is grass and all its beauty is like the flower of the field,” said Isaiah, and maybe so. But in the “today” of the liturgy, the Word became that flesh, the Word became green grass and the flower of the field in full bloom.
This is a complete reversal: it changes everything. We used to hope in spite of all the withering and fading, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. But now that God revealed Himself to us as a human being, our eyes have been opened. It turns out that when you glimpse beauty and goodness in this world of ours, when you see life, holiness, when you experience love, then that is the ultimate truth, that is the eternal reality. You are looking at God's glory shining through. And God's glory may be overshadowed sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, but it will never fade or wither. It will stand for ever.
“Comfort, comfort my people,” the Lord commanded Isaiah, “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.” We spend our lives trying to keep things up, to keep things going, societies, institutions and families, peace and justice, marriages, relationships, communities and friendships, culture and traditions, the natural environment, order, personal dignity and honour. That's our warfare, and without Christ in the picture all we can hope for is fleeting victories, followed by inevitable, heavy and decisive losses. Because ultimately it is death we are struggling against. But God smuggled Himself into our dying world to save us. He made a temple for Himself, a Virgin named Mary, and hid in her for nine months. But today the time has come. She gave birth to a Son, Jesus of Nazareth. “At many times and in many ways God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.”
The radiance of the glory of God shines through the body of a little Baby today. It has been hidden in Mary's womb, but now it throws a new light, the true eternal light, on everything around and on everyone who dares to come closer, to emerge from the shadows. And the grass becomes green again, and flowers of the field raise their heads, above all, we are given an opportunity to cross over from darkness to light, from death to life in God.
DSP