Yesterday was a day of several highlights: Nativity play and service at Montrose, the best World Cup final for a long time, an evening Carol Service in our home church in Crown Terrace. In both places good music, traditional and new carols, obvious and careful preparation, candles and atmosphere, Scripture and prayer. All of that, and all good.
But it was one of the readings of scripture at the evening carol service that opened me up to the recurring miracle that we celebrate by doing all that we do on these days leading to Christmas.
I've spent a lifetime fascinated by John's first chapter, especially chapter 1.1-14. I've studied it, exegeted it, read the theologians who went diving into it, learned it by heart (in the RSV version), designed a tapestry around one of its verses, and have come to think of this text as the distilled truth of a mystery beyond all our capacities, except perhaps worship in humility and wonder.
I've found faith and hope and love in phrases like:
"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not extinguished it.
"In Him was life and the life was the light of all people."
"The Word became flesh and dwelt among us...full of grace and truth."
The passage is obviously deeply familiar to me. But last night I heard it read by an Iranian friend I've come to know in recent months. He read it in his own language of Farsi, with the English text on the screen for us to follow. The coincidence in my mind of a text I know thoroughly, read in a language entirely foreign to me, but by someone who is my brother and not 'other', in the context of worship and our shared love for Jesus, whose birth we were celebrating - that was a moment of profound realisation of what it is that joins us in our humanity.
"In him was life, and the life was the light of all people." My Iranian friend and our community, we share faith in the same Light, the same love of life, the same faith in the Light of Life. Same words in different languages, same Word that transcends all difference and draws us together in a light that shines in the darkness, and cannot be extinguished - not by hate and not by complacency, not by difference and not by indifference.
The lead up to Christmas isn't joy for everyone. Not everyone is, or wants to be, included in the often forced jollity. Not everyone is prepared to be implicated in the conspiracy of festive positivity, which easily becomes a denial of the uncomfortable realities of a world in which exclusion, indifference and hostility to 'the other' is an encroaching darkness. But.
"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not understood it,
and
"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot extinguish it."
There are two possible translations and I don't doubt John knew what he was doing when he chose his words. An older translation tries hard to reproduce John's deliberate double meaning: "The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not." Darkness can neither understand nor overcome the persistence of light. What God is about in Jesus is beyond human comprehension and defies human conquest.
Last night, listening to the Prologue to the Gospel of John, originally written in Greek, first translated into English six centuries ago, read in Farsi, by a friend who in his life experience has found the Light of Life who shines in the darkness, and who goes on believing that the darkness shall not overcome - that was a moment when translation moved from semantic equivalence to human embodiment and personal faith experience.
At that moment, "The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us....from the fullness of his grace have we all received one blessing after another."
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