Shed upon your Church, O Lord, the brightness of your light, that we, being illumined by the teaching of your apostle and evangelist John, may so walk in the light of your truth, that at length we may attain to the fullness of eternal life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (BCP - Collect for the Feast of St.. John, Dec. 27)
Who is St. John? By tradition, St. John was one of Jesus’ closest disciples, the one to whom he entrusted his mother as he was dying on the cross; the one sitting next to him at the Last Supper, leaning his head against the Lord’s chest; one of only three disciples to be with him in his agony in the garden of Gethsemane and in the same intimate group present at his transfiguration.
St. John, by tradition, was the youngest of the disciples; you can pick him out from the other disciples in paintings because he’s the one without a beard.
He was the younger brother of James; the two of them had been fishermen before Jesus called them as disciples, and Jesus gave the two of them a nickname: “Sons of Thunder” because apparently they were a lot of trouble.
After Jesus’ death and resurrection, John and the other disciples became leaders of the church in Jerusalem and suffered persecution. John’s older brother James was the first of the twelve to be killed. As the believers fled the persecutions in Jerusalem, John is said to have gone to [what is now] Turkey, where he started several churches, including the church in Ephesus.
As persecutions continued, tradition says John was tortured by being put in a vat of boiling oil. Another story says he was given a cup of poisoned wine to drink, but when he blessed the wine, the poison rose out of it in the form of a snake. This story is the source of one of John’s more unusual symbols – a chalice with a snake in it. John was later exiled to the Island of Patmos, where tradition has it that he saw the visions recorded in the Book of Revelation. After the death of the emperor Domitian, John returned from exile to the church in Ephesus, where he continued to teach and lead that congregation and also visit other churches and bishops in the area. By this time, John was in his 90s.
Irenaeus, in some of his writings, recalls as a young boy listening to Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna, recount stories of his memories of the apostle and evangelist John when he was at the church in Ephesus.
One of the stories passed down about him (recorded by St. Jerome) says that when the apostle John was very old, his messages became shorter and shorter, until all he would say when he preached was, “Little children, love one another,” and this he would say to them over and over. One story has a congregant ask him, “Master, why do you always say this?” He answered, “It is the Lord’s command, and if this alone be done, it is enough.” Near the end of his life, John’s disciples carried him into the church, so he could speak to his congregation. When they had brought him in and the people were quiet, he raised himself up on one elbow and said to them, “Little children, love one another” and lay back down.
John, the youngest of all the disciples, was the last to die, and the only one to die a natural death of old age. He was a leader in the early church for probably 70 or more years. His life was one dedicated to the Gospel, to proclaiming God’s love for us in the person of Christ and requiring from us the appropriate response of love.
The writings attributed to John and his community are among the most poetic, beautiful, and striking in all the Bible. St. John is called “the Evangelist” because an evangelist is someone who tells the Gospel, the “good news.” John’s Gospel stands apart from the other three. It has a different way of looking at things. Where Mark starts telling the story of Jesus’ life at baptism and Matthew and Luke begin with his birth, John goes back to before the beginning of time and finds Jesus there, with God his Father, creating the world.
Reading the prologue to John’s gospel, especially, is like looking down on the whole of Christian theology from far above it. When you look out the window of an airplane, you can see entire cities, even whole states or countries, laid out below you. The Rocky Mountains look like scrunched paper bags, the Pacific Ocean like a piece of textured glass. It’s totally different from the view at ground level. That’s how John writes – he gives us a bird’s eye view of how everything fits together. This is why John’s symbol is the eagle.
But John’s symbol is the eagle for another reason as well…
Have you ever watched an eagle hunt – or a hawk? We have a hawk that lives near the church; you can hear him sometimes. When he’s hunting, he’ll perch high up in a tree or on a power line, sitting very still, looking down at the grass for mice - or he’ll circle slowly in the air. And what happens when he spots what he’s looking for? He folds in his wings and dives, like a missile.
This is another attribute of St. John’s writing: he zeros in on what is most central in Jesus’ life and teaching and drives all his efforts toward getting that one point across. Just like the eagle - that’s the whole point of going up in the air in the first place, not just to admire the view, but to get enough perspective that it’s possible to see what’s most important.
Our lectionary sees this quality in John’s writings also. Matthew, Mark, and Luke each have priority as the primary source for the Gospel readings for one year in our three-year cycle, but John’s Gospel doesn’t have a year to itself. Instead central passages in John’s Gospel are read every year at important points. Those who put together the lectionary cycle realized that what John focused on was key, and if people heard nothing else all year long – if they never came except during Advent and Holy Week, Christmas and Easter – they would hear the whole message of the Gospel in John.
And what does John’s Gospel say? From the heights of his expansive theological vision, the Evangelist zeros-in on a single command: love one another.
Beginning with the Prologue now, at Christmas, we start from before time, to understand what it means that Jesus was born as a baby – John tells us that the Word, in the beginning with God, through whom all things were made – the Word, Jesus, became flesh and lived among us, and by his becoming one of us, he gave us the right to become children of God. And what does that mean?
It means God loves us; he loves his Son, and his Son loves us. And our appropriate response is love – love God; love Jesus; love each other.
By the time we come through Lent, this message is distilled in the Maundy Thursday liturgy, whose content comes from John’s Gospel – the word “Maundy” is from the word “mandate” or “command.” What was Jesus’ command to his disciples at the Last Supper? He told them “I give you a new commandment… Love one another as I have loved you”
In the letters attributed to St. John later in the NT, we hear this message repeated again and again, and we can well believe that this was, in fact, the message he drove home to his congregation. After all his writings and all his years of teaching and leading the church, he had centered on this one thing: love one another. Listen to what 1 John says in various places.
Ch 4: 7-11
Ch 3
11 For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another,
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23 And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. (1Jn 3: 11,18,23)
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Dec. 27, 2009
Given to St. John's, Silsbee -
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