In his Apostolic Letter: Tertio Millennio Adveniente, of
November 14, 1994, Bl. John Paul notes that: Time is indeed fulfilled by the very fact that God, in the Incarnation,
came down into human history….and….In
Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, time becomes a dimension of God, who is Himself eternal. With the coming of
Christ there begin “the last days”….the “last hour”…and the time of the Church,
which will last until the Parousia. From this relationship of God with time
there arises the duty to sanctify time. [paras.9, 10]
It is the eve of Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday, the threshold
of the holiest week of the year, the week wherein Christ Jesus Incarnate will
institute the essential food for our journey through time, the source of all we
need to sanctify time, His very self in the Holy Eucharist, leaving us Himself
also in the sacramental priesthood so we are never orphans, never deprived of
the Sacred Food of His very self; then will come the day when to the last drop
of His Blood He will pour Himself out in His redemptive love for us, opening
the treasury of divine mercy, transforming the terror of death into the gateway
of eternal life for when He arises all will be well, time will have achieved
its purpose, namely to be the ocean upon which we travel in the bark of Peter
from the shores of our created beginning, to the other side where He awaits us
with His, the Father’s, the Holy Spirit’s everlasting embrace of love.
I will admit when the proclamation of the prologue of St.
John’s Gospel was part of the end sequence of ever Holy Mass I never really
understood why – now I do and admit I wish we would have it restored so that,
as we all would genuflect, as we in those former days at the words: Et
Verbum caro factum est……. we would grasp anew the splendour, the
grace-gift, the purpose of our existence in the mystery of chronological time,
transformed, indeed taken up into the mystery of the Trinity by Jesus Incarnate
so that, in reality, we live no longer bound by chronological time but in the
freedom of kyros [ in Greek Kairos] : that is the Lord’s time for as the Church
wisely proclaims each Christmas ‘this IS the night/day’ – and each Easter ‘this
IS the night/day’, indeed both solemnities are celebrated in the ‘this is’ for
8 days reminding us that time is in large part a great mystery as St. Peter
teaches us speaking of the reality of a thousand as one and one as a thousand.
[cf. 2 Pt. 3:8]
v. 14: And the word became
flesh and dwelt among us….
Each of we human beings one way or another dwells amongst
the ‘us’ of the human family.
We are created because two of us, hopefully in a committed
union of love, knowingly or not, making the gift of self to other also make a
gift of the necessary matter within which God breathes His very self, creating
each one of us by a choice which is His choosing “I” that I should have
existence in His image and likeness, an existence whose immediate and ultimate
purpose is communion of love with Him, indeed in Him and through Him and for
Him.
The ‘for Him’ is because while not a necessity as in we
human beings have a necessity for air, water, food, etc., His being infinite of
infinite Love, chooses not simply to create us as beings who are beloved but
makes it that our loving Him becomes our very joy.
He dwells among us appearing as an ordinary baby, born of a
woman, going through all the realities of human life, growth, development.
God journeying in time as we do from infant to toddler to
child to juvenile to adulthood.
More, He dwells among us as, like each of us, needing air,
water, food, clothing, shelter, companionship, not exempting Himself from
poverty or cold, vulnerability or heartache, loneliness, betrayal, pain or even
death.
Do you dwell among us as a homeless person with nowhere to
lay your head, orphan, with a single parent or widowed mother, fleeing as a
refugee, as one who labours with your hands or is engaged in intellectual work,
a person enduring temptation or doubt, hunger, thirst, rejection, abandonment,
being arrested, accused, tortured, betrayed, convicted, executed?
He has dwelt among us, indeed dwells among us in every
reality/experience of every human being.
v.14:….and we beheld
His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and
truth.
St. John is writing down his account of the life, teachings,
sufferings, death, resurrection of Jesus towards the end of his own life, in
his old age when he himself, one who had so loved and been faithful to Jesus,
was about to cross the threshold, to arrive at the far shores of time and
through death meet again, this time never to be departed from, the One Who loved/loves
him and whom He loved/loves.
The glory, St. John refers to here is both that manifested
in miracles, such as at the wedding feast in Cana, and a reference to the glorious
beauty of the risen Jesus, also, more than any of the evangelists, St. John give
us the most extensive teachings and prayers of Jesus in relation to His Father,
as shall be meditated upon further on the deeper we go into the Gospel.
For now, in an age when the greatest distortion of truth is
relativism, in an age when countless people declare either no need of nor belief
in God, how urgently we Christians need to pray, in particularly during Holy
Week, that ever human being will come to know, listen to, follow, embrace the
One who not only ‘dwelt’ among us but through the Church, the Eucharist in
particular, still dwells among us.
Thus we truly sanctify time!