Up until now all, our Christmas stories began at the stable, or with the wise men, or with Mary’s divine conception and so on.
John starts way before any of them , Johns’s story begins before he was called Jesus, before he joined us…John starts at the very beginning of everything , where Jesus started time, where everything came into being through him.
Before he was Jesus , So he calls him – the word,
The Greek for “word” is Logos, which means logic and reason.
So , Jesus is the reason, the logical reason it all began

And John calls him the source of it all. Cos next John days saying all life came from him, and began with him, . . Jesus is the source and the reason for it all. Without him, nothing came into being.

So when we start Jesus story at the manger, that’s very far from the truth. It’s just where he joined us . Jesus had no beginning, he was the beginning, and he will come again at the end.
Then he calls Jesus the light.

Which is another strange name . Why would you call someone the light?

I had a caravan when I was a kid and it was stupendously dark some nights. You woke up and literally you could not see a hand in front of your face, the proper absence of light you rarely see these days.

However we had calor gas lights, and even the first one coming on extinguished the darkness, the smallest match killed that darkness stone dead. The presence of light, killed nothingness of the dark, the absence of light was taken away by the smallest spark.
So really what we call darkness, like a darkness of the soul is really an absence, of anything. Darkness isn’t active it’s passive.

Jesus is the light, the reverse of an absence, a presence. His presence contains, love, morality, a path to eternal life, order, compassion, empathy, and salvation. All of these things are the reverse of nothing, and even a little of them where these things are absent totally changes things.

Is it any wonder then that people who live in the dark hate the light, because they know even the smallest spark ruins it totally and we can never now know it again.
Is it any wonder that albeit he was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him?

Because the dark which is an absence cannot know anything, because its an absence of reason, chaos cant understand order, the absence of love cannot understand love when it see it. All it see’s is its own demise. That’s why he wasn’t accepted by all and still isn’t. Because darkness cannot accept light, it can only be extinguished by it. Its such a dramatic change from even the smallest light, and Jesus was the source of all light and life and is.

So in John Jesus is the source of everything, the reason for everything, and the thing that banished the darkness of our souls. And he decided to lay in the cradle tonight. Everything became contained in a small child. Why would he do this, through love. So that he can understand and know his creation, and save it from itself, from its absence of love.

he knew his message wouldn’t be enough, so he chose to die to forgive us our lapses, but now his message is a thing in this world, and like a small light in the darkness you cant ignore it, and we cant go back into darkness.

That’s what happened tonight, in a world where love was absent, love came into the world and joined us and we can never know a world without love ever again. This is why john called him the reason, the logos, because he is the reason we know what love truly is.

His life with us he explained what we had to do, showed us what we had to do and lived like we have to do. All of these things are the opposite of nothing, the example once set can never be unset, the darkness of the absence of knowing and now these things can never be unknown and defeated.

We all know this love in our lives, we all know his presence, we will know him forever for all eternity, that’s how long his light will last once it was lit on this night.

Our task is to share that light with whoever we meet, to be the reverse of an absence of love and make that light fill all the places where love is absent,

Amen