25 December, Christmas Day 2024
Readings: Is. 52. 7-10; Heb. 1. 1-4; Jn. 1. 1-14
Theme: And the Word became Flesh
A very happy Christmas to you, to all your families and your friends. I very much hope that this time is full of grace for you as you take time to contemplate the birth of the Lord. We celebrate this Christmas time in a world which still does not know him. It is a troubling moment for our world, and we do well to remind ourselves that our hope is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. And, it is this very same Lord who is born amongst us in the flesh this Christmas day. This birth had been long awaited by the Jewish people. The prophets had long foretold of the coming of the one who would redeem Israel. The one who, as Isaiah in our beautiful first reading announces, will inaugurate ‘the return of the Lord to Zion’. It is this return to Zion which we celebrate at this Christmas time; the time in which the one in whom all things were made visits his people in the guise of flesh. Yes, the very flesh which reveals Jesus to the world is the same flesh which hides his divinity. Such a double effect, of both revealing and concealing inaugurates what we might call the sacramentality of the Word of God. God is now embodied in the perishability and mortality of the flesh. It is, as Isaiah proclaims, the event in which, ‘The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.’ Seeing this salvation is to see the glory of God veiled in flesh: ‘And the Word became flesh and lived (dwelt) amongst us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth’.
Listening again this Christmas time to this most beautiful prologue of St John’s gospel, reminds us that the rejection of the Lord by the world is baked into the Christmas story: ‘He was in the world and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to his own and his own people did not accept him.’ In other words, in the Christmas story, we see traced, if ever so faintly the crucifixion and the resurrection. The rejection of the world and God’s own people, the Jews, of the messiah, is a foretaste of the way in which the process of redemption will be accomplished in the event of the crucifixion of the Lord. This is only possible, of course, because of the fact that the Word became flesh. Without this incarnation, without this ‘enfleshment’, the redemption long awaited by God’s people would not have arrived amongst them as the recapitulation of all that had been foretold in the law, the prophets and the writings. In order to fulfill the promise that had been made to the patriarchs, it was necessary for God to visit his people in the flesh and to be rejected. In accepting this rejection, God does a mysterious thing. He transforms the rejection of God into the acceptance of God. This dual meaning of the preposition ‘of’ allows us to see something of the holy exchange that occurs at the birth of the Lord. God takes our rejection of him as one of us; as one of us in his own flesh in order that the true glory of the Son may reveal the depth of the love of the Father for us. Yes, the redemption, we celebrate in the birth of the Lord is the revelation that God is only God for us (pro nobis). God is not a God away from us, distant and uncaring. No, the God who is revealed in the flesh in Jesus, is the God who is Emmanuel, God with us and for us. God takes our rejection and exchanges it for his acceptance.
This is why during this Christmas season, we rejoice and shout for joy, because great in our midst is the holy one of Israel. The one who has come to redeem his people and to proclaim to all captives, liberty, is Jesus our saviour. This salvation is hard won. It is not a salvation that avoids all the darkness and death of the world which knows not God. Rather, it is a salvation which takes all these forces of negation and transforms them into the absolute force of affirmation, the power of love. Only in this love is all that degrades us transformed into the very life of God which knows no perishing, nor death. But for this to happen, it was necessary that God should reach down and touch us with his warm embrace, so that the coldness and darkness of sin could be transformed into the warmth and the light which enlightens all peoples. Yes, all peoples. For the promise made first to the Jews has now been revealed to the whole world, to the gentiles as well as to the Jews. This is why the birth of the messiah is also the revelation of God. The one who had been long awaited by the Jews is the Lord and saviour himself. Jesus, the only Son of God, reveals who God is: a God who is with his people.
So, as we celebrate this most holy day today, let us remember that all the forces of darkness and sin which know not God have already been redeemed by this Jesus, born to us today. He is the one who has won the victory for us, so that all in the world that seems so powerful is truly revealed to be of little consequence. It is love which counts, and no force, no power of darkness and hell can overcome this. This is why today, of all days, we are right to sing and shout for joy, for great in our midst is the holy one of Israel who has come to set his people free.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.