Readings – Hebrews 1:1-4, John 1:1-14
And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
May I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Incarnation by Murillo, c. 1677
Our epistle reading at this Midnight Mass, the beginning of the Letter to the Hebrews, states that God “has spoken to us by a Son.” These days, we might joke that God should speak to us in a collection of social media memes or a Zoom call. After all, that’s the way everybody else communicates these days.
The joke is fair enough, but it also misses the point. The people of 1st Century Palestine may not have been able to log on to Zoom to take part in a heavenly videoconference, but they could and did expect God to communicate in all sorts of ways that didn’t involve anything connected with this rather odd claim that God “has spoken to us by a son”.
Receiving enlightenment and instruction from divine visions is a repeated theme in both the Old and New Testaments. Peter and Paul are both recorded as receiving direct instruction through visions. But the Father didn’t send the divine Word to people in visions, although presumably he could have done – instead He sent the Word directly, in the person of Jesus Christ.
Ancient Near Eastern cultures were quite comfortable with the idea of divine messengers; indeed the word ‘angel’ comes directly from the Greek work for “messenger” and the Old Testament claims to record angelic appearances from as early as patriarchal times. The angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she was pregnant with Jesus. But while angels announced that Jesus was about to come into the world, they don’t seem to have been able to do the work that God required Jesus to do.
God didn’t dictate a series of writings to Jesus, nor to His followers, at least not directly. That was a way that God had communicated with His chosen people in Palestine in the past, when he gave the tablets of stone containing the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Horeb. God continues to communicate with His people today through the series of writings we call the Bible, but Jesus wasn’t their author, nor were they handed down from on high, but instead were the product of centuries of laborious debate by the Church. But the only record we have of Jesus writing is with his finger, in the dirt on the ground, at the time when a woman was brought to Him to be stoned for adultery.
God didn’t give us a holy book but Himself, as a human being. John’s Gospel claims that the Word who was with God in the very beginning, and who was God, walked this Earth. It’s something we repeat so often, not least in the creed at the Eucharist every Sunday, that we can forget how ridiculously offensive to common sense this claim is. How on earth could the God of heaven be contained in a human body?
In the 1970s, a group of British theologians led by John Hick and Don Cupitt wrote a book called The Myth of God Incarnate, which argued that modern understandings of science meant that the Incarnation, which is the fancy theological term for this idea that God became human, was no longer credible. They argued that for Christianity to survive, it would have to ditch any idea that Jesus was anything other than an obscure wandering preacher. If Christianity failed to do abandon the Incarnation, it would die within two generations, they claimed. What those theologians missed is that the Incarnation has always been one of the most mind-bending and difficult to swallow of Christian teachings. It is saturated in paradox and seeming impossibility. Many a fine Greek philosopher two thousand years ago thought it was a ridiculous idea; not only ridiculous but offensive that something beautiful and spiritual like the concept of the divine Word should be mixed up with flesh, which is prone to disease and lusts and failure.
So, the idea that God became human in Christ has always been difficult to accept, has always flown in the face of common sense, and has always seemed contrived to some and ridiculous to others. It is only familiarity that obscures that to us.
It matters profoundly that Christianity holds to this seemingly stupid or offensive notion, because it changes how we understand human beings, making them profoundly more precious.
If God was made human in Jesus, it means that we are a valuable species, made in the very image of God. For all that we have a dark side, with our proneness to greed, and violence, and wrecking our God-given environment, that isn’t the whole story. We are also a species capable of great goodness, capable of making enormous sacrifices for the sake of others or the sake of the truth, capable of both creating and appreciating beauty. In all this, we bear the stamp of the divine.
If God was made human in Jesus Christ, as a little baby in a stable, then every one of us matters, no matter how poor we are, no matter how frail we are, no matter how despised we might be by others. God did not choose to become human as an emperor or a plutocrat but as a wandering preacher who would die an inhuman death at a pitifully young age
If God was made human in Jesus, then it means that matter matters, that it matters that we are creatures of flesh and blood. It matters that we have had to spend so much of this plague year secluded from one another, seeing one another only through these unnatural screens that leave us exhausted and hungry for physical contact. While we have had no alternative in the face of this pitiless virus, it should concern us that so much of our reality is filtered through screens, and it should not surprise us that they generate such a strong tendency for people to prefer comfortable self-delusions and groupthink to reality. We are made to be in the presence of one another, and without it we are weakened.
If God was made human in Jesus, it means that the sacrament matters; for as the Word was made flesh then, today He lives in the very material things that are sacramental bread and wine. While it is a privilege to preach to those of you watching at home via the Internet, I cannot pretend that I would not much rather be nourishing you with Christ’s body and blood. We have been starved of the sacrament for so much of this year, like we have been starved of so much else that is life-giving and affirming of our humanity; starved of so much that is affirming of our bodies, which are of such value that God not only took on flesh but also the Cross to redeem them along with the whole of creation.
So as we celebrate the Incarnation of Christ this Christmas, let us pray that God will deliver us soon from this plague, and free us to live as we were made to live, in the flesh; in the image of Jesus Christ who is God.
Now to the only wise God our saviour, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.
