The octave of Christmas is celebrated as one great feast. During these eight days the first reading is taken from the first epistle of St. John. The epistle opens with St. John reminding his readers that he is talking about what he has seen, what he had heard, what he has touched. The presence of God in Jesus broke out of heaven and was made tangible here in the world. This is an echo of the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John: God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son. It can cause a little whiplash when we read in the epistle: Do not love the world or the things of the world. If God loved the world shouldn’t we love the world? Which is it? There is, no doubt, a tension the believers experience when it comes to loving the world. Maybe the best way to think of it as the difference between a means and an end. Our end is glory, something beyond this world. We should keep our focus there. The means to glory is living in this world with love and fidelity. God created the world as our means to reaching glory so we should treat creation and the things of creation as a gift to be carefully nurtured. We are been commissioned to help this world look a bit more as God intended it — a place of justice and peace. But we should always keep our eyes on the prize, seeing everything that we do in the light of eternity.
