Advent 6 (2013): True Light to Every Man

The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. (John 1:9)

The Gospel of John tells the story of Emmanuel: When LOVE Showed Up In-Person from a totally different perspective than the accounts of Gospel writers Matthew and Luke.  Matthew and Luke tell of angelic announcements to Joseph and Mary and both of them refer to the activity of the Holy Spirit in the Incarnation.  John takes a different approach.

John’s perspective is from an even higher altitude.  Unlike the ground-level human view showing God’s coming down to bless us with His love, John’s focus is on the Incarnation from a more transcendent perspective.  His goal was not to show a Jewish Messiah to be born to a Jewish girl, or a Deliverer to be raised by a righteous Jewish man and his wife who obey the angelic message in fulfillment of Messianic promises to God’s covenant people.

No, John intends to show the Savior coming into the world… with the same true light that He had/was with God in the beginning…the same true light that conceived and brought forth life at Creation…from the other side of that Nothing Material dimension of God’s presence and now to our sinful and fallen created order of everything materially broken.

It’s like yesterday’s “aperture of the invisible” (flashing open once to create life and pour out God’s love in a material way) was now preparing to come into the world in such a similarly powerful way that it would be a moment of unfathomable true light.  This LOVE light and life would give us personal revelation of God in His One and Only Son.  Arguably, God is pouring out His love in an even more dramatic display in the Incarnation than in Creation itself.

He’s not creating things this time, though.  He’s giving Himself as true light coming into the world.  Emmanuel, “God With Us.”

Questions to ponder:

1. Is the Incarnation something we will ever truly grasp?  Why or why not?
2. How far does the “every man” go?  What does it mean that the true light was coming to “every man?”