John 20.2-8 – Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist – Feast
In the Christmas season the liturgy mysteriously brings us before the empty tomb. It seems like a logical leap, a dissonance: we are contemplating life being born and we already find ourselves faced with the mystery of death overcome. But it is precisely here that John enters the scene, the apostle we celebrate today: the man who more than anyone he knew how to keep tenderness and truth togetherlight and night, Christmas and Easter. John runs to the tomb.
He is what the Gospel defines as “the one Jesus loved”, not because Jesus loved others less, but because John perhaps knew how to let himself be loved more. Christmas reminds us of this: God becomes a Child to be welcomednot to be pigeonholed into a formula. And John is the disciple who welcomes, who lets himself be reached, who abandons himself to love before even understanding it. Having arrived at the tomb, Giovanni stops. He doesn’t enter. Wait Pietro. It is a gesture that says more than a thousand words: love is not impatience, it is not protagonism, it is respect, it is communion.
Giovanni knows how to run faster, but he also knows how to take a step back. In his personal Christmas, because every encounter with Christ is a Christmas, John learns that true strength is not being right, but being each other’s guardians. And when he finally enters, he “saw and believed.” He didn’t see hard evidence, he saw signs. And they were enough for him. This is the heart of faith: allowing oneself to be convinced not by what appears evident, but by what speaks deeply. The manger and the tomb have something in common: both are places where God seems absent, yet the miracle happens in both.
The Incarnation and the Resurrection are the same language of God: telling the world that love never dies. On the feast of John, the Gospel gives us its legacy: learning to run when love calls, to stop when humility asks, to believe when everything seems over. Christmas turns on the light and John teaches us to follow it. And perhaps this is the greatest gift: we too become disciples who, like him, live with our ear pressed to the chest of Christ, to hear life beating even in places that seem empty.
