Readings – Hebrews 4: 1–4 , John 1: 1–14
The word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
The word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
For some of you here tonight, that will be a familiar expression heard in Church a hundred times and regularly read in your Bibles. For others, it will undoubtedly a very weird collection of words that makes no sense whatsoever. Yet this phrase sets out the most important thing about the Christmas story; it’s why Christmas became the biggest holiday of our calendar, and why it remained so over many centuries. So let me unpack it a little.
After celebrating my first Midnight Mass as a priest at Holy Cross, Seend, 25 December 2021
The Word is God – God who made the universe, God who was there in the very beginning, God who existed when the Big Bang went bang, God who made the Big Bang go bang. Our Gospel reading a moment ago said many strange things, and another of them was this: “the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” So we have two beings in the beginning, who make the Big Bang go bang – God and the Word; but the Word is also God. It’s very odd, isn’t it?
Now this “Word”, as St John’s Gospel calls it, became flesh and dwelt among us. In the form of a tiny baby in the womb. Not the son of a King, but the son of a carpenter, who married his mother when she was already pregnant, dragged far from home by the cold bureaucratic order of a distant ruler occupying their country. That the maker of the universe should become one of us is odd enough; stranger still that He should do it as an ordinary man, in a backwater town, without even a proper roof over His head.
We human beings are made in the image of God, not only in our souls, but in our bodies, because Jesus Christ is God, the Word who was already there when the Big Bang went bang. Our bodies are beautiful gifts of God. Our bodies are both unique to ourselves and something we share with everyone else who has ever lived and will ever live. Our bodies have limitations – we are not supermen – but those limitations are not flaws, but design features.
Yet we live at a time when many of us seem to be profoundly alienated from our bodies. We see this most clearly in the epidemics of eating disorders and self-cutting which have become so widespread, especially among adolescent girls and young women.
Technology is part of the explanation for this, although only part of it. Instagram and Facebook hit us with page after page of beautiful people living perfect lives, with all their teeth perfect and not a hair out of place. It’s almost always fake – a pose held for a few seconds, assisted by plastic surgery and a digital photo filter – but it makes us think we are inadequate. Yet you are made to be the way you are, to have the body and face you were given by God.
A few months ago I met, at one of those buffet civic events that clergy get invited to, an elderly man who had some minor but very noticeable facial disfigurement. He was also one of the most radiantly beautiful people I have ever met. Just an ordinary man with an odd face – but a face that radiated love of family, openness to all people, peace with himself, and a life lived well. Beauty is not about having a pretty face; and it’s not about what the fashion industry tells us it is, or celebrity culture, or vapid social media ‘influencers’.
You are beautiful the way you are. Whether you’re a supermodel or a frail old man; whether you’re an athlete, or somebody with a disability, or both of those things. God made you to be you.
I supported the lockdowns of the first year of the pandemic as the only way to save half a million lives in this country alone. But at this stage, especially now we’ve all had our vaccinations, we need to move on towards living with Covid-19 as an endemic respiratory disease like those we’ve lived with since the Stone Age. One reason why we need to move on is that the pandemic has exacerbated this radical alienation from our bodies, from our physical selves, from our flesh.
We have trained ourselves over the last twenty-one months to see one another as potential disease carriers, as dirty. We communicated for months only via screens that give us, literally, a two-dimensional picture of one another using only two of our five senses, something that is so much less than being in the physical presence of people. We also spent more time on the social media platforms where every reasonable difference of opinion seems to become an excuse for a vicious argument.
Wearing masks may well be necessary at times, but they hide the facial expressions which are as important to communication as the words we speak, and they are dreadfully unhelpful for people with hearing impairments. Moreover, children learn to speak as much by imitating the shapes of people’s lips as the sounds of the words they hear, and as young children have fallen behind in basic skills like speaking during the pandemic, it is those already at the bottom of society who’ve fell behind farthest.
It was justified to have a once-in-a-century response to a once-in-a-century health crisis. But if we try to live like this in the longer term, I don’t see how we can build a society where people care for one another and the common good. We will slip into being a people who are angrier and more suspicious of one another, so frightened of the death that inevitably comes to us all that we never actually live.
Who wants to live in a world where we never get a smile from a stranger on the bus?
People are resilient, children most of all, and we will come back from the challenges of these pandemic years. But be in no doubt that we have just lived through some dark times.
Let me conclude by unpacking another phrase from tonight’s Gospel: “the light shineth in darkness.”
The world that Jesus Christ was born into was also dark. The baby born in a stable would go on to be brutally put to death as a young man; and yet by undergoing that he destroyed death and opened the way to eternal life for us all. But that’s too long a tale for tonight – you’ll have to come back at Easter for that instalment of the story!
We have just lived through a moment when the advanced systems and structures of the modern world which we depend on, and nations so mighty they could wipe out the world at the touch of a button, were brought to their knees by an organism too small to see without an electron microscope. Perhaps that dark experience should teach us to look for light in the Christmas story, where the maker of the universe took on a human body in the form of a tiny baby.
Follow that Christ-child tonight, and follow Him for the rest of your life, and He will light up your life.
And now to our wonderful counsellor, mighty God, everlasting Father, to Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace, and to the Holy Spirit who overshadowed Mary, be glory in the highest, until the end of all ages. Amen.
