Read
9The true light that shines
on everyone
was coming into the world.
10The Word was in the world,
but no one knew him,
though God had made the world
with his Word.
11He came into his own world,
but his own nation
did not welcome him.
12Yet some people accepted him
and put their faith in him.
So he gave them the right
to be the children of God.
13They were not God's children
by nature or because
of any human desires.
God himself was the one
who made them his children.
Reflect
We are all looking for something more than what the observed world contains. Sometimes we look with hopeful expectation, like mariners searching the horizon for signs of an undiscovered country. Sometimes we look over our shoulders as one does in the woods as dusk comes down, the old ancestral terror of the hunted rising in our hearts. But we are never free from the hope and the fear and the sense that something, someone else is out there.
Never is this more apparent than at this time of year. Even the most faithless and cynical in our culture can’t quite seem to abandon the idea that something other than the natural world is at play in the last weeks of December. For everywhere it is written and whispered and sung that Christmas is a magical time. It shows up in strange, sad ways, when people punish those who tell children there isn’t really a Santa Claus, and when the networks are filled with the annual crop of romantic holiday movies in which angels or elves or the Spirit of Christmas help the earnest but unlucky girl find love in time for New Year’s. We need magic at Christmas. If there isn’t magic, there is only the darkness and the cold, and every year we are a little further from what we felt when we were children.
The story of Christmas is the story of two miracles. The first is that the magic we suspected does exist. There is something else out there, but now it is not out there, but in here, even in this very room.
The second is that it is on our side. It didn’t have to be. That Other could have been anything. It could have come to devour us. It could have thrown us aside with alien indifference. But the truth is that it came in loving us. It came from the dark outside and when the light revealed its face, it was the face of our first and dearest friend.
Respond
Lord, thank you for coming into this world to reveal yourself to us. Thank you for being who you are instead of what you might have been. Thank you for loving us and for overcoming the separation we caused between you and ourselves.
Mike Bonikowsky
Mike Bonikowsky began looking at books as soon as he could sit up. Eventually he learned to read them, and has not been able to stop. One day he realized that people wrote the words in the books, and he began to write his own. He has not been able to stop that either. He lives with his wife and child in Melancthon Township, Ontario, where he writes his words in the basement.