In the beginning
The Rev’d Devin McLachlan
John 1.1–14
‘Midnight Mass’ (The First Eucharist of the Feast of the Nativity)
24/25 December 2025
St Bene’t’s, Cambridge
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Not words. Not, as Hamlet has it, words words words.
In the beginning was The Word. The divine Word, the logos, from which all words flow.
Semitic languages, of which Hebrew, the language of Jesus, the language of most of the Bible, is one —
Semitic languages were the first to discover how to write all words not with hundreds of pictograms, but with a simple pocketful of 22 letters.
And the first letter of Hebrew is alef
Alef, the Rabbis tell us, was so humble that it let bet — the second letter of the alpha-bet — be the first letter of the Bible.[1]
And as a reward for its humility, Alef was honoured as the first letter of the ten commandments.
Alef is also the first letter of the Divine name which God gives to Moses:
I Am What I Am[2]
Alef it is the first letter of the word for Truth, emet[3].
Alef represents the number one, and so for the Rabbis represents the One-ness of God.
In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.
Here’s how you write Alef:
It’s a dot, serifed or not, — in Hebrew, called a yud — up here.
And it’s a dot, serifed or not, — in Hebrew, called a yud — down here.
(Yud up here and Yud down here)
And between them, a diagonal Vav, a line, descending left down to right.
The Yud above represents God, immortal, invisible, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.
The Yud below is us, God’s people, Creation, all the things that have come into being through God’s Word.
And descending to us, from God above to us below, the Vav — in Judaism, representing Torah.
Tonight, for us as Christians, I’d like to think of the Vav as this miracle of this Holy Night, when the Word became flesh and lived among us.
We have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth — truth, emet, which begins with alef.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
But there is something wonderfully miraculous about Alef, this first letter of the alef-bet, this first letter of Truth, this first letter of Commandment and the Name God told to Moses:
Alef is Silent.
Alef has no sound of its own. At the most in some dialects it is a glottal stop.
The oneness of God. The holiness of Truth. The clarity of the Commandments.
The eternal Being of the Divine, and the mystery of the Incarnation begins with Silence.
As it did two thousand and twenty five years ago, on that Silent, Holy Night, shining in the darkness.
In a busy, noisy, words-filled world, St Bene’t’s has always treasured the holiness of Silence.
St Benedict dedicated an entire chapter of his Rule to the Spirit of Silence, and Silence is one of the spiritual gifts of this community which I treasure the most, though I suspect I am the very least gifted in its practice.
When Herod was shouting from his palace, and Roman and royal officialdom taking names for the census, neighbours gossiping, zealots haranguing, in came the Word of God with the silence of Alef, Silent as Light, to dwell among us, fully human, fully divine, the light that was the life of all people, the life that was the light of all people.
How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin,
where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.[4]
[1] A Chabbad simple commentary on Alef can be found at https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/137073/jewish/Aleph.htm
Another online source is https://hebrewtoday.com/alphabet/the-letter-alef-%d7%90/
[2] Exodus 3.14, אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה
[3] אֱמֶת
[4] ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’, The Rt Revd Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts