Advent 2025, Week 4 – John’s Light of Christmas Past/Present/Future, Part 1
I have a friend from college who, together with his wife, have experienced numerous difficulties in parenting. Our kids are about the same age, and they even had three boys then a girl just like us. One of their sons married, then soon divorced. One struggled with addiction and died from an overdose. Most recently, they’ve experienced the ups and downs of parenting their teenage daughter.
Those ups and downs included numerous parent–child battles, changing schools to deal with bullying, and most recently the loss of her driver’s license.
Parenting can be hard. Parenting teens can be really hard. Family relationships in general can be hard. Maybe your holiday gatherings have already begun. Maybe you’re looking forward to them. Maybe there’s drama and pain in your family. Probably a mix of both.
This week we’re going to look at Christmas past, Christmas present, and Christmas future, but without the ghosts in Charles Dickens’ book A Christmas Carol.
For our Christmas past, present, and future, we’re going to follow the writings of one of Jesus’ disciples, the one whom some scholars consider to be Jesus’ closest friend. John. John has something to say about Jesus’ past, present, and future, and I think it will provide some hope and encouragement to those difficult relationships.
John wrote a lot of the New Testament. His writing style has led some to call him the Dr. Seuss of the NT. You know how Dr. Seuss used only a few words, repeated a lot? John is like that.
One of the words John repeats frequently is the word “light.”
In John 1, verses 1 through 3:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”
Look at the first verse. What famous Old Testament verse does it remind you of?
Genesis 1:1. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
Notice how John is basically saying, “We need to expand that Genesis story a bit. Yes, God created. But what we now know is that Jesus is God, and therefore Jesus, God the Son, was a part of that creative process.”
Think back to Genesis 1, and what is the first thing God created? “Let there be … what?”
Light!
So far, in verses 1–3, though, John hasn’t mentioned light.
He’s about to. In fact, he will say something surprisingly different about light, when compared to the original Genesis account of creation. We learn what John says about light in the next post.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 