Mother and Child’s Conversation
When the child is born, a conversation begins. The mother and the baby start a new form of their deep relationship. What used to happen within the mother, as it were, becomes a face-to-face encounter. The child sees the world in the face of his loving mother. The mother pronounces the baby’s name and reveals to the child that he or she is a member of the human community.
Mary and Jesus’ Conversation
The conversation between Jesus and Mary, which began at Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, is without end; even better, it is infinite, simply because Jesus is God. He is Jesus, a man in our human race. He is God, too. When addressing Him, looking at Him, listening to Him, touching Him, Mary reaches to God.
Mary and John’s Conversation
We can easily imagine the page of the Gospel we have just heard – the opening of St John’s Gospel – as the fruit of this conversation between Mary and Jesus echoed in another conversation, the conversation with the other son of Mary: John, the beloved disciple who represents all of us who believe in Christ and love Him.
What was there in the beginning? This is John asking the first question, the question about the origins of the world and all that we are.
“In the beginning was the Word”. This is Mary answering. She expresses Jesus’ deepest identity: He is the Word of God spoken to the world because He eternally was the Word spoken in God, the Word who was “with God” and who “was God”. Mary and John touch the mystery of the Trinity. God speaks in one Word Himself and the whole world: eternity and time, silence and revelation, the perfect peace of God and the violent dramas of our history. In this one Word, He says, He creates, and He heals the world.
What about this other beginning? This is John rejoining and explaining that there was this great man, too, John the Baptist. He began an extraordinary spiritual movement. Jesus stepped in, took over from him, but didn’t He owe much to John the precursor?
John was a witness, says Mary. “He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light”, although he was not himself “the light”. John was great, as a light. But Jesus was “the true light”. In a sense, He has always been present in the world. The world could not exist without the original Word through which it was created. But in Jesus, a new presence of the Word of light was revealed.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth”. Mary knows in her flesh what these words mean. Jesus received His flesh from Mary’s flesh. John, too, knows about Jesus’ flesh. He has written in his first letter about that “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life”. John the Apostle is a witness who has seen Jesus in the flesh. Both Mary and John exult in their flesh for God has come so near to them. We, too, exult on this Christmas day: God has come in the flesh, God made Himself so close to us, God is at hand so that we can meet Him, be taught by Him, believe in Him and love Him! Today we adore Jesus’ flesh, sacrament of His divinity, wellspring of grace and truth, overflowing fullness of light and love.
We hear John and Mary singing together in rapture: “From His fullness have we all received, grace upon grace.” In Jesus, all is given, because the gift that is this Babe is the guarantee of all the gifts God wishes to give to each of us: His light, His truth, His love, His Spirit of Truth and Love, His healing and deifying grace, the communion in love with their eternal life.
Trinitarian Conversation
After this, is there room place for a question? Yes. John asks the other question: the question of the end. What will there be for the world and for us at the end?
Let us listen to Mary’s answer. “No one has ever seen God.” – neither John, nor Mary, nor anyone else; not by lack of desire, but by want of capacity. This will be the end: then the pure of heart will see God in His own light, and the world in the light of God.
Mary continues: “The only Son” – the Son who has been and is her Son but was at the beginning and will be manifested at the end as the Son of the Father. “The only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father” – that is the end destination of the travel of history and of the whole trajectory of creation, incarnation and redemption – “The only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known”. The Father is the last word of our lives, the word of that end which is eternal beginning, eternal begetting. “Today, I have begotten you”. This is true today and for ever.
Here, Mary and John’s conversation merges into the eternal conversation of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is where Christmas invites us, too: to the adoration of love for the Son made flesh which leads us to the Father who is heaven – His Father and our Father. To Him be glory in heaven and peace on earth for all men and women of good will and pure desire.