Sermon Christmas Day 25 December
Readings: Isaiah 52.7-10; Hebrews 1.1-4; John 1.1-14
Theme: The Word Became Flesh
The readings during Advent have all been probing the identity of the Messiah (Christ). Who is this child to be born? What type of Messiah will he be? On the day of Christmas, we begin to see the answers to these questions. He is a human being, born of Mary and of the Holy Spirit. He is not the triumphant military leader born with the protection of armies and servants, or the royal King born in splendor and finery, no, he is a simple child, born in the city of David, Bethlehem. Together with this humanity and simplicity, we also need to hold something extraordinary together with this humanity of Jesus in our minds. He is also God, the God who is with us, Emmanuel.
One of the most powerful statements of this complex identity of the Christ child is given to us in the prologue to the Gospel of St John. In this passage of scripture, John invites us to do the holding together in our minds of these seeming opposites through the analogy of the Word (Logos). This theology of the Word brings together the different strands of the identity of Jesus into a coherent whole.
In order to do this, St John weaves his account of the nativity into the framework of the opening narrative of the Book of Genesis. “In the beginning….” These words are the signal that in unveiling the mystery of the identity of Jesus, John will do this as a new reading of the Jewish Scriptures. This child born in Bethlehem is the glory of God. As John puts it at verse 14, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory”. This ‘glory’ is the revelation of the identity of Jesus as “the Word became flesh”. The Word has now been communicated to us in its fullness in Jesus, and through the words, teachings and actions of Jesus we come to know who God really is.
This ‘glory’ of God portrayed by John should be joined to the other part of his Gospel where this glory is manifested fully; namely, at the hour of his dedication to death (John 7.39; 12.23-28; 13.31; 17.5). At the time of the passion of Christ, we also see the ‘glory’ of God, for St. John. This seemingly paradoxical combination is only so, because we struggle to accept that God is love (1 John 4.8). The meaning of this deceptively simple statement is revealed both in the birth of Christ and in his death. The complete giving of Godself to us is shown in the descent of the Son of God to take on human flesh and in the offering of this Son’s flesh for the salvation of the world. These acts of God are communicative acts. That is to say, they are speech acts; they reveal to us of who God is.
Moreover, not only do they speak to us of the identity of God, they also show us who God is. The theology of the Word of God tells and shows us who God is. God becomes audible and visible in Jesus. We hear God speak and we see God act. This combination of speaking and acting are two sides of the one reality that in Jesus, God reveals Himself to us. The God of Jesus Christ is the God whose nature, whose identity, is to communicate to us who He is. In other words, God’s revelation to us as the Word of God, is the self-communication of God. When God speaks, He reveals who he is. It is self-disclosure that is occurring in the nativity and crucifixion of Jesus. This self-disclosure is the simple, undivided nature of love. Love by nature gives itself. Speaking and acting in this sense are the same event. What is spoken is who God is. The nature of God is to reveal Himself.
So, when St John writes the opening prologue to his Gospel, the Genesis motif that situates it is meant to tell us that this Word is the beginning and this beginning means that all of the creation is given in this act of generous self-communication of God: “All things came into being in him”.
This is fundamentally good news for us because it reveals that we too are love. The search for who I am that often accompanies periods, if not all of our lives, is the unending journey into the infinite depths of divine love manifest to us in Jesus. Yet, this journey of self-discovery into love goes through the glory of God. It goes through the humility of the nativity and the suffering of the passion. This leads to a shedding of a certain, perhaps naive, conception of who and what love really is, as is embedded within the words of the prologue of St John. Though this Word was “The light that shines in darkness”, “his own people did not accept him”. This rejection of the truth is a resistance to grace; the refusal to accept that we are given; that we are gifts of God. We do not create ourselves, though our freewill fashions who we become in life. Only in accepting this gift of ourselves do we “have power to become children of God”. In doing this, we are born again, and this new birth is a re-reading of the account of the creation in the Book of Genesis in the light of the Christmas message that “the Word became flesh”. When we realize who we are, we embark on the journey of discovering who God really is. So, let us rejoice, sisters and brothers, that our saviour is love, manifest to us in the flesh this Christmas time.
As many of you will be spending this Christmas season with family and friends, I wish you a joyful time full of peace and goodwill. For those on your own, though this can at times be difficult, try to open yourselves out to the mystery that we are never alone because God is with us (‘Emmanuel’), both now and all of the days of our lives.
Happy Christmas.