A Deeper Christmas
A Sermon for the First Sunday after Christmas (Galatians 4:4-7; John 1:1-18)
God makes room in our hearts for a deeper Christmas. In the stillness that follows the sometimes “misdirected frenzy” of the season, as the midwinter days grow ever-so-slowly longer, as many move on as though nothing at all has changed (and, to be fair, it doesn’t much look like it has), the word of the gospel invites us to stay a bit longer and ponder the heart of the Christmas mystery.
John’s gospel opens not with a genealogy or a conception or a birth but with a cosmic pronouncement: in the beginning (before time) there is and always has been an other in the one God who is also God and all things that exist were made also by this other in God that John calls “the Word.”
There’s nothing here about an inn or shepherds and angels or caesar or even a mother. But there is an only Son who is always with the Father and close to the Father’s heart and who makes the Father known, a Word who becomes flesh and moves into the world wherever humans are.
John tells us that this Word, the only Son of the Father, who alone makes the Father visible, not only makes everything we see and hear and touch and taste, but is the light that enlightens every human person and every collection of humans. This Son is their life and their light. And every one of us has received “grace upon grace” in this human called Jesus Christ—”God from God, light from light, true God from true God.”
John tells us this light that illumines every human who has ever lived or ever will live or who lives now, this “Light from Light,” shines in the darkness and that the darkness cannot comprehend it, cannot grasp it, cannot extinguish it (though it tried its worst).
Christmas and danger are inseparable as long as the fallen order of things fends of its inevitable return to nothingness. But, eventually, only the good will remain.
C.S. Lewis speaks of a “deeper magic” that somehow defeats the superficial magic that evil speaks and does (and that is a lot of evil), a magic which is God’s own love for the world, a love that will stop at nothing, even the death of God—especially God’s death—in order that we and the universe might enjoy God’s permanence and God’s smallness.
Every pretension to greatness or power is toppled by God’s own willingness to offer all of God for the life of the world so that the world can exist as God does. This is the deeper Christmas that is found when we are placed by God at the foot of the cross that Christmas makes possible, that makes Christmas endure even when our keeping of Christmas comes to an end. And when we stand at the foot of the cross we become a child as God is a child, able to enter and inhabit eternity.
For John and for Paul, the purpose of God in becoming flesh is to make us children of God, that we might be born “not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.” We are born instead by and in and at the cross. The Father sends the Son’s Spirit into our hearts and helps us join the Son in saying “Abba! Father!”
Becoming “flesh” in John’s sense is to finally become a living human by dying. We become human as God is human in Jesus Christ, the crucified God. This is to become the children we must become to enter the kingdom of heaven,
We join the Son’s humanity, a humanity freed from death by the resurrection from the dead, and in Jesus Christ, the firstborn from the dead, we have not a relationship to the Father that is like the Son’s relationship but as his body in the world and in eternity we share the Son’s own relation with the Father in and by the Spirit.
The Son comes among us, born of a woman, to remind us that from “the beginning” to be human is in this Son to be God.
There’s no analogy or illustration or anecdote or vignette that makes this news usable or practical—it is God’s zeal and not ours that makes this impossibility possible—but God nevertheless uses our hearing of this very good news to make us partakers of the humanity and divinity of the Son by the Spirit. And for that we give with the whole creation our very best thanks this Christmas.