CHRISTMASTIDE · 27 DECEMBER
Saint John the Evangelist & Apostle
The Beloved Disciple · Evangelist · Author of the Gospel, Epistles & Revelation · He Who Stood at the Cross
John — JON · Zebedee — ZEB-eh-dee · Ephesus — EF-eh-sus · Patmos — PAT-mos · Domitian — doh-MISH-an · Irenaeus — ir-ih-NAY-us · Polycarp — POL-ih-karp
Merciful Lord, we beseech thee to cast thy bright beams of light upon thy Church, that it, being instructed by the doctrine of thy blessed Apostle and Evangelist Saint John, may so walk in the light of thy truth, that it may at length attain to the light of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
He is the only Apostle who did not die a martyr’s death, the only one of the Twelve whose life story ends not with execution but with natural death in extreme old age at Ephesus (EF-eh-sus). He stood at the cross when the others had fled, and the dying Lord gave him his mother — Woman, behold thy son; Son, behold thy mother — and from that hour he took her unto his own home. He outlived them all: Peter and Paul and Stephen and James and every companion of his youth on the Sea of Galilee, and he went on writing and teaching and caring for the communities at Ephesus into the first years of the second century, when the chain of living witnesses to the Lord’s earthly ministry had shortened to himself alone. He is the living link, the last thread connecting the Church to the eyewitness tradition, and when he died the last direct memory of the Lord’s voice and face and presence passed into the guardianship of those he had taught — Polycarp (POL-ih-karp), who had sat at his feet in Ephesus, and through Polycarp to Irenaeus (ir-ih-NAY-us), and through Irenaeus to the tradition this archive has been exploring from the very beginning.
The Gospel of John is the last of the four, and the most unlike the others — not a narrative of actions but a meditation on meaning, not the story of what Jesus did but the theology of who he is. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Prologue places the whole of the Gospel’s story within the framework of the eternal generation of the Son from the Father, and everything that follows — the seven signs, the seven I am sayings, the farewell discourses, the Passion, the Resurrection — is the unfolding of that opening statement. John’s Gospel is the fourth Gospel but it is also the first in the sense that it provides the theological framework within which the other three are properly understood: without the Prologue, Bethlehem is a birth; with it, Bethlehem is the Incarnation of the eternal Word. It is John who gives us the water of life and the bread of life and the resurrection and the life and the way and the truth and the life; John who gives us the vine and the branches, the shepherd and the sheep; John who gives us the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth. The beloved disciple’s Gospel is the Church’s primary instrument for understanding who Jesus is.
His feast falls on 27 December, between the Protomartyr and the Holy Innocents — between the first adult death for the Name and the first infant deaths caused by the birth that the Name names. John in this position is the still point of the Christmas week: the Apostle who did not die a martyr’s death, held between two feasts of martyrdom, as the one who bore witness not with blood but with ink, not with death but with longevity, not with the dramatic gesture but with the long faithful presence that outlasted everyone. He is there at the cross. He is there at the empty tomb. He is there in Ephesus for sixty years. He is there on Patmos (PAT-mos) when the Emperor Domitian (doh-MISH-an) exiles him and the visions come. He is there at the end, so old that his disciples carry him to speak to the communities and he can only say one thing: Little children, love one another. When they asked him why he always said the same thing, he said: because it is the commandment of the Lord, and if it alone be kept, it is enough.
John stands in the cloud of witnesses as its longest-serving member, the last surviving eyewitness, the man who wrote the Gospel that begins where all things begin — In the beginning — and who carried that beginning in his memory and his heart until the second century had opened and the Church’s first generation was complete. His witness is the guarantee of the tradition’s continuity: the living chain that runs from Jesus to John to Polycarp to Irenaeus and through all the Patristic and medieval and Anglican figures in this archive was anchored in a man who had leaned on the Lord’s breast and been given the Lord’s mother and stood at the foot of the cross and run to the empty tomb and spent sixty years in Ephesus telling the young communities what he had seen. He is there still, in the cloud of witnesses, with all the rest. And he is still saying: little children, love one another.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant John didst give the Church the deepest account of thy Son’s eternal nature and the simplest commandment of his love; Grant that we may hear in his Gospel the Word that was in the beginning, and obey in our lives the commandment he repeated at the end: that we love one another as thou hast loved us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.