John 1:1-14
Last night at our Christmas Eve Mass we read in the
Gospel according to Luke we heard about the Angels proclaiming the good news to
the shepherds, and the holy family in the stable with the baby Jesus swaddled
and lying in a manger. It is a familiar
and beautiful story, one that is reflected countless works of art and poetry
and drama throughout the ages including the pageant performed yesterday by the
children of this parish and our own crèche that you see before you. But today we hear something a bit different. Today’s Gospel is not so easily rendered into
images, you won’t see it depicted in many paintings or acted out on stage, and
when people do try to render this passage artistically, it invariably winds up
in one of two places, the beginning of Genesis where God spoke and created life
out of the chaos of nothingness or back in the manger with the swaddled baby
and the shepherds. This makes sense, in
this opening passage of John these two distant parts of the bible come
together. The Word was there in the
first chapter of Genesis, before creation.
“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth
was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind
from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be
light’; and there was light.”[1] It was with the Word that God brought light
to the darkness in the beginning. God
spoke his Word and light came into being.
God spoke his Word again and again and the sparks of life were lit in
creation. Of course the Word of God is
spoken throughout scripture. The force
of God’s Word is at work throughout the Old Testament because as John said ‘the
Word was God and the Word was with God’.
Whenever we read about God interacting with Israel, we are reading about
the Word of God as well. Whenever we
read about Moses and the law and when we read about the prophets and martyrs we
know that they have been inspired by God’s Word. The problem is that the nature of God and our
nature are so radically different, at least from our perspective, the
perspective of the created. We are stuck
between our natural desire to want to know God and our desire to keep God at
arms distance. We want to enshrine God
in a tabernacle, but we also want God there with us in the difficult
moments. We want God to butt out and we
want God to take charge. We paint God
with all sorts of different ideas, ignoring what we don’t like, twisting God
into what we deem a suitable image.
Humanity is indeed conflicted about God.
We see this again and again throughout scripture, we see Israel resist
the call of prophets, we see corruption and self interest drag God’s chosen
people away from God. We see it
throughout the history of the Christian Church as well.
“He was in the
world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know
him.”
It is true that
God is not easily understood, God is so big, so far beyond our imagination that
we think we cannot possibly know God, not really. We are created, limited by our physical
selves, We all have a beginning, and we certainly seem to have an end as well,
at least for a while anyway. We are
stuck in time, possessing only a brief time to do anything at all, and because
we are imperfect many of us tend to waste a lot of that time on petty,
unimportant matters. But God, God is eternal, God is infinite in
every way, and yet after so many attempts to connect with us, his creation, God
does something different. God takes on
humanity, closing that unfathomably large gap between us and our creator. One theologian writes, “Christmas is not an
event within history but is rather the invasion of time by eternity.”[2] That is, when God brought humanity and
divinity together in Jesus Christ, it was not just for that short span of 33
years during the life of Christ, the consequences of God entering history
continues to resonate, continues to be felt in all of time, in all of
history. Jesus Christ is the pebble
dropped into the lake of time, we shall see the ripples go out forever in all
directions.
This is a lovely idea, but what does it mean for
us? What does it change? We still act like we don’t understand. We call Jesus Lord, but divorce our worship
and Love of Jesus from what we know about his life. We act like the incarnation was something God
did despite himself, we return God to the tabernacle, calling on God only in
times of Crisis, only as an outside agent acting on our lives.
We know, I hope we know, that Jesus is true God and
true man, but so often we fail to see the truth of that staring us in the face:
In his divinity Jesus shows us who God is, and in his Humanity Jesus shows us
who we are meant to be, and they are the same.
This is the unfathomable revelation of the incarnation.
God shows us in Jesus that his nature is to reach
downward, to humble himself, when God “emptied himself, taking the form of a
slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form,”[3] as Paul says in
Philippians, it was not despite himself, but rather it was because of his very
nature. Such a nature is so different,
so completely opposite of the order of this world, but it is the real order of
things, it is God’s order. We may want
to put limits on God’s nature, say that he cannot in his divinity possibly be
this way, but “it is not our right to set any sort of limits to the
loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our duty is to see
and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before.”[4]
God does not forfeit his deity when he becomes a
servant to humanity, God does not stop being the almighty eternal King of all
creation when he becomes humanities brother in time. Rather, the fact that God is both exalted and
completely humble is a sign of his complete freedom. God’s freedom of LOVE, is love that crosses
all boundaries to bring truth and Grace to a world bound by sin. Turning to God is an acceptance of that Love
in our own lives, not just an acknowledgement of God’s love for each of us, but
accepting that we too, made in God’s image, are made to LOVE in a radical and
unexpected way. The perfect image of God
shown in Jesus Christ also the perfection of God’s image in us, and it is an
image of LOVE given freely and completely.
This is the eternal Word of God made flesh. It is indeed beyond any single image that can
be painted, or song that can be sung. It
is beyond any single sermon that can be written, but is found whenever we clear
a space in our lives, God’s Love comes rushing in.
This is the nature of God revealed in Jesus, a meeting
of something as simple as a child being born and placed in a manger, and yet as
complicated as eternity itself. And here
we are, as witnesses of this miracle in the world but also bearers of God’s
word as well as we accept and rejoice in the image of God in our own humanity.
Merry Christmas.
Amen.
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