Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist: An Anglican Perspective

Feast Day: December 27

The Anglican calendar is ordered by a hierarchy of holy days, each carrying a different weight of observance. At the top stand the seven Principal Feasts, the highest-ranking days of the liturgical year. Below them are the Red-Letter Holy Days appointed in the BCP 2019, including the Feasts of the Apostles and Evangelists. The Feast of Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist, observed on December 27, is one of these Red-Letter Holy Days. The Prayer Book appoints his Collect on page 625, the Preface of Christmas, and Exodus 33:18–23, Psalm 92:1–4(5–10)11–14, 1 John 1, and either John 21:9–25 or John 1:1–18 as the readings for the feast.

December 27 is the third day of Christmas. Saint Stephen was remembered on the twenty-sixth as the first Christian martyr, John is remembered on the twenty-seventh as the apostolic witness whose testimony endured through a long life, and the Holy Innocents will be remembered on the twenty-eighth as children killed because Herod sought the newborn King. These three days give Christmas extraordinary depth. The Church moves from a willing martyr to a long-lived apostolic witness and then to innocent victims who could neither choose nor articulate their witness. John stands in the middle as the man who saw, heard, touched, remembered, and spent a lifetime proclaiming the Word made flesh.

The contrast with Stephen is particularly fitting. Stephen’s witness reaches its earthly completion suddenly and violently, while John’s witness is remembered as slow, sustained, and given to the Church across decades of ministry and testimony. Both bear witness to the same Lord, and both belong within Christmas because the Child born at Bethlehem is not merely to be admired. He is to be known, confessed, followed, loved, and proclaimed.

The Biblical Portrait

John is the son of Zebedee and the brother of James. Jesus calls the brothers from their fishing boat beside the Sea of Galilee, and they leave their father and the hired servants to follow him. Mark tells us that Jesus gives James and John the name Boanerges (boh-AN-er-jeez), meaning “Sons of Thunder.” (Mark 3:17, ESV) The name fits something of what we later see. When a Samaritan village refuses to receive Jesus, James and John ask, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luke 9:54, ESV) Jesus rebukes them.

The contrast with John’s later writings is striking. The Son of Thunder who once wanted fire called down upon those who refused Jesus became the apostolic teacher who wrote, “God is love” and “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:8, 19, ESV) We should not flatten an entire life of discipleship into a simple personality transformation, but there is genuine pastoral beauty here. Christ does not merely recruit John’s zeal. He disciplines it, redirects it, and teaches him what divine love actually looks like.

John belongs with Peter and James to the innermost circle of the Twelve. The three are present when Jesus raises Jairus’s daughter, when he is transfigured upon the mountain, and when he goes deeper into Gethsemane on the night of his arrest. John therefore witnesses some of the most intimate revelations of Christ’s power, glory, and suffering recorded in the Gospels. His apostolic life unfolds close to the person and work of Jesus, and that closeness becomes central to the testimony the Church received under his name.

The Church has from ancient times identified John the son of Zebedee with the Beloved Disciple of the Fourth Gospel and received him as the apostolic witness behind the Gospel and the Johannine Epistles. The Gospel does not attach the name John directly to the phrase “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” but it identifies that disciple as an eyewitness whose testimony stands behind the book. The early Church consistently associated that witness with John the Apostle, and that ancient identification coheres naturally with the New Testament portrait. John therefore reclines close to Jesus at the Last Supper, stands near the Cross when many others have fled, receives Mary into his care, runs with Peter to the empty tomb, sees and believes, recognizes the risen Christ beside the Sea of Galilee, and appears at the Gospel’s conclusion as the disciple whose testimony is declared true.

The Beloved Disciple

The title Beloved Disciple should not be understood as though Jesus loved John while loving the other disciples less. The Gospel uses the designation to identify a particular disciple through his relationship with Jesus and makes that relationship part of the witness he bears. John’s identity is not grounded in his own prominence but in the love of the Lord who called him.

At the Last Supper, the Beloved Disciple reclines close to Jesus, and Peter signals to him to ask whom Jesus means when he says that one of them will betray him. (John 13:23–25) At the Cross, the same disciple stands beside Mary and the other women while Jesus entrusts his mother to his care, saying, “Behold, your mother!” (John 19:27, ESV) John tells us that from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. The disciple who had rested close to Jesus at the table remains near him when the path of discipleship leads beneath the Cross.

On Easter morning, the Beloved Disciple runs with Peter to the tomb. Peter enters first and sees the linen cloths; then the other disciple enters, and the Gospel records simply that “he saw and believed.” (John 20:8, ESV) The following verse makes clear that the disciples did not yet fully understand from Scripture that Jesus must rise from the dead, but something decisive has happened. Later, beside the Sea of Galilee, the same disciple recognizes Jesus before Peter does and says, “It is the Lord!” (John 21:7, ESV) The pattern is characteristic: he sees, recognizes, and bears witness.

The Gospel finally identifies this disciple as the witness standing behind the book: “This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true.” (John 21:24, ESV)The Gospel grounds its proclamation in eyewitness testimony rather than detached religious speculation. John does not merely contemplate Christ from a distance. He bears witness to the Lord whom he knew, heard, followed, saw crucified, and encountered risen from the dead.

Heard, Seen, and Touched

The appointed Epistle, 1 John 1, gives the feast perhaps its most characteristic vocabulary: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.” (1 John 1:1, ESV) The physical verbs accumulate deliberately: heard, seen, looked upon, touched. The apostolic proclamation concerns the eternal life that was with the Father and was made manifest, but this manifestation occurred within history and human embodiment. The Word of life was heard with ears, seen with eyes, and touched with hands.

That makes 1 John particularly appropriate during Christmas. The Church has just celebrated the confession that the eternal Word became flesh, and John insists upon the reality of that flesh against every temptation to turn the Incarnation into appearance, symbol, mystical idea, or spiritual metaphor. The Christian faith does not begin with humanity ascending toward an invisible spiritual realm. It begins with God making himself known in the Son who entered the world bodily. Christmas is therefore not an ornament added to Christianity but the announcement that the eternal life which was with the Father has truly been manifested among us.

John then explains why this apostolic testimony is proclaimed: “so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” (1 John 1:3, ESV) Eyewitness testimony serves communion. John does not keep the privilege of having seen Christ as a private spiritual possession. What the apostles saw and heard is proclaimed so that Christians who never stood beside the Sea of Galilee or beneath the Cross may nevertheless share through faith in their fellowship with the Father and the Son.

Moses and the Glory of God

The appointed Old Testament reading is Exodus 33:18–23, where Moses asks God, “Please show me your glory.”(Exodus 33:18, ESV) God answers that Moses cannot see his face and live, places him in the cleft of a rock, and covers him while his glory passes by. Moses receives a real revelation of God, but not an unrestricted vision of the divine glory.

Read within the Christmas season, the passage creates a profound connection with the alternate Gospel, John 1:1–18. The Evangelist announces, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14, ESV) John is not claiming that he gazed directly upon the unveiled divine essence in a way Moses was forbidden to do. The Prologue itself says, “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.” (John 1:18, ESV) The wonder is that the unseen God has made himself known in the incarnate Son.

The God whose glory Moses longed to behold has therefore made himself known definitively in Jesus Christ. John sees the face of Jesus, hears his voice, reclines beside him, watches him suffer, and encounters him risen from the dead. The Christmas mystery answers Moses’s longing in a way that exceeds what Moses could have imagined. God’s glory comes near not by ceasing to be glory, but because the eternal Son assumes our nature and makes the Father known. John’s Gospel teaches the Church to recognize that glory even where the world sees only humility, suffering, service, and the Cross.

Walking in the Light

The BCP Collect for Saint John gathers the feast around the Johannine theme of light. On page 625 the Church prays, “Shed upon your Church, O Lord, the brightness of your light; that we, being illumined by the teaching of your apostle and evangelist John, may so walk in the light of your truth, that at length we may attain to the fullness of eternal life.”The Prayer Book then appoints the Preface of Christmas. The Collect does not ask the Church merely to appreciate John’s theological brilliance. It asks that John’s apostolic teaching illumine Christian life.

The language comes naturally from John’s own writings. The Gospel announces that in the Word “was life, and the life was the light of men,” and that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:4–5, ESV) First John declares even more directly, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5, ESV) Light received therefore becomes a path walked, and doctrine becomes discipleship.

That movement is essential because John never allows knowledge of God to remain an intellectual possession detached from obedience and love. The person who claims to walk in the light while hating his brother remains in darkness, and the one who says he knows Christ while refusing his commandments makes a false claim. The Apostle of profound theology is therefore also an Apostle of ordinary Christian obedience. The Word was God, the Word became flesh, God is light, and God is love, but those enormous claims descend into the daily lives of Christians who must walk in truth, confess their sins, keep Christ’s commandments, and love one another.

The Apostle of Love

John has often been called the Apostle of Love because the theme runs throughout his Gospel and Epistles. The title becomes sentimental, however, when separated from what John actually teaches about love. Johannine love is not vague kindness or emotional warmth. Its shape is given by Jesus Christ, and its deepest meaning is revealed at the Cross.

First John says, “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us.” (1 John 3:16, ESV) He then writes, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:10, ESV) The order is precisely the order of grace. Christian love begins not with our capacity to love God but with God’s prior love for us in Christ. Love is cruciform before it is sentimental because its definition is the Son giving himself for sinners.

Only then does John command the Church, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (1 John 4:11, ESV) Grace becomes obligation without ceasing to be grace, and Christians love because they have first been loved. That makes John particularly fitting for the Christmas season. Christmas can easily become a cultural celebration of family affection, generosity, nostalgia, and human warmth, but John takes us deeper. The love at the center of Christmas is not first our love for one another. It is the love of God who sent his Son.

Human love finds its proper order when John writes, “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19, ESV) Christmas warmth receives its deepest meaning when it becomes a response to the Love that came among us in the flesh. The Child of Bethlehem is not merely an image of tenderness. He is the Son whom the Father sent in love and who will lay down his life for sinners.

John at the Cross

John’s identity as the Beloved Disciple gives his theology of love a weight that sentimentality cannot bear. The Apostle associated with these writings does not speak about self-giving love from a safe distance. He stands near Jesus as that love is enacted to the uttermost. John 19 places the Beloved Disciple beside the mother of Jesus and several women while Christ hangs upon the Cross.

Jesus sees his mother and the disciple whom he loved and creates a new bond between them, saying to Mary, “Woman, behold, your son!” and to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” (John 19:26–27, ESV) Even while dying, Jesus provides for his mother and draws these two lives into a new relationship of care. The scene is intimate, but it also fits the wider fellowship Christ creates around himself. Natural relations are not despised; they are gathered within the communion produced by his saving work.

The Fourth Gospel also records the piercing of Jesus’s side and solemnly insists upon the truth of the eyewitness testimony: “He who saw it has borne witness; his testimony is true.” (John 19:35, ESV) Once again, seeing becomes testimony. The Cross is not an unfortunate interruption of the glory revealed in Jesus. In John’s Gospel it belongs to that revelation, because the Son glorifies the Father through the obedient self-giving by which he completes the work given to him. The apostolic witness that tells us God is love also bears witness to the place where that love was displayed at immeasurable cost.

The Breakfast by the Sea

The primary appointed Gospel, John 21:9–25, brings the Church to one of the most intimate scenes after the Resurrection. Jesus has prepared a charcoal fire beside the Sea of Tiberias, with fish laid upon it and bread nearby. The disciples come ashore, and the risen Lord tells them, “Come and have breakfast.” (John 21:12, ESV) The scene is wonderfully concrete. Resurrection has not made Jesus less embodied or less able to share ordinary human life. There is a beach, a fire, fish, bread, conversation, and disciples who know that the man feeding them is the Lord who was crucified.

Beside that charcoal fire, Jesus questions Peter three times, “Do you love me?” The threefold questioning naturally recalls Peter’s three denials, which John also places beside a charcoal fire on the night of Jesus’s arrest. The Gospel does not state mechanically that each question cancels one denial, but the narrative correspondence is difficult to miss. Peter is being restored and recommissioned to feed Christ’s sheep, and once again grace precedes service.

The Beloved Disciple remains nearby, and Peter eventually asks Jesus what will happen to him. Christ answers, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!” (John 21:22, ESV) The Gospel then explains how a rumor arose that this disciple would not die and carefully corrects the misunderstanding. Jesus had not promised that John would remain alive until the Second Coming. Peter simply was not to make another disciple’s calling the measure of his own. Christ determines the path of his servants, and each is called to follow him.

John in Christian Tradition

Ancient Christian tradition associates John’s later ministry especially with Ephesus in Asia Minor and remembers him as living into old age. Scripture does not give us a continuous biography of his later years, but the early Church’s memory of John’s long life gives him a distinctive place among the apostles. Some bear witness to Christ through sudden martyrdom, while John is remembered through decades of endurance, teaching, pastoral care, and testimony.

The Church has also traditionally received John the Apostle as the John who was exiled on Patmos and received the Revelation of Jesus Christ. Revelation identifies its author simply as John and tells us that he was on Patmos “on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” (Revelation 1:9, ESV) The ancient Church’s identification of this John with the Apostle gives a fitting conclusion to the portrait: the disciple who once saw the glory of Christ on the mountain and witnessed his humiliation at the Cross later receives a vision of the risen and reigning Lord whose kingdom will triumph over every enemy.

The heart of John’s traditional remembrance is therefore remarkably coherent. He is one of the Twelve, a close witness of Jesus’s ministry, Passion, and Resurrection, and the apostolic testimony associated with his name gives the Church some of the New Testament’s richest teaching concerning the Incarnation, eternal life, truth, light, love, fellowship with God, and the final victory of Christ. His longevity also gives the Church a different picture of faithfulness from Stephen’s martyrdom on the preceding day. Christian witness may sometimes be concentrated in one terrible moment, and sometimes it must be carried patiently across decades.

The BCP 2019 Collect and Christmas Preface

The Collect’s movement from light to life is matched beautifully by the Preface of Christmas. The BCP appoints the Christmas Preface for Saint John because his entire witness directs the Church toward the mystery celebrated in these twelve days: the eternal Son truly assumed our human nature and was born for us. Few apostolic feasts could be more naturally joined to that Preface. John’s Gospel begins with the eternal Word who was God and became flesh, while his first Epistle begins with the bodily reality of what the apostles heard, saw, and touched.

The Incarnation is not merely one doctrine among many within John’s witness. It governs the way he understands revelation, salvation, fellowship, light, love, truth, and eternal life. The Christmas Preface therefore places John exactly where he belongs, within the celebration of the Word made flesh. The Preface announces what God has done in Christ, while the Collect asks that the light of that revelation illumine the Church through John’s teaching and finally lead her into the fullness of eternal life. Grace comes first, illumination follows, and Christian walking proceeds in the light God has given.

Saint John in Anglican Worship

White is customarily used for Saint John in Anglican worship, fitting both the Christmas season and the Church’s remembrance of John as an Apostle and Evangelist who did not die as a martyr. The white of December 27 stands between the red customarily used for Stephen on December 26 and the red of the Holy Innocents on December 28, giving the first days of Christmas a striking visual rhythm. The sequence allows different forms of Christian witness to stand beside one another without competition.

Stephen’s witness culminates in martyrdom, while John’s is remembered through long endurance, teaching, pastoral care, and written testimony. The Church needs grace for both kinds of faithfulness. John has also traditionally been associated with theologians and writers because of the depth and beauty of the writings received under his name, though such patronal associations are devotional rather than part of the Prayer Book’s definition of the feast. His strongest Anglican association remains the one the BCP itself emphasizes: light. The Church asks to be illumined by John’s teaching so that she may walk in the truth, which means the Apostle is honored not simply because he possessed extraordinary access to Jesus but because his testimony continues to serve Christ’s Church.

Observing the Feast

Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist, is observed on December 27 within the twelve days of Christmas. The Collect is found on page 625 of the BCP 2019. The appointed readings are Exodus 33:18–23, Psalm 92:1–4(5–10)11–14, 1 John 1, and John 21:9–25 or John 1:1–18. The Preface of Christmas is appointed, and white is customarily used in Anglican worship.

Begin with 1 John 1 and read it slowly enough to notice the accumulation of physical language: heard, seen, looked upon, touched. Let those words press against every tendency to turn Christianity into an abstract spirituality detached from the historical and bodily reality of Jesus Christ. Then read John 21:9–25 and remain with the ordinary details of the Resurrection scene: the charcoal fire, fish, bread, breakfast, Peter’s restoration, and John following behind. The risen Christ does not merely provide proof that death has been conquered. He restores failed disciples, feeds them, commissions them, and directs each toward the particular obedience he has appointed.

Read Exodus 33:18–23 and then John 1:1–18. Hear Moses ask to see God’s glory, and then hear John announce that the Word became flesh and that his glory was seen in the incarnate Son. The comparison should lead not to speculation about the divine essence but to wonder that the God whom no one has seen has made himself known in Jesus Christ. Pray the Collect on page 625 and ask not simply to understand John better but to be illumined by the truth he teaches. Where hatred remains, ask to walk in love; where sin is hidden, ask to walk in the light; where Christ has become an abstraction, return to the apostolic testimony concerning the one whom the apostles heard, saw, and touched.

John also gives Christians a useful perspective on the nature of witness. Not every faithful life will end dramatically, and not every Christian will be called to public prominence. Some witness is carried through decades of patient obedience, repeated teaching, care for the Church, fidelity in old age, and the refusal to stop saying what Christ has done. Saint John reminds us that long obedience is no lesser testimony merely because it lacks one dramatic moment. The Lord who sustained Stephen through martyrdom can sustain another servant through decades of quiet faithfulness.

Conclusion

Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist, is remembered as the witness whose testimony spans the great mysteries of the Gospel. He follows Jesus from Galilee, beholds his glory, hears his teaching, stands near his Cross, runs to the empty tomb, recognizes the risen Lord beside the sea, and bears witness to the Word of life whom he had heard, seen, and touched. His apostolic testimony is both profoundly theological and stubbornly concrete because the eternal Word truly became flesh and entered human history.

The BCP Collect and Christmas Preface give that witness its proper center. The Church asks to be illumined by John’s teaching because the light he proclaims is not John’s own light but the brightness revealed in Jesus Christ. The Son was born for us and truly assumed our humanity so that sinners might be cleansed and made God’s children. John bears witness to that gift so that others may enter fellowship with the Father and the Son and learn to walk in truth and love.

On the third day of Christmas, John therefore teaches the Church a form of witness different from Stephen’s martyrdom but directed toward the same Lord. Faithfulness may sometimes be compressed into one terrible moment, and sometimes it may unfold across decades of ordinary obedience, teaching, remembering, and proclaiming. John’s enduring testimony gives the Church words with which to receive the mystery of Christmas: the eternal life was manifested, the Word became flesh, and what the apostles saw and heard they proclaimed so that we also might share their fellowship in Jesus Christ.