Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen
The text for this meditation is written in the 1st Chapter of the Gospel according to St John: Verses 1 – 18:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. 15 (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) 16 From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17 The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
Let us pray: Father guide the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts that we may hear your word of truth, for your Word is true. Amen
A lot of people don’t think of our gospel reading for this morning as a nativity story. It is a common Christmas reading, but these days it doesn’t seem to capture people’s imagination like the stories Luke and Matthew tell. The angel’s announcement to Mary that she would be the mother of the Messiah – the Roman census and the desperate journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem with Mary on a donkey - the search for a place to stay in Joseph’s ancestral home town, and the eventual realisation that they were going to have to bunk down with the animals - the birth of the baby so far from home, and his first crib in the animals’ feeding trough - the angel choir singing to the shepherds, and their journey to the manger to see the Saviour - the long journey of the wise men, probably arriving months later, and then the desperate flight of the holy family into Egypt to escape from King Herod’s death squads – this is fantastic storytelling, and it draws us in and grips our imaginations year by year.
For most people, John chapter one doesn’t have quite the same appeal. It reads more like a chapter from a philosophy book, factual, and a little complicated. My guess is that most churches will not read this passage over the Christmas season.
But I don’t think we’re doing John justice by ignoring his nativity account. You see, it’s a nativity story that starts a lot further back than Matthew or Luke. In fact, he goes as far back as you can possibly go, and certainly further back than he thought he was going:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”.
‘In the beginning’. When is that, precisely? Undoubtedly, John was thinking of the first sentence of the Book of Genesis: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. Wow!! this nativity story of John’s has its’ origin way back in the time of creation. The two creation stories in Genesis one and two describe the beginnings of the universe in terms of life on this earth: the earth is created first, and then the sun and moon and stars are created to give it light and warmth. Most scientists think that the earth is about four and a half billion years old, and we human beings have lived on it for only a tiny fraction of its history. But our universe itself; how old is it? Well, of course, scientific consensus is changing all the time, but I think the current estimate puts it at about fourteen billion years, starting with a big bang that was prepared and timed to absolute perfection to create life as we know it.
Generally speaking, for us, Jesus is our New Testament saviour. Sure, there were prophecies, but our Jesus was born at Christmas some 2019 years ago. But here in today’s nativity reading John is taking us back the very beginning, when God began to create the heavens, when God carefully planned that big bang fourteen billion years ago, or however long ago it may have been – in the beginning was the Word. In other words, even this far back, we still aren’t at the beginning of the Word himself. We can go as far back as we possibly can in the history of our universe, to a time when all that existed was God himself - and yet Christ (the same baby Jesus) was already there. ‘And the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. In some way far beyond our human understanding, he shares the very nature of God, but is somehow distinct from the Father as well. Our rational brain will never understand this, but John’s inspired Word invites us to cling to it in faith.
In the Genesis story, God starts to speak: ‘Then God said, (Gen. 1:3) “Let there be light”, and there was light’. And so begins a whole series of ‘spoken commands’. (1:6) ‘And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters”’. (1:9) ‘And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear”– and so on, and so on, a whole series of creative words, causing vegetation and plant life, birds and fish and animals, the sun and moon and stars, all leading up to the climax of creation. (1:26) ‘Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness”’.
This is the power beyond all human understanding. God’s very word has the power to bring creation into existence. Our humble words express the thoughts of our minds. But this is awesome; God has all the wonders of creation in his mind, but then he speaks it out, and it becomes real.
It is here in this nativity reading that John reveals that the Word of God was itself alive and active and personal. It wasn’t just a thing, like ‘the Force’ in Star Wars? It had a personality of its own. (Jn 1:1) “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”.
This is what John tells us (John 1: 3-5) “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it”.
This ‘Word’, this ‘Logos’ in Greek, is Jesus himself. In an amazing way, far beyond our human understanding, He was himself the creative Word that brought everything into being. What John Is telling us is that Jesus is not just the New Testament Saviour that we know and study and worship and turn to for guidance and help; He is not just the instrument of our Salvation who washes us clean at our baptism and feeds us on His Body and Blood – as true and as powerful as this is. Jesus was also involved in celestial black holes, in dinosaurs and all things prehistoric, in the majesty of the night sky and the beauty of the mountains. Paul sums this up in Colossians when he says, (Colossians 1:15). “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created”.
You see, here, John is establishing for us the identity of this baby in the manger. He isn’t just a great religious teacher or prophet, but the very Word of God himself, (John 1:3) “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. That’s who Christmas is all about.
To add to that, little later on in the passage, comes what C.S. Lewis called ‘The Grand Miracle’:
(John 1:14) “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth”
This is the great descent – the One through whom absolutely everything in the universe was created now stoops down to enter his creation. He doesn’t do it like a Greek god, taking the form of a warrior or a beautiful woman; no, he becomes a tiny, helpless zygote, (a fertilised female egg), inside his mother Mary. He grows and eventually is born, but of course, like all babies, he’s totally helpless, totally dependent on his parents to keep him alive. ‘He emptied himself’, says Paul in Philippians – in other words, he laid aside his power and glory and became a true human being, sharing our lives and our struggles, to show us not only what God is like, but also what God designed human life to be like.
‘We have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth’. Jesus once said, ‘If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father’. If you have seen Clint Eastwood and his son, or Tom Hanks and his son standing side by side, you can get a human perspective of what Jesus meant when he said, ‘He who has seen me has seen the father’!”
Even so, for us, it’s not immediately obvious that Jesus is the image of God. We think of an Old Testament God, one that even Moses could not look at, so full of power and majesty, so glorious!! But Jesus looks just like an ordinary human being. Yet John tells us in (Jn 1:14) “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”. This is the glory we celebrate today, the one foretold in John 12: 28: when Jesus prayed “Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”
You see, in John’s gospel, the cross is the supreme example of the glory of Jesus. In other words, the glory of God is indestructible love – love that would rather die than hate. It’s not in power and majesty that we see the glory of God in Jesus: it’s in his way of life, doing the will of God even when it cost him his life. (John 13:1)“Having loved his own who were in the world’, says John, ‘he loved them to the end”.
This is what John’s nativity story is all about. Jesus Christ the unimaginable absolute power of all creation humbling himself, out of love, to take on the persona of a human being through the form of human birth, knowing that the only way to be true God to His people was to walk among them in true human form, be baptised with God as His witness, to teach and perform miracles and finally to be our substitute Passover Lamb and die an agonising death on the cross of redemption. If that were the end of it, we would be wasting our time; but the God/man Jesus who embraced death for our sake, rose from the grave and overcame the bonds of death also for us. Again, he presented himself in human form to His disciples. With their own eyes they saw the human face of the resurrected Jesus.
So we thank God this morning for the message of Christmas: that the Word of God didn’t stay safely in heaven, but chose to humble himself, to become weak and vulnerable, to enter human life in all its mess and ambiguity – and in that context, to live and die and rise again to save us. As for us, an important part of our Christmas celebration is to hear the call to live out this Christmas message; not just here surrounded by like-minded people, but out there, midst the mess and ambiguity of human life. As daunting as this may sound, we go forward as baptised Christians in the name of the one who is the light of all creation, the one whose Glory won us salvation and power over death, and “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace”.Friends in Christ our Christmas present from Jesus is an eternity of loving forgiveness and acceptance; but that is not the end of it. This baby born today, this man Jesus, this source of life and creation from the very beginning, has not only chosen to take our humble souls to himself for all eternity, he has also commissioned us to be his face in this fallen world, to bring all mankind into His kingdom (Matt 28: 18 – 20) “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” In His birth we are blessed, in His life we are blessed, in His death and resurrection we are eternally blessed. Blessed indeed, that we may be a blessings to all we encounter. Amen
The love and peace of our Great triune God that is beyond all human understanding, bless you richly this Christmastime that your joy may be complete. Amen
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