Christmas Eve

 

On the twenty-first of July 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong placed a two-foot-wide array of 100 retroreflectors on the surface of the Sea of Tranquillity. A mirror on the moon. The crews of Apollo 14 and 15 also left mirrors at locations on the moon, and in addition to these three there are two further sets of mirrors on Soviet Union unmanned Luna mission robotic rovers parked on the moon’s surface. By firing lasers at these mirrors, scientists have been able to trace the moon’s orbit with remarkable accuracy.

We might imagine the opening move of John’s Gospel as firing a laser at mirrors left on the surface of Genesis chapter 1—‘In the beginning…’—and counting how long it takes for the light to be received back.

‘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 came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.’

(John 1:1-5, 14)

Our home planet is one of eight that orbit our home sun, flung out on the Orion Arm of a spiral galaxy, the Milky Way. Our home sun is one of some 40 billion suns in our home galaxy, which is in turn one of 100,000 galaxies in our home Supercluster, the Laniakea (“immense heaven”) Supercluster. These, in turn, are just some of the trillions of galaxies in the universe.

For all the vast, awe-inspiring grandeur of the universe, it is local place where we find meaningful personal connection to God. Often, when I meet with a family to plan a funeral, I am told that dad, or mum, was christened at ‘my’ church, they were married there, that they were always proud of the place and their connection to it mattered deeply to them. They may not have connected with organised religion week by week, but through their whole life long they knew that they could connect with God while this building stood open.

It is a given in the Bible that God created the world and everything in it. But I do not believe that Genesis 1 is concerned with this. Rather, I believe this to be a text, from the time of the Babylonian exile and the return from exile, that is concerned with the Temple in Jerusalem—for the Jewish people, the very centre of the cosmos—and which describes its catastrophic destruction, and God’s initiative to restore Jerusalem and have the Temple rebuilt.

By the time John writes, that second Temple has been desecrated by the Greeks, retaken and reconsecrated, massively extended by Herod the Great, and—between the Jesus event and the time of John’s writing, and, therefore, being read aloud to congregations—destroyed again by the Romans.

John’s Gospel begins with a statement of intent, that God is, once again, about to restore the meeting-place between God and God’s people. But this will not be a Temple of stone, that, impressive though it may be, will be thrown down. When John writes, of Jesus, that he lived among us, the word he chooses is ‘tabernacled,’ recalling the tent of meeting, the place where God was present in the very midst of the people while they lived in the wilderness, between the exodus from Egypt and their entering the promised land. A touchstone for the displaced.

This, then, is the account of the cosmos being restored, from its very centre. *

Those scientists with their lasers discovered that the moon is spiralling away from us at a rate of 3.8 cm per year. Imperceptible to the human eye. In Jesus, on the other hand, God is moving towards us. At times, this too may be invisible to the naked eye. But over the years, mirrors have been left that reflect the light—our holy places are such mirrors, as are moments such as the ‘Midnight Mass’ on Christmas Eve. As are our lives, even when our buildings are closed, temporarily, by pandemic, or when, for whatever reason, we feel unable to come. The light and the mirror and the time between pointing to Jesus, God-with-us, full of grace and truth, in the dark dying days of the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-one. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. May you rest confident in that and may your sense of wonder be renewed.

 

*As John would later record Jesus as saying, “For God so loved the cosmos that he sent his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish away but have enduring life.” (John 3:16). See also the death and resurrection of Jesus, alluded to by Jesus himself as a destruction and rebuilding of the Temple.