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December 27, 2022We have merely begun celebrating one of the happiest events in our Christian tradition, the Birth of Jesus, when the Gospel of John reading for the day abruptly throws us into the middle of a crime scene involving a death and a robbery. Mary Magdalene has frantically reported to Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved that Jesus’ body is missing: the tomb is empty, and “they” have taken it away. A shockingly bizarre contrast just three days into the Octave of Christmas!
At his Nativity, Jesus is presented as a newborn, viewed and venerated in two other Gospels by angels, shepherds, magi, animals… all God’s creatures. He is a baby, alive, fully human, incarnated into their world. Our world. He is Emmanuel, “God with us.” In contrast, at the empty tomb, Jesus is dead, his adult body has disappeared, and any hope of finding it seems remote. He is definitely “not with us.”
Both events challenge us today, as they did for those two disciples, inviting us to contemplate and deepen our understanding of the mysteries of the incarnation and the empty tomb. For starters, the reading from John on the Feast of John gives us a bridge into the world of divine love. The disciple whom Jesus loved quickly inspected the empty tomb. What he observed with eyes of faith did not, for him, appear to be the work of robbers. Instead, “He saw and believed!”
As Christians with eyes of faith too, we are the disciples whom Jesus loves. And if Jesus loved us first, then his death and resurrection might move us to love back just a bit more, today, beginning with the world he was born into.
