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Archbishop of Canterbury Christmas Day sermon; Dr Rowan Williams sermon SOT - "As always on Christmas Day I bring you greetings. Greetings from the congregation in Canterbury Prison with whom I was earlier this morning, who were very keen that their love and prayers would be passed on to you. And greetings to from our Anglican brothers and sisters in Cairo whose bishop I spoke to on the telephone a couple of days ago. You will know how much they need our prayers at the moment, but we are also held in their prayers. In the beginning was the word. When the first Christians read – or more probably heard – those opening words of St John's gospel, they would have understood straight away quite a lot more than we do. They would have remembered, many of them, that in Hebrew 'word' and 'thing' are the same, and they would all have known that in Greek the word used has a huge range of meaning – at the simplest level, just something said; but also a pattern, a rationale, as we might say, even the entire structure of the universe seen as something that makes sense to us, the structure that holds things together and makes it possible for us to think. Against this background, we can get a glimpse of just what is being said about Jesus. His life is what God says and what God does; it is the life in which things hold together; it is because of the life that lives in him that we can think. Jesus is the place where all reality is focused, brought to a point. Here is where we can see as nowhere else what connects all reality – all human experience and all natural laws. Edward Elgar famously said about his Enigma Variations that they were all based on a tune that everyone knew – and nobody has ever managed to work out what is is. But St John's gospel declares that the almost infinite variety of the life we encounter is all variations on the theme that is stated in one single clear musical line, one melody, in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. 'In him was life, and the life ...