St. John’s Day 2009

Pastor Richard Johnson

Text: 1 John 1.1ff

Word Made Flesh

On this 27th day of December the church, for many centuries now, has chosen to commemorate St. John, the apostle and evangelist. It is in some respects an odd intrusion on the Christmas celebration. It is, after all, only the third day of Christmas, and here we are remembering a gospel writer who doesn’t give us any part of the Christmas narrative. John doesn’t mention Bethlehem, or shepherds, or angels, or wise men. Why, so soon after Christmas, do we turn to the mystic John?

In truth, John is very important for our understanding of Christmas, for while he may not tell us the story of Bethlehem, he helps us discern its meaning. This can be seen most strikingly in the prologue to John’s gospel—a text we actually do often associate with Christmas, as we hear that “the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” But his concern for the meaning of Jesus’ birth is present throughout much of the Biblical literature that bears his name.

Often in the church’s history, theology and doctrine is written by those who are trying to correct certain mistaken ideas that have grown up in their day. In the beginnings of Christianity, there were some who could not accept that Jesus was really God made flesh, God with us. There were two different ideas that were floating about. One school of thought taught that Jesus wasn’t human at all, that he just appeared to be human. These folks thought perhaps he was an angel, a divine or semi-divine being who came and made himself look like a man, but who actually wasn’t physically real. The whole thing was an illusion, meant simply to teach us some moral lessons about God. The other mistaken idea was just the opposite: it was that Jesus was an ordinary man who somehow achieved a greater consciousness of God, and that made him a very special teacher, or even, perhaps, a prophet.

Both these ideas seemed very attractive to some in the early decades of Christianity. But the apostles and those who were their followers battled those ideas because they believed they were badly mistaken. If Jesus was not really God, then how could he possibly bring us forgiveness and reconciliation with God? And if Jesus was not really human, then how could he truly understand our human weaknesses and frailties?

So John set out to make the truth known. He insisted, in the passage we read from his first epistle this morning, that Jesus was God, that he was “from the beginning.” And yet he was also human, someone that we could see and hear and touch. He was like us. He was truly God, and he was truly human as well.

This doctrine of Christianity is called the “incarnation”—a word which means, literally, “taking flesh” or “becoming human.” We see it reflected at many places in the liturgy and creeds of the church. In the Nicene Creed, for instance, we confess that Jesus Christ was “true God from true God,” but that he “became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man.” We hear many references to this very deep theological concept in our beloved Christmas hymns, though I suspect they go right past us without our noticing them when we sing the familiar words. We sing “O Come All Ye Faithful”—with its phrase, “Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.” The same idea appears in “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see! Hail, incarnate Deity!” These are phrases which state clearly the Christian teaching about who Jesus Christ is.

Now this is more than just a little lesson in the history of Christian doctrine. The same mistaken ideas persist today, twenty centuries later. Even after all these years, I am taken aback by much that we read at this time of year about the “real meaning of Christmas.” Much of it, of course, is very moving, heartwarming stuff about the spirit of giving, about peace and goodwill. I would never want to do without Dickens’ Christmas Carol, a classic which has only one line in the whole story that makes reference to the birth of Christ. I love Miracle on 34^th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life as much as the next guy.

But however heartwarming such stories may be, for Christians, they are utterly beside the point. Christmas is about the incarnation, God becoming human, becoming one of us, coming down from heaven for us and for our salvation. Apart from that reality, all the words about peace and goodwill, about giving and sharing, are just pious platitudes. What happened in that stable in Bethlehem was not one more part of the arsenal of sentimental stories that we tell at year’s end. It was the fundamental event that reveals God to us: The Word of God, becoming flesh and dwelling among us.

For me, one of the most profound explanations of this came from the lips of theologian Johanna when she was about four or five years old. She had a little friend over some days before Christmas, and they were examining a crèche that was sitting on our table. They observed the angels, the shepherds, the whole cast of characters. Then her friend asked, “Where’s God?” To which Johanna replied: “He’s right there on that hay.” That’s the point, you see—God, the great God who created the heavens and the earth, who flung out the stars and calls them all by name, that great God—he’s right there on that hay, in the form of a weak little baby, born into this troubled world in a stable because his parents had nowhere else to go. Right there on that hay. One of us.

Years ago the late Paul Harvey told a Christmas parable. I’ve recounted it several times through the years, but it never fails to move me. It concerns a man, a kind, decent, mostly good man, generous to his family, upright in all his dealings with others; but he just didn’t believe all this incarnation stuff. Why would God become a human being? It didn’t make sense to him, and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He told his wife, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not going to church with you on Christmas Eve. I would feel like a hypocrite, and I’d rather stay home.” So he stayed home, while the rest of his family went off to the midnight service.

Shortly after the family left for church, it began to snow. The man went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier, then went back and sat by his warm fire. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound, then another, then another, sort of a thump or a thud. At first he thought someone was throwing snowballs at his window, but when he went to the front door to investigate, he found a flock of birds, huddled miserably in the snow. They’d been caught in the storm, and in desperate search for shelter they had tried to fly through his picture window.

He couldn’t just let them lie there and freeze, so he thought of the barn. That would provide warm shelter. Hurriedly he put on a coat and some snow boots, and tramped out to the barn. He opened the door wide and turned on a light. But the birds did not come in. He thought perhaps food would entice them, so he hurried back to the house, fetched some bread crumbs and sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow lighted open doorway of the barn. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the crumbs and continued to flop around helplessly in the snow.

He tried catching them. He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them, waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction but into the warm, lighted barn. It occurred to him that they were afraid of him, and there was nothing he could do to help them. “To them,” he thought, “I am a strange and fearsome creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me, that I’m not going to hurt them. If only I could become a bird, and get down there with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid, and I could show them the way to the safety of the barn. But I would have to become one of them, so they could see me, hear me, understand me.”

At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sound of the wind, and he stood there, listening to the bells, hearing in his mind the words of the carol the bells were playing: “Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.” As he listened, he suddenly understood, and he sank to his knees in the snow.

The mystery of the incarnation. God, the One who was from the beginning, becoming flesh for us, become one whom we could see and touch and hear, becoming one of us—in order that we might understand and know.

And still he comes to us in ways that we can see and touch. He comes in the waters of baptism, in the bread and in the wine of the Eucharist. He comes in ways that we can see and touch, ways that make it plain for us that he is no ethereal God who spins out heavenly words of peace and goodwill that are unattached to our earthly reality. No, he is God veiled in flesh, God with us, Emmanuel, Word of the Father now in flesh appearing, born in a stable, born of woman, a human child, a man of sorrows, light in the darkness, Jesus Christ in our midst, a Savior, born for us.