Our Gospel Scripture reading on this Monday morning, New Year's Eve, seems startling. We just finished celebrating the birth of Christ, and today many of us are preparing for a less religious celebration of the end of the year, followed by a new beginning tomorrow with our resolutions. But here is a reading about “Beginning” given to us before the beginning of the New Year.
I think it brings to mind the opening of Genesis, which also begins with "In the beginning," as if by our resolutions we hope to recreate ourselves with the New Year. So why is this reading given to us today? It reminds us of a Beginning before the creation of all things in Genesis, even before the beginning of time. This Beginning points us to the foundation of all reality in God--Christ Himself, the Word of the Father dwelling with the Father and the Holy Spirit “before all things were made.”
The reason for reading it today is that it reminds us that before beginning our attempts at renewal in the New Year, there is always “the Light” of Christ who “was with God and who was God.” Our renewal is always through Christ "who came to dwell among us" at Christmas—the real New Year begins with Christmas.
New Year's Day will soon pass and be gone. We will turn our attention to Easter where Christmas bears fruit: we will celebrate our becoming "children" "born of God," just as at Christmas we celebrated “The Word” being born of a woman. This reading asks us to stop for a moment in our celebration and think of where it all began—“in the Beginning”—in the love of the Father for the Son through the Holy Spirit.
That's something to celebrate.
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