The First Mass of Christmas: celebrant the Revd Tola Badejo.

First reading: Isaiah 52. 7-10
Gospel: John 1. 1-14

Our night-time Communion service, which begins late on Christmas Eve and ends early on Christmas morning, is the quietest and most reflective of our Christmas services, although it still includes all the usual sung sections of the liturgy. This year's readings avoid the traditional narrative of the birth of Jesus and instead focus on the transformative effects of his incarnation.

The first reading from Isaiah emphasises that Jesus's birth is the fulfilment of Hebrew prophecy, and in the painting above by Duccio, the nativity scene is fittingly flanked by the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel. In the Gospel, John's famous opening passage seems intentionally to reach out beyond Israel and to engage with the philosophical questions of the Greek and Roman world; 'word', as a translation of 'logos', means far more than its ordinary English sense, embracing concepts of divine reason, intention and creativity. John asserts that this divine reason, with whom Jesus is fully identified, created everything and is present in everyone, no matter how imperfect or fallen they may appear to be. At the same time, John refers back to the Hebrew scriptures by echoing the first words of Genesis: 'In the beginning'.

It is interesting that John's Gospel, which begins with an assertion of Christ's divinity rather than, as the other Gospels do, allowing it to emerge from the story of Christ's earthly life, is probably the last to have been written but the only one that might be the work of an actual disciple, setting it down when he was an elderly man.