During this final week of the Christmas season, we have been
reading the First Letter of St. John.
This beautiful letter was written by the Apostle John in his old age to those
who had already come to believe in Christ.
It is a clear letter, a child could understand it, yet in it John
provides profound insight into what it means to love God and have faith in
Christ.
John aimed to make very clear that Jesus was truly divine;
for the community of Christians had already begun to be attacked by false
doctrines and heresies concerning Jesus.
These false teachings had already started to cause divisions in the
Church. So, John the Apostle, writes to give the true teaching about Jesus—that
the source of their division—“sin and false teaching” might be healed.
In today’s passage we hear that true Christian faith
consists in believing that Jesus is the Christ begotten by God, and we are to
love him by keeping God’s commandments, especially in loving our brother. John teaches the community here that a heart
which clings to sin is often a heart which is resistant to clinging to truth. He exhorts the community to allow the love of
God to conquer sin and division in them—to allow God’s Spirit to unify them in
faithfulness and obedience to God.
In the Gospel, we hear that Jesus returned from the desert “in
the power of the Spirit”. The Spirit with which he was anointed is the same
spirit which anoints the Church—the Spirit which anoints the head anoints the
body as well. Just as Christ was
anointed to bring glad tidings to the poor and proclaim liberty to captives, so
to have we been anointed: to proclaim to the poor and to the captives that
Jesus Christ, God with us, is our liberty, he is our Good News, he is “the
victory that conquers the world”, through him sins are forgiven, and the royal
road to heaven been made clear.
To truly live in the “Christmas Spirit” is to allow God’s
Spirit to lead us in the ways of making known that Christ is Lord, that he is
God-with-us.
May our hearts be free from all that keeps us from
witnessing and testifying to the good news of the incarnation for the glory of
God and the Salvation of souls.
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