Merry Christmas!

December 25 Thursday the Fourth Week

ISAIAH 52:7-10; HEBREWS 1:1-6; JOHN 1:1-18

Click here for the complete text of today’s readings.

  

What have you found at Christmas?

Isaiah says it is the “good news,” something “beautiful”; something to “sing for joy” about. “All the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.” What is “salvation”?

Hebrews says it is knowledge: “God has spoken to us by a Son,” who is “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.”

Is that something to “sing for joy about” – to have living contact with the Source of all that exists? To actually hear the words and see the glory of God himself?

“This is eternal life, to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3).

John says the Father, knowing himself, has been exclaiming from all eternity: “God!” That “Word” of God’s self-knowledge is God the Son. When we echo that word by the gift of faith, saying “Jesus!” we are sharing God’s experience of his own Light and Life.

In Jesus “the Word became flesh.” And we have “seen his glory,” which Scripture defines in two words: hesed and emet, translated as “grace and truth,” “kindness and fidelity,” or “steadfast love.”

God’s love, revealed in Jesus, is the light “shining in the darkness” of a world misguiding itself. That “true light, which enlightens everyone,” gives to those who believe the “power to become children of God.”

Merry Christmas!

Pray: “Jesus!”

Practice: Live love.