Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Psalm 147, Galatians 3:23-26, 4:4-7, John 1:1-18
The Sunday after Christmas is called Low Sunday. Attendance is low, energy is low, and the preacher is low on inspiration. The shepherds are back at work and trying to remember how that music went. Joseph is out apartment-hunting, the cattle want their manger back, the swaddling clothes are dirty, and the family needs food. The Incarnation leads to hard facts for physical bodies in hard times on the hard ground, and thus, Low Sunday.
Yet one of the most lofty passages in the Bible is given as our Gospel reading today. We might have preferred a nice cozy story, but we are given the most theoretical passage in all four Gospels. It’s the Prologue to the Gospel of John, and in it, the only mention of Christ’s birth is that “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”
Of course that is the reason for the season and the theological purpose of the birth, and the Prologue is the story from a very high view, and it’s why the Prologue is the climax lesson on Christmas Eve, after we’ve read the more cozy stories from Matthew and Luke. St. John knew that we already had Matthew, and maybe Luke too, so he didn’t have to redo the story. Instead he interprets it. “St. John unfolds the great mystery of the Incarnation.”
He does so audaciously. “In the beginning was the Word.” The beginning, not of Jesus’ life, but of the world, the beginning of time. St. John is quoting the first line of Genesis, the first word of the Torah, B’reshit, “in the beginning,” and he’s putting the Son of God there, at Creation, with God, as God. Which means he’s claiming that, in the Incarnation, the God who created the creation became a creature within the creation. He’s claiming that, in the birth of Christ, the God who said, “Let there be light” became the light.
St. John says that “the true light, who enlightens every person, was coming into the world.” The true light is Jesus, who came into the world at his Incarnation, and St. John is claiming that he had been coming into the world long before that, as the Word, capital W, whenever God spoke. Not yet as Jesus the Messiah, not yet a distinct person, not yet discernible from God-the-Father and God-the-Holy-Spirit, but the Son of God had come already to Abraham, already to Moses, whenever God came and spoke to Israel, whenever God’s Word came into the world to give us life and give us light.
But his coming was unwelcome. St. John writes that “he came to his own, and his own people received him not.” Please understand that he means this typically, not totally, because while he was typically rejected, there were many persons who did receive him, and this was true in Israel in the centuries before his birth, and in the thirty-three years of his Incarnation, and in the church ever since. From Adam till today, whoever does believe in his name, to them he gives power to become the children of God.
St. John is also claiming that there was something profoundly new about his coming at the Incarnation, when the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. This Word who talked with Abraham, who spoke the Law to Moses, this Word went beyond just speaking to flesh and took on flesh. The Word who is the Son of God got his flesh from his mother. From his mother only. He must have looked remarkably like his mother, like a male version of his mother. The Word became flesh.
St. Paul makes a similar claim in Galatians: But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law. So the Son of God received his flesh from a woman descended from the Abraham whom he had talked with, and she brought him up under the Torah that he had spoken to Moses. He is filled with all that time and experience, the fullness of time is in him, and of his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace, the grace of the Gospel upon the grace of the Torah.
He was full of grace and truth. Together, grace and truth. That’s not automatic. We usually choose between them, being either gracious or truthful. You know, like, “I’m not going mention the hard truth here, I’m just going to be gracious.” But in Jesus they come together. His every truth is full of grace, and his every grace is full of truth. Which conditions what we mean by truth.
Our granddaughter Naomi sleeps over at our place on Friday nights, and on Saturday mornings she wakes up while I’m saying my prayers, and she climbs onto my lap while I pray them. She had me write down a prayer of her own, which I now pray every morning: “Dear God, I pray for all the people who have no homes and no food and no pillow and bed and blanket. Please make them have good food, and make them brave and true. And the Holy Spirit, and Jesus Christ. Amen.”
I like the “brave and true” part. I figure she got it from the movie Pinocchio. The fairy tells the puppet that she will turn him into a real boy if he proves himself “brave and true.” So I would say that being “brave and true” is a moral category for my granddaughter.
A couple weeks ago she dictated a second prayer. “Dear God, please make other people good and helpful. Please forgive the people who are mean, or not true, or not happy. Please forgive them that I want them to be happy. For Jesus Christ. Amen.” There’s the word “true” again. She doesn’t mean the objective sense of “true,” as in true facts, but the subjective and personal sense of being true. We say that you are true to your convictions, and true to your word and true to your promises and true to your commitments and relationships. Integrity. You are as good as your word.
I think that’s the truth that St. John means when he says that when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us he was full of grace and truth. Doctrinal truth yes, historical truth yes, but more so personal truth. Faithfulness. Promise keeping. The Son of God is as good as his word, so that he is rightly called the “Word” with a capital “W.” The Word is as good as his word. And thus, the Incarnation of the Word in the flesh is how God keeps God’s gracious promises with integrity.
And here’s a next step that both St. Paul and St. John take: God became the child of Mary so that we become children of God. He by nature and we by adoption, adoption as the benefit of liberation and redemption. Redemption means that God buys us out of our slavery to the darkness. And God redeems us in order to adopt us, as children, and desires not our service but our freedom, and not our submission but our love, and our initiative, and in our freedom and initiative that we be true.
That’s your challenge. That you be true, as true as your first-born brother is. That’s the Christian ethic that comes out of the Incarnation. Not of legal obedience but of freedom with inner integrity. Your integrity that is also gracious. That the promises you keep are gracious promises. That you are true in your relationships and gracious in them. That you are true to your convictions and that your convictions are gracious convictions. To be true like this may require you to be both brave and true—brave enough to see it through. So God gives you the power of the Holy Spirit.
That’s the next step, the Holy Spirit. From Galatians: “In the fullness of time, God sent his Son, and because you are now children, God also sent the Spirit of the Son into our hearts.” That is, when it was time, God came as the Son, as the Word made flesh, and ever since that time, God is coming as the Spirit, as the Spirit of Jesus into your own flesh and blood. The same Holy Spirit that made the child of Mary the Son of God now makes your own mother’s child a child of God. The birth of Jesus is for your own new birth and his Spirit is your Spirit. His grace for your grace, grace upon grace.
You are adopted. You have a new name. And now at last we can turn to our first lesson, Isaiah: You have a new name that he gives you. And, having come naked out of your slavery you put on the new clothes that he gives you, clothes for you to rejoice in, the garments of salvation, the robe of righteousness, the garland of a bridegroom and the jewelry of a bride. Jewelry is a present for lovers. The adopted children get jewelry because they are loved the same as the firstborn son.
This whole doctrine of the Incarnation is a doctrine of love. The strategy of the Incarnation is a strategy of love. The birth of the Son of God reveals that the heart of God is a heart of love. 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. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh, to make real to you the love of God for you.
Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
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