The Weekend Word

The Gospel Reading For the First Sunday After Christmas

“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 through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.In him was life, and the life was the light of men.The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.  There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him.He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.  The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right 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.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.(John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”)For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”

(John 1:1–18 ESV)

“The Bible is the sacred book of the Christian Church, but it would be wrong to infer from its exalted place in every form of Christianity that Christianity is a religion of the Book.”

“The central fact of Christianity is not a book but a person – Jesus Christ, described as the Word of God. The books of the Old Testament came to have authority within the Church because Jesus Christ set the seal of his own authority upon them, and interpreted them as preparing the way for himself. The books of the New Testament came to have authority because the Church recognised in them the authentic testimony of the apostles to Jesus Christ. It is this relationship of the books to a person that makes them very different from a collection of oracles itself providing the basis for a religion. Indeed both in Judaism and in Christianity, the religious belief in and experience of revelation preceded the making and the canonisation of the holy books. In both the Old and New Testaments, therefore, the collection of sacred books was not the basis of the belief in divine revelation, but its consequence.

The conviction in the Church that Jesus Christ was himself the Word of God (John I.14; r John i.i) rested on the belief that there was in Jesus the divine utterance, not only in his teaching and message, but in himself: the Word and the person were one. Furthermore, the Word, who was made flesh, had himself been `in the beginning with God’, at work in the creation of the world, and in giving life and light to human beings. Thus, in a sense hard to describe yet decisively perceived, the scriptures of the Old Testament not only prepared the way for Christ, but also revealed him, as the Word of God, now incarnate in him, who had been at work from the beginning.”

+Michael Ramsey

Douglas Dales. Glory Descending (Kindle Locations 163-169). Kindle Edition.