Recently I was given a Kindle book from a friend. The title is “A Beautiful Year: 52 Meditations on Faith, Wisdom, and Perseverance” by Diana Butler Bass. I had never heard of her, but have read a couple of the entries. When I was praying through the book of Mark, I came upon the entry entitled Year-End Review. She is comparing Genesis with the opening passages in John.

John’s preamble: And the Word became flesh and lived among us. Then comes the ending of the beginning in Genesis: God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there’s an ending of the beginning of John: From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. Very good … grace upon grace. Matthew and Luke start their Jesus stories with birth narratives; Mark’s begins with the first actions in Jesus’s ministry. But John begins at the very beginning, before time, as things came into being, with the Word (breath) and Wisdom (spirit). This poetic Gospel insists that the beginning of Jesus was before his enfleshment: The One in the Cradle is also the One at the heart of the Cosmos. The baby Jesus is the Cosmic Christ. And the same God who brought creation from primeval chaos is, through the Christ, bringing new creation from the imperial chaos of this human-shattered world. The ever-creative God is still at work. And Jesus invites us to join in, extending his wounded hand to draw us into the dance.

I love this expansive thinking! “The One in the Cradle is also the One at the heart of the Cosmos. The baby Jesus is the Cosmic Christ.” Oh! how I wish we could get that message across to the Hollywood people who made famous the mocking of Christ with the guy who just prayed to the baby Jesus. Talladega Nights. Ugh what an awful mockery of many ways of prayer. I suppose it got laughs but the ignorance and blatant disregard for communication with the Cosmic Christ is offensive in so many ways.

May the world come to know the Cosmic Christ in 2026. Lord, forgive us our mockery we pray.