[stephenkhoo]

Tuesday, 27 December, 2011, Feast of St John, Apostle and Evangelist
TESTIFYING TO CHRIST THE GOD WHO BECAME MAN
SCRIPTURE READINGS: 1 JOHN 1:1-4; JOHN 20:2-8

Christ is the Light of humanity. This is what we celebrate at Christmas. However, He is worthy to be called the Light only because He is the Way and the Truth of what it means to be truly human. Only God can be truly human since we are created in His image and likeness. Indeed, the incarnation of God is something that many people find difficult to accept, like the Gnostics during St John’s time. It was unthinkable that God could suffer like a human being. This is simply too amazing and incredible.

But St John testifies that he and his fellow apostles encountered God precisely in this manner. He wrote, “Something which has existed since the beginning, that we have heard, and we have seen with our own eyes; that we have watched and touched with our hands: the Word, who is life – this is our subject. That life was made visible.” In Christ Jesus, the Word that was with the Father eternally before the creation of the world has assumed our humanity. By His life, in His words and deeds, or rather by His very being, He manifests to us the heart of the Father and reveals His Face to us. For this reason, they could come to conclude that Jesus is with the Father. “That life was made visible: we saw it and we are giving our testimony, telling you of the eternal life which was with the Father and has been made visible to us.”

What is the implication for us? It means that in the first place, this God who is so identified with us, knows us through and through. He knows intimately our struggles, fears, the misery of sin and all our sufferings. No one can say that God is too remote from us to know our pains, since He Himself has borne all our infirmities in His body and cursed for our sins as well. But He did not come just to share in our life. He comes precisely for the purpose of inviting us to share in His life. “What we have seen and heard we are telling you so that you too may be in union with us, as we are in union with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” God is therefore not contented to offer the life of His Son for us. He wants to offer His own life to us. For only by sharing in His life, the life that He shares with His Son, can we too find eternal life.

Through the sharing of God’s inner life, we are able to live and love others. If we find ourselves so enslaved to sin and incapable or inadequate in love, it is because we lack the love of God in us. But now that we have fellowship with the Father, we will find the strength to love the way He has loved us in Christ. It behooves us therefore to strengthen our communion with the Lord if we are to find the capacity to love and to forgive even at the cost of our own lives. Through our communion of mind and heart, like Mary with her Son, we too can find the courage to love.

By so doing, we become the sacrament of Jesus in the world today. Many people are still seeking to see the face of God. Before they can make the leap of faith in accepting Christ as the Incarnated One, they need our encouragement and witness that Christ is truly the Word of God, the Life of the Father made flesh. By our personal testimony of love and forgiveness, not just in words but in deeds, they will come to believe that our testimony is real and not an ideology that we are trying to propagate. Indeed, St John, who lived up to a ripe old age, lived a lifelong martyrdom of dying to himself for the Lord and His people. One can be a martyr by blood through death, like St Stephen, or a martyr by a life-long loving commitment to the Lord. Thus our celebration of Christmas is not a one-off event that happens once a year. Rather, the joy of Christmas continues in us as long as we make ourselves a gift to others.

Of course, in giving Christ to others through our testimony in words or in action, we bring double joy to ourselves. St John wrote, “We are writing this to you to make our own joy complete.” No greater joy can one have than to give others joy. When we give others joy, that joy is multiplied. It is now a cliché to remember that the acronym for JOY is Jesus, others and You. When we give Jesus to others, that is the greatest joy, not just for the recipient, but seeing the joy in the person who is touched by the Lord also brings us much joy. This explains why many of us are willing to sacrifice our time for the work of evangelization, re-evangelization or indirect evangelization. Seeing the joy in their faces and the freedom in their hearts fill us with a joy that is indescribable.

Once again, all this is only possible provided we give ourselves to faith in Jesus. In the gospel, we read how the other disciple, probably St John himself, who reached the tomb first, went in and “saw and he believed.” This beloved disciple of the Lord was the first to believe in the resurrection. Again, when Jesus appeared at the shore of Galilee, he was the first to recognize the Risen Lord. This goes to show how one is able to see what others cannot see when one is deeply in love with the Lord. This is true in all relationships. Love enables one to see what others cannot. It is said that love is blind. It might be true in the case of infatuation. But true love sees more than just what the eyes can see, it sees the heart of the person, his intentions and his peculiar circumstances. Faith can thus be described as the eyes of love.

Such faith presupposes the basic openness to a loving relationship with Jesus, as in the case of St John. Without this experience of His personal love for us, we can never really be excited about Him. Love gives us the enthusiasm to live on and to live for the One who loves us. Let us therefore spend this period of Christmas contemplating on THE Christmas gift, Christ Himself. Unlike Mary of Magdala, let us come running towards the Lord, who can give us life, especially when we feel lost like her without Jesus. If only we, even for those of us who are apparently active in Church programs, would humbly acknowledge in our hearts like Mary who said, “we don’t know where they have put him”, then this journey of finding the Lord could begin.

Do you know where you have kept Jesus, your Christmas Gift? Have you kept Him in your heart or have you put Him on the shelf? Or is your heart still with the world? St Ignatius of Antioch wrote, “Do not have Jesus on your lips and the world in your hearts!” It is not enough to wish each other “Merry Christmas” if our hearts are emptied of Christ. When that happens, the world and our flesh will not be mediators of God’s presence because we are absorbed by the world and by the flesh. However, when Christ is in our hearts, then the created things of the world, including our humanity, will be the means by which we mediate God’s love in our hearts. In this way, we hope too that when others see us, they can say that they have seen and touched the love of God.