Among Us
Jeremiah 31:7-14; John 1:1-18
January 2, 2011
John always goes his own way. As the last of the regular Gospels he does not seem to need to recount the Nativity story, and that’s too bad since with a little distance from Matthew and Luke John could have weighed in more decisively regarding all the events of Christmas – where was Jesus born? Where were Mary and Joseph originally from, Bethlehem or Nazareth? Did the shepherds have to fight for elbow room with the Magi? We’ll never know.
John approaches the birth of Christ obliquely. Mentioning nothing about geography or parentage, he is emphatic that this person Jesus is the Word become flesh and dwelling among us. Jesus is born into the midst of full human life and like for the rest of us, it wasn’t easy being among us. Perhaps that’s why John can’t buy his way into a pageant for he is sharply negative about the way the world and his own people did not recognize him and accept him. All the wonderful people had no time for Jesus.
What do you expect, after all, with a life and story that reaches its climax with a crucifixion? John takes us further and deeper, showing us how integral and essential this particular birth is to human life. Christmas Day was not just a pageant and celebration of the birth of a baby, as important as that is in each human instance, but the revelation of what it means to be fully human.
The beginning of the Gospel according to John is not subtle, “In the beginning….” Different language, but these are precisely the words you may remember are the very first of the Bible. No one doubts that John intended precisely this: the Word which we come to know as Jesus Christ began not in 4 B.C., but before the world took shape and form. In several sentences of dizzying poetic prose - the Word was with God and the Word was God - John tries to close off every escape clause for those who want to say that Jesus was just a good, even if the best human being ever. It’s always been hard to say that Jesus is God, in the first and in the twenty-first century, and easier to admire the baby merely as a miracle of new life.
The end of that dizzying quatrain declares that not anything that was made was made without the Word: an even deeper more difficult idea that the Word being God is nonetheless the Creator. Christmas morn becomes an overwhelming event in which a New Creation begins with a human life. To let us slightly back down to earth there’s all this talk of the Light that has come to shine in the darkness. It wasn’t the first time light and darkness were opposed in this way and we have always sought to be enlightened; the image is basic to the aspirations of the human mind and soul.
A little story interrupts the poetry about how John the Baptist arrived as so many charismatic leaders and prophets have, yet he was wise and honest enough to declare that he was not the Light, for his task was to testify to the light and prepare everyone for his coming into the world.
The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Many religious people have tried to deny that this world, our bodies, have anything to do with real faith. Christmas, whether in a stable or a house, insists that godliness is in the first place physical, not some misty thoughts of the bodiless spirit. Perhaps that is exactly why the world did not know him and his own people did not accept him. The world somehow couldn’t ‘see’ him. Who he was and how he lived simply did not register with them; they could only put him in some dismissive category of an eccentric or troublemaker. To his own people he was an affront when they took him seriously, a person who showed them up in all their weaknesses and doesn’t he know where he has come from? They missed the whole point, but usually we do too in the face of a terrible goodness.
As a consequence, most of us have missed the last clause in that famous verse, “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.... And from his fullness we have received grace upon grace.” Truth is hard enough to accept: many a human institution, including the church, does not prefer and does not know how to accept the truth, because the truth is typically inconvenient and dangerous to our way of living. But grace, especially grace upon grace which we are gifted with through Jesus Christ, is even harder.
Our inclination is to believe we can do it all ourselves and if we are successful, we are convinced we have created a new world. Indeed, we have created many new worlds of violence and war, poverty and obscene wealth, environmental disintegration, oppression and slavery. But grace, love that we can neither earn nor deserve, insists gently that who we are comes from the creation of another, ultimately we say here, from God. We are born, “not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”
There is a not so subtle fact about the Incarnation of Jesus Christ that we subtly ignore. Being a faithful and spiritual person is always physical. We are only spiritual in our bodies. There is no such thing as a spirit of love that does not reside in flesh and blood people. You cannot simply talk about love of humanity in church and go out and refuse to deal with those of a different race or ethnic origin, as we have often done, a common case of disembodied love.
Ah, but some may be thinking right now, you can’t see God. How do we worship and connect with the Creator who has no physical body? John, more emphatically than the other evangelists, takes the cue: “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.” We see God in the Jesus who inhabits the bodies and souls of the people next to us. The Word becomes flesh and dwells among us still. A word is not the Word of God until it finds a home in our physical being, rehearsing again and again that lonely morning in a stable or a house when God became human - we have never been able to say exactly how. It just keeps happening, for whenever we “do the Word” the birth of Christmas is among us again.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan