Isaiah 52.7-10 Rejoice, for the Lord is consoling his people
Hebrews
1.1-6 God has spoken to us
through his Son
John
1.1-18 The Word was made flesh,
and lived among us.
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I was on a train the other day and saw two new
parents with their clearly very newborn child.
The sight was deeply moving and compelling
and, as we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ today, it struck me as an icon
of what we see in the scene of the birth of Jesus, what we call the nativity.
The mother of that newborn was holding her
child in her arms and gazing adoringly, gently rocking him, and then, very
discreetly, placed him on her breast to feed him.
All the while the child’s father gazed at him
too and ensured that his wife was comfortable and undisturbed.
What I saw on the train will have been what
the shepherds and Magi saw too in the stable of Bethlehem, parents nurturing
and protecting their new-born child.
In the scene at Bethlehem we see something
profoundly human, just as I saw on the train.
We have to see the birth of Jesus Christ
through the lens of a human birth, because that shows us his humanity, all that
he shares in common with us.
And yet the Gospel reading proclaimed this morning
did not reference Bethlehem or the adoration of Mary and Joseph.
It’s St Luke who gives us the details of
shepherds and angels, of the inn and manger.
St Matthew gives us Bethlehem, the star and
the Magi.
And those gospels speak powerfully of who
Jesus Christ is, and from them we can see the intimacy and warmth of the
parental love of Mary and Joseph for their divine son as ox and ass worship him
and the heavens realign to signal their maker.
Yet we domesticate the birth of Jesus, and
disenchant it, when we think of the nativity of the Saviour simply as a
touching human scene or declare that Christmas is all about children.
We strip out the fact that the gospels
consistently proclaim the reality underlying the birth of the Saviour, which is something of profound significance,
that holds together both a human birth and the fullness of the presence of God
the Most High.
As our second reading put it, ‘[This Son] is
the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being…’
(Hebrews 1.2).
This is what we call the incarnation, which
literally means the ‘taking of flesh’, the taking of flesh by God himself.
That is why we say that Jesus Christ is truly
God and truly man; Son of God and Son of Mary.
So:
Jesus
Christ didn’t look like a human
being; he was one.
His
humanity did not diminish his divinity; it was his glorification.
Jesus
Christ is God, uncompromised by his human body and mind or his birth in time
and history.
Jesus
Christ has a human start, but is the divine Word from the beginning.
All the statements I have just made come
straight from the earliest and enduring understanding of the Church about who
Jesus Christ is: we speak of it in our Creed to be proclaimed shortly.
And this is what our Gospel this morning proclaims,
speaking so powerfully of the mystery that lies behind the humanity of the
reality of the nativity.
The Gospel affirms both the fleshly reality of
Jesus Christ, and his divine origin.
We’ll sing of this shortly in the hymn ‘Of the
Father’s heart begotten’.
The hymn affirms who Jesus is, born of God the
Father out of the Father’s love for his creation that began, is sustained and
will ever be through his Word.
All time and eternity belongs to him, he is
the beginning and the end, and yet he deigned to be born as a human being
locked in time:
Of
the Father’s heart begotten,
ere
the worlds from chaos rose,
He
is Alpha: from that Fountain
All
that is and hath been flows;
He
is Omega, of all things
yet
to come the mystic Close:
evermore
and evermore.
The magnificence and wonder of the Incarnation
is that through Christ being born as one of us, born of the pure Virgin Mary,
we ourselves have the potential, capacity and means to become God’s children by
adoption and by grace.
Go back to that image of the parents and baby
on the train; go to the image of Mary and Joseph with their child who is the
Promised Messiah and Saviour; and then picture yourself embraced in the loving
arms of God who beholds you as his precious child.
Jesus Christ comes to make us more human not
less; more what God created us to be at the Creation, before falling away from
him by our sin.
God stretches out his arms of love towards you
at Christmas, and every day, and delights to see your arms stretched out before
him to receive his Son, the Bread of Life, the child of Bethlehem; the Saviour
of the World.
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