Just two days ago we remembered and celebrated the great feast of Human Arrivals. Mary and Joseph arrive in Bethlahem and then at an animally stable. Then Jesus arrives into our humanly stables. Then shepards arrive to see what had been announced when angels arrived to invite them. Kings from farther east will eventually arrive. That feast we will celebrate as the Epiphany or the Great Showtime.

The Eucharist today is celebrated within the life and mission of John, “the Disciple whom Jesus loved”. Here, grant me a little poetic imagination. Might we pray with the Gospel’s picturing of these two close friends of Jesus, arriving, as did the sheperds, at the place of, not a death, but a new life. Might we pray with a kind of second Christmas where Jesus is again and newly born in His Resurrection. Like the shepherds, they arrive and see and so believe. Mary Magaleen had arrived first and had seen, but was unsure of this new birth and went for help, or reassurance or to announce something new all right.

Those three saw and believed. It was early on the first day, first of the week and first of the new birth of Jesus and the Church. They believed by not seeing actually. Like the sheperds they had expectations, so the did not see and yet believed.

Please read and pray with today’s First Reading. John uses words of his senses, hearing, seeing and touching the ”visible” Word made Flesh. John writes with great joy and with the enthusiasm of someone who desires “fellowship” with others who had not seen, heard and touched what he had. John just had to let it out.

There was a man, also named John, the Baptist, who points out Jesus to his own personal disciples in the first chapter of the Gospel which John, whose feast we celebrate today, wrote many years after the other three Gospels were written.

Jesus, in this Gospel comes to life, or is born, several times in John’s Gospel and always in the life-giving mission within our human context. A quite interesting calendar-arrangement, is that this feast is celebrated between to liturgical feats. Yesterday was the Feast of St. Stephan, the First Martyr after the Resurrection of Jesus and tomorrow is the Feast of the Holy innocents which remembers the deaths of all young males under two years old in the vicinity of Bethlahem. Herod thought he had been told that the that the long-awaited for was born there.

Two celebrations of deaths leading to life surrounding an account of the friends of Jesus finding dying as a rising. Jesus is born to sharing His Divine Life with all, those who seek Him and those who humanly long for His Life in all their seekings. Jesus arrived and arrives to bring us life and we continue arriving, not to find, but be found again and again.

P.S.

A very good New-Year’s Resolution is to stop trying to figure God out and so let God in.