The Christmas World of I John
G.K. Chesterton claims that the purpose of traveling is not to see the foreign lands to which you travel, but to see familiar places with new eyes:
Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see France? Do you suppose that I go to Germany in order to see Germany? I shall enjoy them both; but it is not them that I am seeking. . . . The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set food on one’s own country as foreign land.
I’m not so sure about that. When I go to France, I go in order to see France. But, commenting on this passage in his collection of Chesterton’s Christmas writings, Ryan Whitaker Smith observes, “The purpose of our journey is not so much to dwell in ‘the place from which Christmas came,’ but to allow that place to dwell in us, to return to our own country with christened eyes, to look upon our everyday surroundings with a baptized imagination.”
We do this in countless ways during Advent and the Christmas season. Elsewhere, Chesterton describes how the magic of Santa Claus prepared him to wonder at the gratuity of creation: “Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers. Now, I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea.” Just this past week we had two Christmas pageants at my sons’ school, with a shepherd in one and an angel in the other. The pageants help the children understand the Christmas story and enter into it themselves. They also can teach us adults in unexpected ways. John Tavener’s “A Christmas Round” turns a translated Greek text into a swirling round: “Today the Virgin bears a child, whose birth cannot be borne.” As I watched my little son enter into the songs and gestures he had rehearsed, and as he bounded up to me and my wife after the performance, blowing kisses and hugging us tight, I found that it was a gift too beautiful for me to bear. Christmas has ways of catching us unaware—of pulling back the surface of reality to its deeper truth, of letting us hold the baby whose birth cannot be borne.
Another way we do this is by immersing ourselves in the first letter of St. John, which provides the bulk of the daily Mass readings for the Christmas season. There are clear reasons for this. The letter speaks eloquently of Christ come in the flesh and exhorts us to love one another as God has loved us in giving us his Son. This is in line with a long tradition going back to Augustine, who in the prologue to his homilies on I John writes that John “said many things, and nearly everything was about charity.” I John is bright with joy, which makes it perfect for Christmas, but it is also a strange book that can seem jarring or contradictory at times. Still, despite that—even because of it—the letter is a doorway into the spirit of Christmas. We would do well to sit with it over the course of the season and let its message refresh us.
Two things mark the speech of children, especially young children. The first is their cadences, which can have an almost sing-song quality. The second is their directness and simplicity. My sons instinctively live in a world of black-and-white moral clarity, of being the good guys who fight the bad guys. This is a healthy way to begin life. We want our children to distinguish good from evil, but in time we will teach them to look for shades of grey. Yes, I say when asked, the Nazis were the bad guys and the Americans were the good guys, but in World War I it was not so clear. More than children, we adults are keenly aware of the shades of grey in the world and in our own hearts. We hope we are the good guys, but fear that sometimes we take the wrong side.
This is what makes the world of I John both consoling and alarming. The letter has a sing-song quality, the directness and simplicity befitting the celebration of a child. Indeed, the author repeatedly reminds us that we are children of God. Thus in I John 3 we read: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And every one who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.” This is the kind of consolation we want and expect from Christmas. Yet in the next verses we find this:
Every one who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he appeared to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. He who does right is righteous, as he is righteous. He who commits sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. No one born of God commits sin; for God’s nature abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God (I John 3:4–9).
We have immediately gone from consoling to unsettling. The world of I John is a childlike world of black and white, good and evil. There is sin and there is righteousness, and the two split like oil and water. What about the shades of grey? What about those of us who yearn for righteousness and still commit sin? Of course, there are ways to harmonize the passages of John, both with each other and with the New Testament as a whole. We sin but we confess our sin and are forgiven. By faith and the sacraments, we abide in Christ and, barring deadly sin (I John 5:16–17), remain there. But the letter’s childlike character is salutary. It reminds us that in the end there is a clear choice: good or evil, sin or righteousness, embracing God or rejecting him. The shades of grey will resolve into black or white. In the end, we are all good guys or bad guys; we should do what we can to end up good guys.
This clear binary may come in part from the letter’s historical context. I John was written after John’s gospel, when there appears to have been a split in John’s community over the nature of Christ. In his Introduction to the New Testament, Raymond Brown argues that the group that broke away would have been a precursor to the docetists, who denied that Christ was truly human, or the gnostics, who believed the physical world to be a deception. They seem to have
negated the importance of the human career of Jesus by not confessing him as the Christ come in the flesh (4:3). Probably they thought that salvation came solely from the entrance of the Son of God into the world, so that the historical activity of Jesus had no salvific or exemplary importance. In particular, they seem to have neglected the bloody death of Jesus as an act of love and expiation, a motif that the author emphasizes (1:7; 2:2; 4:10; 5:6).
To rectify this, I John immerses us not only in the childlike world of good and evil, but also in the wonder of John’s gospel, whose prologue exposits the importance of the Incarnation and serves as the deepest theological exposition of Christmas: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” St. Luke tells of the heavens opening and a multitude of the heavenly host revealing the glory of God to astonished shepherds. John, too, writes of the revelation of the glory of the Lord, but over Jesus’s whole life. There are the seven signs, beginning with the water and wine at Cana and culminating in the Passion, in which the Light of the World is lifted high on the candelabrum of the cross. But all throughout there is the sense of a new, uncontainable joy breaking into the world: living water that will well up to eternal life, a light beginning to shine in the darkness that the darkness will not overcome.
Together with his gospel, I John emphasizes the saving power of Christ’s life and how, as a moral exemplar, he teaches us to remain alive in God’s love. John reminds us that the sleeping child is the Word made flesh. And the necessary response to the gift of this child is love for our brothers and sisters. Abiding in the love of God, we must abide in love with those close to us. Living out the Christian life by believing the truth, keeping the commandments, and striving to maintain unity with the Church are all intertwined.
Hence the climax of I John is a beautiful paean to love: “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love” (I John 4:7–8). So much theological reflection has come from those three words, the foundation of Trinitarian thought: God is love. John is clear that this love begins in God and his gift of Christ to us, then comes to us through our own faith in God and love of our brother. It is here that we find Augustine’s famous exhortation: “Love, and do what you want. If you are silent, be silent with love; if you cry out, cry out with love; if you chastise, chastise with love; if you spare, spare with love. The root of love must be within; nothing but good can come forth from this root.”
In due course, Christmas will give way to Epiphany and then the rest of a long new year. To paraphrase Augustine, Christmas and its trappings refresh us on our journey like a stay in a warm inn. They are not the end, but a place to rest along the way. The end of our journey is clear: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” “That is the end,” Augustine writes, “there is the perpetual praise, there always the unceasing Alleluia.”
After the Magi presented their gifts, St. Matthew writes, “they departed to their own country by another way.” When our gifts are all opened and received, may we likewise return to our everyday life by another way, with eyes that see good from evil and arms that have held the God who is Love come down to us.
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