“In the beginning was the Word” – Jn 1:1-18
“In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.”
The Son of God is the Word in which the Eternal Father utterly expresses himself, with whom he shares the entire infinity of his Deity. But the Son of God is also a personal Meaning in which the Eternal Father expresses all the greatness and truth of his Divinity that are incomprehensible to us. In the beginning there was the Divine Meaning, - and through Him, through the Only Begotten Son of God, everything was created. This is what today's Gospel tells us.
So, the world did not come out of nowhere, its beginning is not an accident, or some primal chaos or ignorance. In the beginning there was the Divine Meaning. Our entire cosmos, counting in thousands of light years, all its individual beings and all its history - what is more, the entire world, unimaginable to us, of invisible creatures - was embraced by the infinite and Almighty God, through the Word that was in the beginning and that is God. Our rationality is a reflection of the Divine Word, the Divine Reason, which was from the beginning and which embraces everything. "There was a true light," says today's Gospel, "which enlightens every man when he comes into the world."
If our world is badly arranged, it is not because it came from some primal nonsense. Not because the Creator had arranged it wrongly. "People loved darkness rather than light," the Gospel tells us. And therefore, our life is often bitter, lonely, full of mutual harm and distrust. And this is the greatest absurdity of our sinfulness: the world and man come from God who is Love, from God who is Meaning itself, and we are suffocated by the lack of love, and we are plunged into nonsense and darkness. There is no attitude more irrational than sin,than the arrangement of our life as if God did not exist, as if everything came from some primal nonsense and eventually tends towards nonsense.
"And the Word was made flesh", the Divine Word became man. In this perspective, today's Gospel shows us the gift of Christmas. Here comes the Divine Logos, the Son of God, through whom the world was created, He comes to our earth, where mindlessness, egoism, hypocrisy and mutual aggression prevailed. He can undoubtedly repair everything that we have destroyed with our sins in His creation. He is God's Wisdom, God's Sense, God's Son - and He alone is able to lead us out of the darkness of our ignorance and restore us to the dignity of God's children, made in the image and likeness of God Himself. May we only receive Him, our Savior. Let us not just stay away from Him.
2020 is Gone
2020 is already behind us. Each of us individually can look at the ending of the year differently. For some it was a time when something had just begun, a time of a new beginning: a new job, maybe the first one in life; new acquaintances - starting a family; a new life - a child that is born. For others, 2020 could be a painful time, sometimes experiencing something difficult: illness or death of a loved one; unsuccessful plans or investments; failures at work or personal life.
For me, 2020 was a quiet, "normal" year, with no major ups or downs. The year that has brought me closer to meeting face-to-face with my Savior.
Regardless of how personally we experienced this period, from God's perspective it was a time of grace, a time of God's action in our lives. Because God, once he started his work, which is the creation and life of every human being, does not cease to watch over us and lead us towards himself, although - it is true - that sometimes he does it in a way that is not understood by us.
God's logic is slightly different than ours. If it were up to us, Jesus, the Son of God, King of the world, would be born in a villa or a comfortable apartment, in one of the world's capitals, surrounded by a multitude of the best doctors and midwives, and not in a poor stable, in Bethlehem, somewhere at the end of the world.
Every year we celebrate Christmas to recall and become aware of this incomprehensible logic of God's love: the inexhaustible God, the creator of the world, becomes man, child, baby, "God with us" in an incomprehensible way, to accompany us in our joys and sorrows and those ordinary moments of everyday life.
At the end of 2020, let me send you one of thethoughts of Padre Pio:
“Whoever has time should not waste it and wait for a convenient moment. Let us not postpone until tomorrow what we can do today. By saying, "I'll do it later", the pavement of Hell is paved ... and besides, who can assure us that we will live tomorrow? Let us therefore listen to the voice of our conscience, the royal prophet: When you hear the voice of the Lord, do not harden your hearts. So, let us get down to business and start accumulating spiritual treasures, because only the time that is running out is our property. Let us not divide it between one moment and the next because we are not able to do it ourselves.” (TN, w: Epist. Iv; s. 877n).
Until Tomorrow
fr. george