Translation of the Epistle for the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord
God, Who at sundry times and in divers manners spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all in these days has spoken to us by His Son, Whom He has appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the world: Who being the brightness of His glory and the image of His substance, and upholding all things by the word of His power, has affected man’s purgation from sin, and taken his seat the right hand of the Majesty on high: having become so much superior to the angels, as He has inherited a more excellent name than they. For to which of the angels has He ever said: Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee? And again: I will be to Him a Father, and He shall be to Me a Son? And again, when He brings in the firstborn into the world, He says: And let all the angels of God adore Him. And of the angels indeed He say: He makes His angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of fire. But of the Son: Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a scepter of equity is the scepter of Thy kingdom. Thou hast loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore God, Thy God, hath anointed Thee with the oil of gladness above Thy fellows. And: Thou in the beginning, O Lord, didst found the earth: and the heavens are the works of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou shalt continue: and they shall all grow old as does a garment: and as a vesture shalt Thou change them and they shall be changed: but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.
Beginning of the Gospel According to Saint John
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 by Him, and without Him was made nothing that was made: In Him was life, and the life was the light of men; and the light shines in darkness, and the darkness grasped it not. There was a man who sent from God, whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to bear concerning the light, that all might believe through Him. He was not himself the light, but was to bear witness to the light. It was the true light, which enlightens every man who comes into this world. He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. But as to many as received Him, He gave power to become sons of God, to those who believes in His Name, who are born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us: and we saw His glory, glory as of the Only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
The Saving Words of the Gospel
The Word was made flesh and tabernacled amongst us
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
We are blessed to have this Gospel, not at the end of the Mass, as a form of a second blessing, but pride of place as the Gospel of this proper Mass, the Third Mass of the Feast of Nativity. And because we hear it so often, we have the danger of a certain unhealthy familiarity. We can hear words that are rather obscure and abstract, and because of the abstraction, because of what seems to be hidden by them, we let it pass by us, and it becomes something of a white noise. And so, the Church puts this Gospel today as the Gospel of this Mass, so we can go into this Gospel and see this treasure of not only literature but of this treasure of Revelation; one of the high points of Divine Revelation. There’s nothing else like it in Scripture, there’s nothing else like it, certainly outside of Scripture.
And it starts out the Gospel with these words that every first-century Jew is going to understand In the beginning... As soon as he hears these words In the beginning… he’s brought back to Genesis; he’s brought back to Creation. When he hears בְּרֵאשִׁית (beereshait) or in Greek, ἐν ἀρχῇ (en archí), he can’t help but think of Creation. And this is what Scripture scholars call a hook word. A hook word is something that gets your attention to call you back to another usage of that term so that you understand the context. So, it’s laying the groundwork In the beginning… And In the beginning, what? In the beginning was the Word. This is an interesting way to begin a Gospel; the Word.
What is the Word? We use words. I’m using words right now. We know what a word is. Word in English has many meanings. It could be a term that represents a concept. When you’re in trouble at work, the boss says, “Come into my office, a word.” The word in Hebrew, מימרא (memra), is interesting because it can also mean The Commandments. They don’t say Ten Commandments; they say The Ten Words. And word in Hebrew was often used for divine action. Why? Because their understanding, their faulty understanding of God’s transcendence, He was so transcendent that He wasn’t really mixed in with the daily doings of our lives. And so, they would come up with synonyms for His action in our lives. And there are all sorts of words such as word itself, but also “shekinah” and “presence.” They were afraid of a God that would come close, and as we see, that’s exactly what happens in this Gospel.
This term “logos” has pages and pages of meanings and usages when you consult classical Greek lexicons. And so, it’s a multi-faceted term; it can mean word, it can mean concept, it can mean reason, it can mean intelligibility; it’s all of those things. And nonetheless, Greek philosophers saw logos, word, as a sort of a view into what is beyond us.
There was, in fact, a Hellenized Jew, Philo, some 50 years before the birth of Our Lord, who wrote about the logos as something of an intermediary between God and man. He wasn’t divine. He wasn’t man. He was something of an intermediary who he refers to 1300 times in his writings. But like everything before Christ, in Revelation outside of Revelation, attempts at explaining the divine action is always going to limp, and there’s going to be a point where it reaches the boundaries of truth, and then all of a sudden they venture into mistakes.
So, John in his Gospel, is correcting all of those mistakes. The Gnostics who thought that you needed to have some sort of initiation in order to learn secrets and that all flesh was evil. John’s not writing against them, he is just manifesting the truth, and the truth itself, then, becomes a work of apologetics against what is erroneous. So, In the beginning was the Word, and that Word was the Word of God.
When I say a word, it might express something of me, it might express something of an observation, whatever it is, it’s limited. Even the words of God and the prophets of the Old Testament were limited because they were speaking about one aspect of the divine will for people at a certain time. There was a human limitation there, not a divine limitation, a human limitation. When I say something of myself, it takes words and all of them are going to be faulty. Our Lord has one Word. The Father has one Word, and this Word is not something that He uttered chronologically. He didn’t utter it at a certain time. It’s an eternal Word that expresses Himself, and He does it with perfection. He does it with totality. Nothing is lacking in His self-expression. So, when God the Father says something, that something is everything. That something is everything.
If you look at Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, you see the Father stretching out His arm, and at the end of the arm is Adam, under the left arm of the Father in the offing, waiting her turn, is Eve, and then you see all of these other faces, those are the children of men that are to come. And they’re all enveloped by this burgundy cloak that the Father is wearing. And this burgundy cloak is in the shape of a human brain. And that’s not a coincidence. This brain then, this is the Logos. This is Reason. This is the Word. This is Intelligibility. This is God’s self-expression, which contains everything. There’s nothing lacking. That’s why it’s One.
You even see this in angelology. As you know, there are no two angels that are alike, no two equals. They are a strict hierarchy. The lower down in the hierarchy of angels, the more concepts they have in their mind. The higher up they are, the fewer concepts because they’re more inclusive. Well, this gives us an idea of this one Word. This one Word is God’s perfect self-expression. And this is the beginning, then, of Trinitarian doctrine. The Father who speaks one Word, and the breath of that Word is the Holy Spirit. So, there we see, as Augustine says, the Holy Trinity in God’s self-utterance, which has no beginning, no end.
And the Word is not some intermediary as Philo and the pagans said. It says the Word was with God, so He is eternal. There was never a time when he wasn’t. And the word was God. So, He is equally divine. The Word is equal to the Father, but not the same. The Word is equal to the Father and the Breath, but not the same. Distinct and of one substance. He was in the beginning with Him. All things were made through Him. And this is the foundation of all science. Everything made exists through this Logos, and scientists have to do violence to their intellect to deny the existence of God when they say that creation is intelligible. Why? Because the Logos is shot through everything. That He existed, whatever exists exist through Him, whatever exists exists for Him, and, therefore, is to render Him glory, just by existing according to its nature.
I was speaking with a young man who suffers a horrible cross of schizophrenia, who had a beautiful profound conversion, and he said, “Once I learned Christ, I got to know who Christ was. There was no turning back.” This is a man who was on his way to holiness, bearing his cross of mental health problems in a way that is sanctifying, because he understood that everything speaks of God. Everything speaks of God. And if it doesn’t, I don’t hear it well. I don’t see it correctly. If everything is made through Him, by Him, for Him, then it exists to give Him glory. It’s there for Him.
And if I parse it, if I see it outside of His Logos, outside of His mind, this is the beginning of the sin of Adam, where we start to take things apart and we see whether or not we like it or don’t like it.
Without Him, nothing was made: In Him was life, and the life was the light of men; and the light shines in darkness. And then, he says, There was a man once sent by God, his name was John. So, what he’s doing is taking the greatest of the prophets and he says, ‘and he’s not Him.’ So, all of these prophets who spoke the word of God, they’re not the Word. They uttered words but they have nothing, nothing that approaches the one Word. He came as a witness to the Word, but he was not the light; he was chosen to bear witness to the light. The Word is the true light that enlightens every man who comes into this world. He was in the world, the world was made through Him, the world knew Him not. This is the definition of sin; to not understand the reason for everything. We take it out of the context of the Word, it becomes alogos, it becomes illogical. Alogos is the Greek word for sin, because there’s something insane about sin, in which we would think, do, say something that is out of its true context, because everything that exists is stamped with the logos of its provenance. It comes from God’s mind, and it’s involved in God’s thought. It’s included in God’s mind; if I don’t see it that way, I don’t see it correctly. So, this is the great tragedy of our fallen world: That He created it for Himself. He made us and everything else for Himself, and we don’t grasp that. And not grasping it, we act according to that insanity.
But that’s not the end of the story. As many received him, he gave power, ἐξουσία (exousia) is the word, it’s power and authority, to become sons of God. So, this is the hope, the divine filiation. And how did He do this? He subsumed our nature. He didn’t transform into man. He subsumed, took our nature upon Himself without abandoning His divinity. And in doing so, He gave us the pathway to salvation. Because the Word was made flesh, and now this is the answer to those Gnostics, this is the answer to all of those “matter bad spirit good” people. And we see this repeated from the time of the Gnostics, the Manichaeists, the Bogomilians, we see this in every century, it has its Gnostics. And today it, I won’t go into it now, but it’s wokeism is a form of Gnosticism. A Denial of the logos and a denial, therefore, of the goodness of matter. As Catholics we don’t think that matter is bad, spirit is good. When God created as we saw in בְּרֵאשִׁית (beereshait) in Genesis. What He created is good. Everything He made is good; fallen but still good.
And that’s the key, says Irenaeus, when the Word became flesh, He took flesh upon Himself. God became man so that we could, as he says, and hold onto your seats, so that we could become God. That the divine filiation and is the key to our divination. Divination, not in the Mormon sense that each one of us becomes a God in substance, but we participate in divine nature through grace. And the word was made flesh, and the root of this doesn’t say, “Dwelled among us.” He set up His tent; He tabernacled amongst us. So, any Jew hearing that is going to know exactly what this was.
There’s a place of exile, the desert, they set up a Tent of the Divine Presence. And now, that was a preparation for this temple that is now the body of Christ; the body of God which is in the form of a baby. This is His new tabernacle, a newborn baby born in the darkness and poverty. This is the new tabernacle. This is the Tent of Encounter with Divine Presence.
Augustine says,
Great benevolence! Great mercy! The Son whom the Father had begotten, and by whom He created all things, He sent into this world that He might have adopted brethren by His grace. For He, the Only-begotten, came to loose the sins in which we were entangled, and whose burden hindered our adoption; those whom He wished to make brethren to Himself, He Himself loosed, and made joint-heirs: let us possess Him, and let him possess us: let Him possess us as Lord; let us possess Him as salvation, let us possess Him as light.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
~Fr. Ermatinger