The First Sunday After Christmas

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Mark, the earliest of the four Gospels written, is a Gospel of action. It begins immediately with the baptism of Jesus and the calling of the disciples, the temptation in the wilderness in two verses in between. Matthew pulls back the scope, beginning with the genealogy of Jesus from the lineage of David, focusing on the fulfillment of prophecy. Luke is more intimate, giving us context of the family and community into which Christ was born.

The Gospel of John, written roughly forty years after the other three, begins not with the narrative of Jesus’ ministry, birth, or genealogy, but instead steps back completely, outside of time and space. By beginning the story of Jesus within the inner life of God, before all creation, John’s Gospel is showing us that there is no exiting the story of Jesus. There is no history, no time, no individual life or created thing that is not bound up in the story of Jesus. Echoing the opening lines of Genesis, John begins with grandeur: “In the beginning.” But rather than the act of creation that begins Genesis, John begins before that: “In the beginning was.” Before all action, all history, there is the uncreated light of Being itself. And what “was”? The Word, both present to and identifiable with God.

I am usually hesitant to bring Greek words up in preaching because I have seen it employed so often to do little more than demonstrate that the preacher has a working knowledge of Greek, which I do not. Sometimes wading into the Greek can be clarifying and sometimes it serves to make the scripture one is studying more complicated. John 1 is an instance where it does both. This word, “Word”, that is capitalized, is translated from the Greek word Logos.

On a literal level, logos translates not simply to “word,” but instead refers to discourse, rational argument, to ideas put in order. Beginning with Heraclitus and the stoics, continuing through Plato and Aristotle, the term took on a reference to the unique ability of humanity to use reason, to order ourselves and our thoughts in a way distinct from other living things. The logos of each person was not self contained, but participated in a single grand Logos, the notion of rational order that sustains the universe. Many theologians have suggested that this rational ability makes up at least part of what it means to be made in the image of God. To some the universal Logos was the rhythm of Nature, to others it was the one divine God above all else, an impersonal spirit of perfection from which all creation flowed.

So with that context, we can better understand what it would have meant to John’s intended audience to read “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. 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.” This universal order is with God, inseparable from God, is very part and parcel of God, and it was through this aspect of divinity that all creation came to be. At this point, Christians, Jews, and a considerable amount of pagans would all be in agreement.

The next few verses introduce John the Baptist, making way for the Lord, the forerunner of the light. This light is obviously Jesus, but verse 10 goes on to say of this light that “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him.” This is the first time in scripture, openly, at least, that Christ is identified so closely with God, as being present at creation, co-creator with God. And then verse 14, one of the, if not the great reorienting verses of scripture, transforming the way we read Genesis 1:1, Revelation 22:21, and everything in between: “And the Logos [the capital “W” 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.”

The Logos, this attribute of God through which all things were made, this quality inseparable from the very nature and person of God, became flesh in Jesus Christ. We are hearing here explicitly stated for the first time that the story of God, the story of creation, the history of the universe, and the image and likeness of God within each of us is all contained in the story of Jesus Christ, who is at once a working class Hebrew man in first century Galilee and the eternal Son of God who is one with his Father. This paradox is both an inexhaustible Mystery that we will never fully grasp and the axis of truth upon which all worlds turn.

But grasping the Mystery was never the point. “...and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” Throughout scripture, the glory of God is an unbearable thing to be in the presence of. Priests, prophets, and patriarchs must shield themselves and take caution when the glory of God is made manifest. Yet this unbearable glory descends into the womb of Mary. Verse 18, the close of the prologue says this: “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.” This unfathomable glory of the God who is invisible, not by lack but by excess of light, has condescended to the earth on which we dwell as a man who can be heard, seen, touched.

As a man who shares our meals and our homes and will eventually share in our sufferings and in our death. The gulf of separation between creator and creation has never before been so sturdily bridged, and this bridge was not constructed like a tower of babel by which humanity raises itself to divine heights, but by the curtain of the temple rent in two from top to bottom as God stoops to inhabit the lowly and the common, leaving nothing untouched or unchanged on that journey from eternity into time, from heaven into the manger.

Verses 12 and 13: “ But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.” I said a minute ago that grasping the fullness of the Mystery was never really the point of the Incarnation. While using our rational minds to engage with the revelation of God’s truth is both fruitful and necessary, it is an endeavor that will only take us to the door, but never through it. To pass through that door is not to understand the Incarnation, but to encounter it in the person of Jesus Christ.

God did not send us a theorem, nor a treatise, nor an equation. He sent us a Son. A relational human being, the Word made flesh to dwell among us. Jesus came to invite us into the eternal relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit. He came to make us co-heirs of glory with himself, very children of God. Philosopher Michel Henry wrote that the words of Christ in scripture call us to a fundamental transformation, to an encounter with God. This is why the teachings of Jesus cannot simply be reduced to moral instruction or social teachings. The words of Christ are rendered senseless, writes Henry, if they are not being spoken to us by Christ the Word.

So here on this 4th day of Christmas, let us rejoice that the Word came to us not as a command, but as a child. Not as a set of rules, but as a redeemer. And as nothing was left untouched by his love’s redeeming work, let us seek to encounter him in the places and in the people, and in the events that make up our lives.

Amen and merry Christmas.