Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
Readings – Isaiah 9: 2, 6–7; John 1: 1-14
“For a child has been born for us … authority rests upon his shoulders.”
The international situation is darkening with a series of protracted and frightening wars, while domestically people are setting their hearts against God. Religiously-minded people see that abandonment of God as a direct cause of the obvious collapse in standards in public life, especially among political leaders. I am not referring to the present day, but to the time when our Old Testament reading was written by Isaiah, around two-thousand seven hundred years ago.
In the midst of this darkness, Isaiah wrote down a vision of a brighter future. In it, a child is born who will have authority to lead people from darkness into light. He will establish peace and justice, and even be known as “Mighty God”.
Hundreds of years later, about the same distance in time as separates us from knights in armour and feudal lords, the vision still inspired many people to keep hope in difficult times. Some of them had been followers of a wandering preacher called Jesus, whose life was so extraordinary and so surrounded by miracles and the seemingly impossible that they reached the conclusion he was the Son of God. As they reflected on the sacred writings of the Jewish faith which they all devoutly held, this was one of the pieces they thought had foretold Jesus all along.
Our Gospel reading was also a product of those followers, as they wrote down their own reflections on what they had experienced through Jesus. Its first sentence is particularly famous – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Famous it might be, but it can be a little difficult to unpack. So let me try to explain. 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. But the Word was also apparently with God in the beginning. 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?
Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele by Jan van Eyck (1436)
Now here’s another strange phrase from our Gospel reading – “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” You might have noticed that I knelt when I read that phrase. That’s because it expresses the thing that is so unique about the Christian faith – not only that there is a God, but also that God holds us human beings in such high esteem that He actually became one of us, took on human flesh Himself, to open the way to eternal life for us.
And it’s not just the fact that God became a human being that is amazing, but how He did it, the sort of human being He became. For there couldn’t be more of a contrast between Jesus’ supernatural beginnings and his earthly beginnings. Jesus was with the creator of the universe when it all started, and indeed was Himself the creator of the universe, grand concepts that seem to be full of paradox and which aren’t really understandable in human language. At the same time, Jesus became one of us in the womb of a woman, who gave birth to Him in poverty in a stable, as physically weak as any other baby, and absolutely vulnerable and dependent like any other baby. The maker of the universe and the baby in the stall are one and the same: both are the baby who was prophesied by Isaiah all those centuries before.
One really important thing that flows from that is that we human beings are so valuable, so extraordinarily worthwhile and amazing, that God could become one of us and in fact did become one of us to save us from the consequences of our sins, to destroy death and open the way to eternal life for us.
Here’s a detail about how God became a human in the person of Jesus that I find particularly important for our own society. Do you know what the Bible tells us about Jesus’ physical appearance? Absolutely nothing! Clearly, our physical appearance isn’t something important to our place in the universe. Whether we’re catwalk material or have the sort of face that sunk a thousand ships, whether we’re tall or short, fat or skinny, God cares mainly about what is going on inside our hearts.
Yet something has happened to make many of us unhappy with our physical natures. We have epidemic levels of cutting, self-harm, and anorexia. The cosmetic surgery industry is booming. Some people are so trapped by a need to have the perfect appearance on social media that they spend hours every day taking hundreds of selfies, just so they can have the perfect photo to upload to Instagram or Facebook.
One of the drivers of this, of course, is the way marketing, advertising, and the fashion industry sell an unrealistic image of physical perfection as an ideal to be aspired to – ironically, of course, the perfect physical specimens in the advertising we see are usually themselves the product of both cosmetic surgery and digital photo editing.
This is one driver of the current alienation from our bodies, but something deeper is also at work. It is the same thing driving the dark and fearful mood of our present times. This fearful mood exists even though our lives are longer, healthier, and more convenient than those of previous generations.
I think the deeper problem is that, when we lose faith in God, we end up with unrealistic demands on ourselves. We end up with an enormous gap between our illusions of what is possible for us and what is realistically achievable. That is true both of our expectations of ourselves as individuals and our expectations of the human race. So, we are rightly horrified and terrified by the war in Ukraine, only the second time in my lifetime after the Iran-Iraq War that two large and militarily well-equipped nations have fought a lengthy conventional war. Many of us thought that in the 21st Century, we would be leaving war and the sort of failings that lead to war behind… but I’m not sure why we thought that. Human beings are the same mixture of good and evil they always have been, and always will be, and prone to the same mistakes.
Similarly, many of us seem to have thought that advancing technology would create an earthly paradise; yet it is precisely because we have such increased technological power, without any increase in our wisdom, that we are in the grip of the climate crisis; when the truth comes out about what actually happened in Wuhan in late 2019, we might find something similar lying behind the pandemic.
What if what makes us human beings loveable is not that we’re clever, powerful, or perfect physical specimens but that we’re a mix of light and darkness, capable of such magnificent achievements yet also so flawed and frail and vulnerable?
So this Christmas, remember that the frail and vulnerable form of a tiny baby was good enough for God as he embarked on the journey of liberating us from sin and death, because he loved us flawed human beings so much – just as we are – that He was willing to die for us. God loves us for what we are and not what we think we ought to be. So be confident that you are good enough for God and let the little child born in the stable, who was also the God who made the Big Bang go bang, lead you from darkness into light. 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.
