It may seem strange on...
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It may seem strange on the day after Christmas to read from the Fourth Gospel, for in John the birth of Jesus is told without any mention of Mary or Joseph, without appearance of magi or shepherds, without naming Bethlehem or Jerusalem. If we had only this one Gospel, we would not know the date or place of Jesus' birth. We would know him as the son of Joseph, and we would be left with the impression that he was born somewhere in Galilee (7:41-42), not Judea. However, it is John who explores the cosmic meaning of Christ's birth among humanity. As Frederick Buechner, in The Hungering Dark, puts it, "The Gospel writers are not really interested primarily in the facts of the birth, but in the significance, the meaning for them of that birth, just as people who love us are not really interested primarily in the facts of our births but in what it meant to them when we were born and how for them the world has never been the same again, how their whole lives were charged with a new significance." So when the carols have died down and the angels have returned to heaven, and the shepherds have gone back to their flocks, it is John who describes why "the world has never been the same again," and how all of our lives are now "charged with a new significance."
-- Bristow
-- Bristow
