Merry Christmas!
John 1:1-14
Last night we heard the
classic story of Mary and Joseph and their trip to Bethlehem. We heard about the Angels and the Shepherds,
and we heard about the young baby Jesus being born in a stable. This is the story we sing about, the story of
a baby born in a stable, lying in a manger.
It is a story about the cold political power of the elite that cares
only about counting how many people and how much money it has control
over. It is a story about indifference
that would leave a pregnant woman to give birth to a child outside in a stable. It is a story of good news to those outside
of society. The shepherds who spend
their nights outside the city gates, with only their flocks and each other for
company, these forgotten men who wander the hillsides, they are the ones who
get visited by angels, and have no choice but to go and see this miracle child
for themselves. They did not understand
fully what they were seeing that night.
They knew the baby was special because the angels told them so, and they
were amazed by what they had experienced that night, but how could they really
comprehend who this little baby was?
Mary, as she looked down at her son, she alone would hold the shepherds’
story in her heart and wonder at what it all really meant, but could she really
understand, could anyone?
The story of Jesus’
birth is a very human story told from a human perspective. But there is another perspective, a
perspective that can never really be understood because it is not a human
perspective.
So today we pull way
back, back before Mary becomes pregnant, back before King David or Abraham were
born, back before men walked the earth at all, before the world began, before
the universe even existed. Back before
there was time. We even go back before
there were angels or heaven. Today we go
all the way back to the very beginning.
Back then there was God.
And that is all we can really say because God
by God’s self is completely beyond our human comprehension, beyond the
descriptive ability of our language. But
God chose to create, we know that much.
And God spoke creation into being.
‘Let there be light’ and there was light. He spoke the earth and the stars into
existence and everything that is on the earth.
And he spoke us into existence too.
God’s Word, God’s creative force, God’s very expression of God’s self,
not separate from God, but God entirely and completely, this is who was born to
Mary, wrapped in swaddling bands and laid in a manger almost two thousand years ago. God.
In Christ the
unimaginable, the incomprehensible becomes visible. We do not need to speculate about who God is
(though I’m sure we will continue to do so) all we need to know about God is
shown to us in Jesus, and through the lens of Christ we are better able to
recognize God when we see him in the people and the world around us.
We are amazed at God’s
willingness to lower himself, to reach down and bind himself to human
flesh. We marvel at this because we
think of it as something God does in-spite of himself, but the true marvel is
that God reaches downward towards us because that is God’s nature. In Jesus God’s love is revealed, not as some
distant cold love but love that is personal and tangible, Love that gives of
itself completely. This is what
perfection really looks like; this is who God is. And this is the image that we were made
in.
Jesus shows us God in his divinity,
but in his humanity Jesus shows us who we are too. In Christ we see what it means to be fully
human. We see that our nature is not
unlike God’s, to reach out from ourselves as God reached out; we are meant to
love like God loves, not a cold theoretical sort of Love, but a relational love
of sacrifice and self offering.
In Christ we can see
where our true nature meets the nature of God.
Christ is the true light, he does not just shed a spotlight on God, so
that we might know our creator but came to shine a light on us as well, so that
we might know ourselves.
Saint Athanasius said
“God became man so that man might become God”.
Though I have read this statement a hundred times, and studied at length
what it might mean, I am always surprised by it. It is an eye opening statement. Perhaps this is what is meant when John says,
“to all who receive him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become
children of God, who were born, not of the blood or of the will of the flesh or
of the will of man, but of God.” Our
true belief is belief that does not just reside inside our heads, but flows
through our veins and lives in our hearts, and most of all is expressed in our
lives and uncovers in us who we truly are, who God made us to be.
I think perhaps there
is this idea that striving to be like Christ is to try and be less human. But the truth is, the more like Christ we let
ourselves be, the more human we become.
That is the miracle
proclaimed to the shepherds, and the mystery pondered in Mary’s heart. That is the incarnation of God in this world,
the miracle and mystery that we should always try to keep with us in our hearts
and minds not just today but everyday. In
Jesus, born a fragile human child, all that is truly God and all that is truly human
is revealed to us. And for this we
should sing to the Lord a new song, for he has surely done marvelous things!
Amen.
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