Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 2 January 2022

Second Sunday of Christmas

'No one has ever seen God;

it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father's heart,

who has made him known'. (Jn 1:18)

These words from John at the end of our Gospel this Sunday, catch me unawares, not because I disbelieve them, but because I know them in my heart, and yet need time and space to think how I have come to understand this truth through the 'only Son'. You see, I am not an evangelical whose focus is very much on the direct and emotional encounter with Jesus as Lord and Saviour, so my searching for the Christ, as I suspect it is for many, is by hints and guesses, by trusting the encounter we have in Word and Sacrament and seeking to know the Lord in what I now realise has been my constant struggle to live out the Beatitudes and the great Commandment.

We have been given many different ways to get to know the Christ, all of them are rooted in the Gospel, we hear them proclaimed to us in the Scriptures, as Catholic Christians we instinctively make many of these encounters our own. They are part of our faith DNA, they belong with us as part of our travelling kit on the one Royal Road that is narrow but leads to eternal life. I take enormous comfort from the fact that Jesus understands that human beings are rightly diverse in personality and giftedness, but that this variety is a bonding gift, for in baptism it becomes familial. As we are part of 'His' family, we also belong in that Pauline metaphor of the Body as different parts but always one in Christ, our head, our corner stone, our way, truth and life (Eph1, 5,6. Col 2,19.I Cor 6,12,13,14) Each of us will discover our particular ways of encountering Jesus, but there is one particular way I understand Christ amongst us which I wish to share, the poet and the artist in me returns back to it again and again, but anybody who knows love will understand exactly what this is.

Let me show you. In this Christmas season the various feasts continually bring us to the theme of Christ as the Light that has come into our world and lives, John gives us this in these hauntingly beautiful cadences:

"In him was life, and that life was the light of all humankind.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. (Jn 1:4-5,9,14) Now we are all well aware that imagery of the One God cannot place before us anything other than supposition, for nobody can see God, yet! Christ is the way to this realisation of encounter, for in Christian tradition we acknowledge the persons of the Triune God and find our way in to knowing this Being through Christ, but also the charism of the Holy Spirit. Light, brilliance, something greater than our perception helps us. Here in the Nativity feasts we find echoes of this light as star, brilliance, luminosity, another way of seeing beyond human sight. The Byzantine tradition sings this Kontakion at Great Matins of the Theophany: 'You have revealed yourself to the world today;

and your light, O Lord, has set its seal on us.
We recognize you and exclaim to you:
You have come and revealed yourself, O Unapproachable Light'. In some way this deeply poetic but theological hymn gathers us up into Christ, the Oikos which follows this tells us more by showing us what this means for human life:

'As the prophet foretold,
a great Light, Christ, has shone upon Galilee of the Gentiles,
upon the land of Zabulon, and the land of Nephtali.
A people living in darkness have seen a great light shining from Bethlehem.
The Sun of Righteousness, the Lord born of Mary, casts his rays upon all those who dwelt on earth.
Come then, O naked children of Adam, and let us clothe ourselves in Him that we may warm ourselves.
For the Light that no one can approach, the One who is a protection and a mantle for the naked,
the Light to those in darkness, has appeared and revealed himself today'.( Oikos of Great Matins of the Theophany)

This is the real sense of wonder we find in that Gospel of John, reaching out to us as we start a new year, but it is also there in a more concise form, staring right at us in the second reading from Ephesians. The true Light has come to us who are God's chosen:

'Before the world was made, he chose us, chose us in Christ,

to be holy and spotless, and to live through love in his presence,

determining that we should become his adopted sons and daughters, through Jesus Christ

for his own kind purposes'. (Eph 1: 4-5)

Keep that text as a symbol of your New Year resolution to live out your faith in light and truth as the children of the Most High. Amen

May I wish all of you a very Happy and Blessed New Year.

Lectio

From the sung Lucenarium at Vespers in the Ambrosian Rite

as the lamps are lit.

V. For you light my lamp, O Lord

R. My God, lighten my darkness

V. For in you I shall be delivered from temptation

R. My God, lighten my darkness

V. For you light my Lamp, O Lord

R. My God, lighten my darkness

Collect from Vigil of the Epiphany ( Ambrosian Rite)

O God, who on this day revealed Your only-begotten Son to the Gentiles by the guidance of a star, mercifully grant that we who already know You by faith, may be brought to view the beauty of Your glory. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, * who lives and reigns with You, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, One God forever and ever.

Extract from a Homily of Paul VI

Christmas Midnight Mass

December 24, 1967

…Here, it is no longer us who seeks to rise towards God, it is God who descends towards us, to make us rise towards him, to free and to save us. It is God who takes the initiative, God who breaks into the fabric of human history. This is the "good news" - (this is the meaning of the Greek word euángelos) - which is announced today to all the earth.

The Gospel is "the new" par excellence, one might say, the only true novelty which has ever been verified in the long and laborious spiritual history of humanity. To weariness, to the aging of the pagan world, Christ brings something entirely new: liberation and salvation from on high. He frees us from ourselves, from our fundamental misery, from our evil inclinations, from his sins and from our vices, and makes us a new person, associated with his divine life.

Saint Paul, the incomparable cantor of this liberation of humanity by Christ, will cry out in a transport of gratitude and love: "he loved me and he gave himself up for me!" ( Gal. 2, 20). This is because everyone is now personally concerned. It is not to a generic and abstract humanity that salvation is offered, it is to each person in particular; it is my necessities, my desires, my deepest aspirations that Christ comes to fulfill. And the new energies which it places in the heart of humanity will exert their beneficial influence on the whole of society. Our modern world tormented by so many agonizing problems, this world where we work, where we suffer, where we long for peace: let us turn to the Child of the crèche, let us welcomes his message! It is for us the way of salvation, happiness and true peace. It is a new hope which dawns on the world, it is the announcement of a fullness and an unending joy!