“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”
Today is Christmas. Today Jesus Christ is born — God enters the world in a new and startling way. This baby boy, born to a poor family in occupied Judea, born, as far as the world can see, as a child of adultery from a backwater town, forced to flee his homeland as a child to escape political violence — this baby boy is truly, fully, utterly God.
We talk about the incarnation often in Church. We recite the creed each week and remind ourselves and each other that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”, and in our familiarity it can be easy to lose sight of what this means. Now, I’m not going to pretend that I can stand here and unravel the full implications of the Incarnation in the next 5 minutes, but I want to at least try to enter into one aspect of this great mystery while we are gathered for a moment this morning.
What comes to mind when you think of God? What images fill your mind? A ‘bright blur’? A bearded man on a celestial throne? A father? A mother? What attributes come to mind? Power? Knowledge? Wrath? Wisdom? Love? What does this God in your mind expect from you and others? Purity? Holiness? Perfection? Good morals? ‘Traditional values’?
All of us carry around these ‘god-images’ within us. We build them up from our formative experiences as a child, from the things we learn to think of as ‘good’. Often we take images of people who have shaped us and project them onto God, or we take whatever we think of as good — our values — and blow them up to God-size in our minds. Whatever we’ve learned to think of as powerful or beautiful or valuable — take that and multiply it by 1000x — and there’s our ‘god’. Sometimes this is shaped by our experiences with our faith, with church, with the Scriptures, but often those are only a piece of the image.
This means that all of our images of god are a bit different — sometimes very different — from one another. Sometimes our god-images just aren’t compatible, because what I think is good and true and beautiful is actually opposed to what you think of those things. Sometimes when this happens and we come into conflict with one another, we wave our hands and say, ‘God is infinite; God is unknowable. Who can say what God is really like?’ And sometimes there’s some truth and humility in that statement.
But here’s the thing: Christmas means that we don’t get to wave our hands like that anymore. On Christmas, God enters in, bodily. Emmanuel — “God is with us”. Jesus is not a really ‘godly person’, Jesus is God. This means that there’s not some other, bigger, vaguer, more mysterious God ‘behind’ Jesus that we don’t really get to know. As the author of Hebrews says, Jesus is “the exact imprint of God’s very being.” “The Word was God.” “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”
Despite Jesus’ love of parables and sometimes cryptic seeming sayings, he doesn’t spend his life acting as some kind of vague, mysterious figure, cloistered away from the public, shrouded in mystery. He lives publicly, ministers to huge crowds, gathers students, teaches, performs signs, gives sermons to thousands. He doesn’t leave us to wonder what God is like, he speaks and lives what God is like before our very eyes. And his witness, his revelation of what God is like is so rich that there are four gospel books and a whole New Testament chock full of his followers recording it and trying to tease it out for us.
The incarnation means that if we want to know what God is like, definitively, we are not left in the dark — we look at Jesus. We read the gospels from the lectionary each week because our tradition knows this. It knows that there is nowhere else for us to go, if we are going to encounter God clearly. The birth of Christ means that we are left with no excuse. God has come into the world bodily and told us who he is, and he’s there for all of us to see. We just have to decide if we’ll listen.
And this is a big ‘if’! In Jesus, God comes into the world in ways that don’t look like what we expect. God’s power is revealed in Christ’s suffering. God’s glory is revealed in Christ’s humility. God’s wrath is revealed in Christ’s self-giving love. We look for a king, for a glorious leader to give us security with his wealth and power, and Christ comes to knock on our door as a migrant carpenter, with no home to lay his head. We look for a teacher to give us neat definitions and clear do’s and don’t, and Christ comes as a prophet and a healer who confronts our definitions and asks us to love our neighbor. We look for someone to tell us we’re right, and our enemies are wrong, and Christ comes with his misfit band of followers of all kinds and tell us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
This is the mystery of the incarnation. This is the revelation of God that shatters all of our images of him, all of the idols that we make and carry around with us. Christmas reminds us that, if we are to be Christians, to be Christ’s people, we must make sure we are looking at Christ, learning from him first what God is like, allowing our images of God to be shaped by the way that God makes himself known in Christ.
“The goodness of the Lord is the kindess of the Lord / The glory of the Lord is the mercy of the Lord / The beauty of the Lord is the suff’ring of the Lord, / is Christ upon a tree, stripped of dignity. / The power of the Lord is the meekness of the Lord / who bore humanity with brave humility.”
God has given himself to us in Christ on Christmas Day. May we have the courage to meet him there, and the humility to be continually transformed by the encounter. Amen.