Lectionary Commentaries for January 4, 2026
Second Sunday of Christmas

The prologue of John’s Gospel cracks the lens with which we are tempted to engage in any too-small reading of the Gospel by directing our attention toward a cosmic space-time reality. Unlike the Lukan narrative that often shapes our imaginations in the Christmas season, the Second Sunday of Christmas plunges us into the deep time of the primordial Genesis creation narratives with John’s opening words: “In the beginning…”

Give yourself over to this reshaping of space-time reality. Help your congregation enter the cosmic realm of God’s dwelling, no longer confined by temporalities or geographies. A realm before there was a world. A time before chronology. A history before history. This is the beginning of the Good News, cosmic in scope and timeless in scale.

If the season of Christmas is a celebration of God-come-near, then John is preparing us for this enfleshing of the Divine in our midst by directing our gaze not to a manger or the holy family or the Christ child, but toward the cosmos, suffused with the light and life coming into the world, into time, into space, and into our lives.

The logic and wisdom of the Divine

“In the beginning was the Word…” (1:1). While “word” connotes language and communication to us, it holds those alongside other meanings in John’s usage. We might understand the Greek logos better if we experiment with its meaning a bit as something like the “logic of God” or the “rationale of God,” perhaps hearing these first verses suggest something like “the speech-act of God bringing the Divine logic to bear on the cosmos.”

The workings of Logos (Word) in John bear a striking and intentional resemblance to the workings of Sophia (Wisdom) in the literature of the Hebrew Bible. The two words also help us play with gender a bit, with the masculine Logos echoing the feminine Sophia.

Two texts expounding the presence of Sophia (Wisdom) with God sit alongside John’s Gospel as one option in this Sunday’s lectionary readings: Sirach 24:1–12 and Wisdom of Solomon 10:15–21. But the presence of Wisdom occurs elsewhere, in Proverbs, in ways that also parallel the Word in the Gospel of John:

• Proverbs 8:22 portrays the presence of Wisdom at the beginning of God’s work, God’s first act. In John, the Word was “in the beginning with God” (1:2).
• Proverbs 3:19 portrays God’s work through Wisdom in founding the earth. John says of the Word: “All things came into being through him” (1:3).
• Proverbs 8:27–30 portrays Wisdom working with God in the creation of the heavens and the deep, the skies and the seas, marking out the foundations of the earth. John: “Without him [the Word] not one thing came into being” (1:3).

While Wisdom is not expressly present in John’s text, readers/hearers familiar with the wisdom literature certainly would have heard its echoes. Catholic New Testament scholar Sister Mary Coloe argues, “That Wisdom is present but unnamed in the New Testament resonates with the experience of women in church communities today who are present and active, but their contribution and leadership [are] unrecognized and unnamed.”¹

We would do well to help our congregations recover this echo of Sophia in the Logos, as most are likely unfamiliar with the wisdom literature providing the Jewish background to John’s Gospel.

The light shines and the Word became flesh

Scholars debate when the incarnation is first portrayed in John’s prologue. Verse 14 is an obvious answer: when the Logos of God becomes flesh and dwells among us. But others see the incarnation appearing as early as verse 5: “The light shines in the darkness…”

We can engage this debate not as an either/or concern, but as an even more intriguing both/and possibility. What would it mean if we took 1:5 seriously as the inbreaking of God’s incarnate presence upon the cosmos, not in human flesh but in the cosmic order (logos) of creation? (“Light from light,” as the Nicene Creed says.) This may very well open our perspective—as the whole prologue of the Gospel seems intent on doing—to the indwelling of God in the other-than-human realm of the cosmic order.

Again, Genesis is evoked: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it” (John 1:5).

The cosmos revels in the light of God before there are humans to perceive it.

But then, the incarnation that we celebrate in the Christmas season: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us…” (1:14).

There is an interesting point in this passage that we may overlook due to the presumed gender of Jesus if we aren’t careful to attend to the evangelist’s words: The Word becomes flesh, not man. Margaret Daly-Denton says, “‘The word became flesh,’ with all flesh’s implications of interconnectedness within the whole biotic community of life on Earth. … ‘Flesh’ is a far broader reality than ‘humanity.’”² Or, as Mary Coloe says, “[Flesh] is all inclusive, male and female, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving.”³

While our Christmas imagination is shaped most profoundly by the coming of God with us (humanity), we can have our too-small reading of the Gospel expanded again by John’s insistence upon the logic of God that suffuses the cosmos by becoming flesh, a category of being shared by all biotic life. The Good News is incarnate for all creation, perceived in ways that we cannot imagine with our limited space-time perspective.

Grace upon grace

The good news of this text for humanity shines through in these expressions: the power to become children of God” (1:12), to receive grace upon grace from the fullness of the light of all people (1:16). And becoming children of God is a gift of grace cosmic in scope, timeless in scale.

Notes

1. Mary L. Coloe, John 1–10, Wisdom Commentary (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2021), 8.
2. Margaret Daly-Denton, John: An Earth Bible Commentary: Supposing Him to Be the Gardener (New York: T&T Clark, 2017), 35.
3. Coloe, John 1–10, 13.

The joyful declaration that God is the giver of every good gift, even of life itself, appears in each of this week’s readings for the Second Sunday of Christmas. While the Gospel of John traces the eternal presence of the gift of life through the creative Word of God, Jeremiah 31:7–14 encourages readers to focus on a single moment in time, when both the Giver and the gifts appear to have been lost forever. For so many people, the Christmas season can evoke a similar sense of absence, when gifts and moments of merriment are abundant, but only for other people. What message does this text bring to such a moment?

Jeremiah 31:7–14 overflows with song and joy, but it does not shy away from acknowledging loss and pain.¹ In verse 7, for example, God calls for praise, but what is uttered is a prayer for deliverance: “Proclaim, give praise, and say: Save, O LORD, your people, the remnant of Israel” (verse 7b). In subsequent verses, God declares God’s intention to gather the “remnant,” those exiles who have been dispersed among the enemies. As these scattered ones are gathered from distant corners of the earth and restored to their land, God meets weeping with consolation (verse 9) and turns mourning into joy (verse 13).

This gathered remnant is called a “great company” (verse 8)—an expression more typically employed of festival or military assemblies, and yet here it is a motley crew consisting of the blind and lame alongside women “with child and those in labor,” all needing help for such an arduous journey, with God leading them in straight paths (verse 9).²

Almost as a non sequitur, the reason given for this special care is God’s claim, “For I have become a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn son” (verse 9). The word “for” suggests that the father-son relationship now motivates God’s actions, while the statement that God has become Israel’s father confirms the sense that Israel’s origin and identity as the people of God were in doubt.

Throughout the book of Jeremiah, the case was repeatedly made that the inhabitants of Judah had so thoroughly broken the covenant that God had no other alternative but to hand them over to the Babylonians for punishment. Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem and deportation of the Judeans was, according to Jeremiah, the result of that rupture between God and Israel.

It’s possible that covenant language had become so saturated with injury and accusation that it could no longer convey any hope of reconciliation. If so, then the parental imagery employed in this verse reestablishes the relationship with God on other grounds. To be sure, parental imagery is no guarantee of an enduring bond. The Bible is filled with stories of fractured families and estranged fathers and sons; human experience confirms the truthfulness of these ruptures. Parental and covenantal relationships have more in common than we would like to admit. Even the most intimate of bonds can be broken, often beyond repair. But somehow, God reestablishes the bond, this time as father, with the intention of bringing the remnant home.

One is reminded of the imagery in Hosea of God tenderly teaching the infant Ephraim to walk, becoming infuriated when Ephraim grows up and continually rebels, agonizing over what to do, deciding to disown Ephraim but finally determining to put away wrath because, after all, God is God (Hosea 11:8–9). A covenant can be broken, and a rebellious child can strain a parent’s patience to the breaking point, and yet, God resolves to resume this relationship. God’s decision to claim paternity in verse 9 suggests the possibility of beginning again where all hope had been lost.

God’s deliverance of the exiles is deeply rooted in conceptions of familial responsibility. When God acts to redeem and rescue those who had been scattered among the nations, God acts not as a warrior king or, for that matter, as the lord of the covenant, but rather as Jacob’s next of kin (verses 10–11). The language of redemption is closely tied to conceptions of the obligation to act as “redeemer”—literally, to act as “next of kin” for family members who, for one reason or another, fall into captivity or become estranged from their ancestral inheritance.³

The unit reaches its climax in verses 10–14. In the presence of the nations of the world, divine care for Israel is on full display. God shepherds the gathered flock, while abundant harvests and fecund flocks signal the end of hunger and want; all are signs of God’s goodness. Water imagery pervades this section.

The verb employed in verse 12a to describe the people’s return (nhr) can connote either the flowing of a river or shimmering light reflecting off the water. Accordingly, translations seek to convey either the people’s flowing unity or their radiance.⁴ There’s no need to decide between these options, since the verb conveys both meanings at once: God’s gathered people come streaming home. Like a river, they are fully alive, shimmering with radiance, moving freely and in unity toward the source of that joy: God, the giver and sustainer of all good things.

These gifts of God do not stop: Once established in the land, the gathered remnant is like a “watered garden” (verse 12b). Here, again, the translations convey a range of options, from simply referencing the availability of water to implicitly drawing attention to the Gardener as its source, as if to suggest that the gathered remnant is no longer subject to the vagaries of rainfall or drought but is “well-watered,”⁵ even “irrigated,” by the one who has brought them home.

If, as Ronald Clements has suggested, this unit grounds Israel’s hope in the character of God as the one who creates and gives life,⁶ then the message of Jeremiah 31:7–14 anticipates the philosophical meditation on the creative Word of John 1, even while it remains concretely grounded in the physicality of human, vegetal, and animal life. From lameness and vulnerability to the radiance of abundant life, these scattered ones are not simply created but also redeemed, nurtured, and sustained, as metaphors of God as father, redeemer, shepherd, and gardener converge. As in John 1, it becomes difficult to differentiate the gifts from the Giver, all of which are goodness itself.

Notes

1. For the mixture of grief and joy in Jeremiah, see Louis Stuhlman and Hyun Chul Paul Kim, You Are My People: An Introduction to Prophetic Literature (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010), especially 134–136.
2. William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 2: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, Chapters 26–52, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 184.
3. L. William Countryman, “Redeem,” in Westminster Theological Wordbook of the Bible, ed. Donald E. Gowan (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 413–414.
4. For the translation of nhr as “radiant” in 31:12b, see, for example, NRSVue, NAS, REB (compare “jubilant,” CEB). For the translation “flowing” or “streaming,” see KJV, NKJV, ASV.
5. “Watered”: NRSVue, KJV; “well-watered”: NKJV, NEB; “irrigated”: CSB; “lush: CEB.
6. Ronald E.Clements, Jeremiah, Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox, 1988), 175–185, esp. 185.

Psalm 147 is classified as a Community Hymn—a hymn of the people that celebrates God’s sovereign reign over the community of faith and over all creation.¹

It is the second of the five psalms known as the “Final Hallel” (Hallelujah) that form the doxological close of the book of Psalms (Psalms 146–150). As does each of the five psalms, Psalm 147 begins and ends with the words “Praise the LORD,” which is “hallelujah” in Hebrew.

Psalm 147 may be divided into three sections, each with a call to praise followed by descriptive words about God’s sovereignty over the community of faith and the created world.
verses 1–6:          Invitation to sing praises to God
verses 7–11:        Invitation to sing and make music to God
verses 12–20:     Invitation to glorify God

The focus of this commentary is verses 12–20, but the context of the verses within Psalm 147 is important to understand. In verses 1–6, the community of worshipers is invited to participate in praising the Lord and then is given the reasons for the invitation to do so in a series of statements about God’s actions on behalf of the community of faith and all creation:

God is gracious (v. 1); God builds up Jerusalem and gathers the outcasts (v. 2); God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds (v. 3); God determines the number of the stars and names them (v. 4); God is great and abundant in power and understanding (v. 5); and God lifts up the downtrodden and casts out the wicked (v. 6).

Verse 7 issues a twofold invitation to participate in singing Psalm 147: “Sing to the LORD with thanks” and “make music to our God.” What follows in verses 8–11 is a continuation of the reason for the invitation to praise given in verses 1–6:

God covers the heavens with the clouds, prepares rain for the grass, and makes grass grow on the hills (v. 8); God gives the animals and the young ravens their food (v. 9); God does not delight in the strength of the horse or the speed of the runner, but rather in those who revere (in the New Revised Standard Version, “fear”) God (vv. 10–11).

And thus we come to our focus verses: 12–20. Verse 12 issues the third call to participate in singing Psalm 147: “Glorify, O Jerusalem, the LORD; praise your God, O Zion.” Verse 13’s opening word, “for,” introduces the reason that the singers of the psalm should glorify and praise God:

God strengthens the bars of your gate and blesses your children (v. 13); God grants peace within your borders and fills you with the finest of wheat (v. 14); God sends out commands to the earth and the words run swiftly (v. 15); God gives snow like wool and scatters frost like ashes (v. 16); God hurls down hail like crumbs so that no one can stand (v. 17); God sends out God’s word and makes the wind blow and the waters flow (v. 18); God declares statutes and ordinances to Jacob and all Israel, unlike any other nation (vv. 19–20).

Verses 12–20 issue a resounding cry to “Praise the LORD” and outline the various reasons why the psalm singer should do so. The reasons to do so are in something of an inclusion structure. According to verses 13–14, God cares and provides for each individual member of the community of faith. And in verses 19–20, God’s statutes and ordinances are the means by which God cares and provides for the community of faith. In the intervening verses, verses 15–18, the psalmist depicts God as creator and sovereign over the created order, sending out God’s word, giving snow and frost, hurling down hail and cold, and causing the winds to blow and waters to flow.

Thus, we might see a structure for these verses as follows:
verse 12:                    Call to praise
verses 13–14:          Call to each member of the community of faith
verses 15–18:          Call to all creation
verses 19–20:         Call to the whole community of faith

All the faithful are called to see God’s good work in their lives—for strength, legacy, peace, and fulfillment. The faithful also are called to see God’s good work in creation—in the snow, the frost, the hail, the wind, the waters. And, finally, the faithful are called to see God’s good work for the community of faith as a whole—the statutes and ordinances, that is, the path to the good for society as a whole.

The closing verses of Psalm 147 outline a process of what I like to call “becoming human” as God’s good creation. We begin with ourselves, attempting to understand who we are in relationship to God; we then observe the world around us and try to fathom God’s place in the magnificent created order; and then we join with the larger community as we pursue the good for all creation. James L. Mays sums it up well:

The history of the community of faith is a small part of reality, but the power that moves its course is the same that governs the stars. On the other hand, the processes of the world are vast, impersonal, and uncaring, but the sovereignty at work in the world is the saving, caring God whom Israel has come to know in its history.²

The words of Psalm 147 remind the faithful of the nature and character of the God they worship. Psalm 147:12–20 is the lectionary reading for the second Sunday after Christmas Day, along with John 1:10–18 and Ephesians 1:3–14.

John 1 states that “the Word” was in the world in the fleshly embodiment of the person of Jesus. But only those who accepted “the Word” as both the embodiment and transcendence of God—that is, those who saw God as intimate provider and sovereign of the universe—could be called the true children of God. Ephesians 1:3–14 reminds the reader that believers are blessed as children of God in all of God’s wisdom and insight (Ephesians 1:8) and that their futures are assured according to God’s “plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10).

Thus, all three texts (Psalm 147:12–20; John 1:10–18; and Ephesians 1:3–14) remind the community of faith that God is creator of all and yet that God intimately cares for humanity.

Notes

1. Commentary previously published on this website for January 3, 2016.
2. James L. Mays, Psalms, Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox, 1994), 442.

Ephesians 1:3–14 offers a panoramic vision of what God’s love has brought into reality.¹ In Greek, the passage is only one sentence, comprising just over 200 words. The New Revised Standard Version breaks it into six sentences. Try reading the passage in one breath and you’d be gasping by the end—that is part of Paul’s point: Jesus Christ makes plain that God’s plan is to bring everything together into the unity for which it was created. 

Believers in Jesus have been let in on the plan. Life in Christ is more than individualistic assurance that we will be taken care of on the day of judgment; it is the realization that we have been drawn into the drama of the universe’s restoration. Glimpsing the astonishing, comprehensive plan for wholeness that our lives are caught up in will make us breathless indeed!

Because of its massive theological vision, this text can be a challenge to preach. Many preachers will feel drawn to one image or phrase that they feel they can get a handle on and communicate effectively. No matter what form the sermon takes, preachers attending to this text should not shy away from the vision of God Paul offers—one that leaves people responding in the only way possible when we catch a glimpse of the glory we have been drawn into by grace: “Blessed be God!” (verse 3).

Several details of the passage can illuminate the preacher’s study, reflection, and preparation:

The subject of the long sentence is, unsurprisingly, God (verse 3). There is only one finite verb in the entire passage: “chose” (verse 4). This reflects the passage’s broader emphasis on God’s initiative in creation, redemption, and fulfillment. The passage unfolds by recording the way God has blessed us and drawn us into redemption by adopting us in Christ. By faith in Jesus, believers are now participants in the very life of God. 

Twelve times Paul refers to things that have taken place “in Christ” (or “in him,” or “in the Beloved” [New Revised Standard Version: “the One he loves”]). Paul’s language is consistently inclusive: the blessings of God belong to “us”; “we” have been chosen [literally “called”] to live for the praise of God’s glory (verses 11–12). Only as he concludes does Paul encourage the church directly: “In him you also heard the word of truth” and were “chosen” (verses 13–14). To come to faith is to be caught up into a drama, and Paul wants his readers—us—to get a glimpse of the larger story, and to be confident that we are in it together. 

It is common for the openings of Paul’s letters to preview the themes he will expound further on. While casting an expansive vision, these opening verses of Ephesians anticipate topics developed later in the letter: the initiative of the Father to redeem people and draw them into his family (2:1–10; 3:14–21); the priority of God’s grace (2:5–10; 3:7–10; 4:7–16); the family of God as marked by a unity that foreshadows the ultimate redemption of all things (2:11–22; 4:1–16) and that even now reflects in some ways the story of that redemption (5:22–6:9). 

Paul is a Jew writing to Gentiles (2:11; 3:1), but racial privilege is no source of division in the family established by the Father, Son, and Spirit (2:11–22). Paul’s inclusive language (we, us) is grounded in the unity of the body of Jesus Christ.

Several themes of Ephesians 1:3–14 are particularly important:

1. The plan of God the Father has been disclosed through our relationship with the Messiah (see also 1:16–23; 3:1–13). This plan reveals that believers are caught up in a drama involving every atom of creation, everything seen and unseen, everything spiritual and earthly. For many people, predestination makes God a micromanager. In Ephesians, predestination has nothing to do with a competition between human and divine will. God’s purposes and plan are the ground of our lives. The purpose of our stories becomes clear only when we see them in the light of revelation. 
2. The incarnation and resurrection of Jesus have opened Paul’s eyes to the manner in which God is surely reclaiming his lordship over everything (1:19–23). The ethnically unified church is a sign to the world and to all the spiritual forces that oppose God that the redemption and harmony of all of creation are unfolding even now (3:7–10). When Paul surveys the glory of God’s plan, he admits that the only story that can make sense of his life is the story of God the Father redeeming all of creation under the lordship of Jesus.
3. Brought into the plan of God, believers are adopted. Paul says this explicitly in verse 5, and it norms all of the family language in the letter as dependent upon the model of the Father-Son relationship that is central to God’s own life and the basis for the metaphor of adoption (verse 5; see also 4:13). Paul’s repeated expression that believers are “in Christ” captures how the Christian life is not hermetically sealed off from God or from Jesus. We are not alone; rather, we are now caught up into the life of God. 
4. The Christian life is first and foremost a response of praise. Paul sets out praise as the fitting response to adoption (verses 5–6), election (verse 12), and the inheritance of the Spirit as the seal of God’s promise (verse 14). Interestingly, these references to praise reflect, respectively, the work of the Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit. Together, they emphasize the grace of God toward believers, and toward all of creation.

Paul’s vision of God as energetically, redemptively, and relationally engaged in the world runs counter to the disenchanted worldview that dominates the West today—what the philosopher Charles Taylor has described as a world enclosed in “the immanent frame.” Preachers can take heart that Paul’s original audience would have been stunned by the cosmic scope of his theological vision. Today’s preachers continue to herald this astonishing announcement. 

Notes

1. Commentary previously published on this website for January 5, 2025.

References

Lynn Cohick, Ephesians, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020).

For further reflection on ministry and discipleship in a disenchanted world, see: Andrew Root, Faith Formation in a Secular Age (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017).