John 1:1-18 – Second Sunday of Christmas
What child is this?
Introduction
There’s a Christmas carol set to the tune of Greensleeves, I’m sure many of you know it, What Child is this? It captures the wonderings of the shepherds and the Magi looking at this small, vulnerable child. Who is this we’ve been drawn to honour and worship?
The Carol concludes, it’s Christ the King. The messiah, the chosen one who brings salvation.
Another writer, many hundreds of years before William Dix, who wrote ‘What Child is this?’, also wrestled with the same question. Who is this Jesus who lived full of grace and truth, was executed by the empire, was raised to life again, and ascended into heaven?
Our Reading this morning is what that author, who we know as John, concluded.
Matthew and Luke included their stories of Jesus’ birth because these details were important for stories of divine births in the Greek-Roman culture of the day. But they make the point that Jesus is completely different to the likes of Augustus and Romulus.
However, John wants to tell us more. In fact, these 18 verses set up our expectations and introduce the motifs that he will use throughout his whole Gospel. It lets us into the story and gives us a set of glasses, if you will, to bring the person of Jesus into true focus.
John dramatically concludes that this child, this Jesus, is the fullest image, the truest representation of who God is.
What Child is this? None other than the creator and sustainer of life says John.
Jesus was life from the beginning
Explanation
He starts with this beautiful but very dense poetry that really, almost ties us up in knots. I remember once I was in a meeting and someone had read these first few verses as part of the devotion. When they finished, a lovely lady of lifelong faith remarked so honestly. “You lost me”. Fair enough, I say. One scholar says that John knows he’s pushing language to try to do what cannot be done. But the reality of Jesus leaves him no option.
John is taking us back to the first pages of scripture, where the Spirit of God is hovering over the dark, wild and waste of the unformed chaos seas and speaks a Word.
Let there be…
Let there be…
The writer of Proverbs says that by Wisdom, God created all things. They build a picture of wisdom as a wise woman present with God at creation.
John picks this up, intent on telling us that wisdom is not an abstract concept. It is a person.
Illustration
These days, we may say words are cheap. We are used to spokespeople, leaders, even friends and family, speaking words that don’t ring true, apologies that sound hollow and voices that propound “alternative facts”.
It can feel like we are in a desert where there are no words with real meaning.
If it’s true that our words flow out from the well of our hearts, then what does our word say about us?
Can we separate our words from ourselves?
Implication
By connecting Jesus with the Word of God, John is telling us something incomprehensible about Jesus.
This creative life-giving presence of Word that flowed in the beginning from within God, with the breath, the Ruach, or Spirit of God. This livegiving Word, this Wisdom that creates, is Jesus.
This: Jesus is life from the beginning.
No good cop, bad cop
Explanation
A bit further on in our reading, we have this verse: “Out of his (that’s Jesus) fullness, we have received grace in place of grace already given, for the law, was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”
From reading Paul, we can be used to taking away the ‘unhelpful’ idea that the Old Testament shows us a bureaucratic God who likes rules and law keeping, whereas Jesus was all about grace, love and acceptance.
But here John calls the law given by Moses, he calls it a ‘grace’. If Jesus comes full of grace, it is because God has already given grace in the law, the teaching God had given to the Israelites, which was a binding agreement between them.
We don’t often think of the ‘law’ as grace. But the Old Testament story is built on grace.
Illustration
Before the law there was the Exodus from Egypt. Where God has compassion on this group of people who are enslaved. God rescues them before any law is given. Grace at work.
Before the Exodus, God choses, for no particular reason, a man called Abraham and promises to bless his descendants, and the world through him. Grace at work.
Before Abraham, the ancient Israelites told the story about the undoing of creation in a great flood because of humanity’s propensity for violence and self-centredness. After the flood, God sees that even the hearts of the best of humans are plagued with the same issues as before. But God promises never to de-create the world again. Grace at work.
Before the flood, God, with the creative potential in the cosmos, chooses to make a dirt creature in the image of the divine and share the divine task of ruling and caring for creation with it. Grace at work.
Implication
Grace has always been at work. Grace upon grace, upon grace upon grace.
In the fullness of Jesus, we see this grace. In a God that steps into the creation, becoming one of the dust creatures. What deity empties itself like this?
A God who was always, is now, and always will be full of Grace.
God and Jesus do not play bad cop and good cop. It is all Grace.
It’s sometimes difficult to recognise Jesus
Explanation
One of John’s favourite themes is the light and dark. It runs all the way through his gospel, all referencing back to this passage and back to Genesis, where God first challenges and chases away the physical darkness.
For John, the darkness is a way of speaking about our human confusion as to who we are and why we exist, and our repeated commitment to making gods of ourselves, doing what we think is right instead of learning wisdom from God.
This human delusion, this narrative we nurture, that we can save ourselves, means that when we see something different, we label it as weak and we dismiss it.
Though we are made in God’s good image and made very good. Humanity seems to think it wants something else.
Illustration
Once I was driving between Oamaru and Christchurch at night, I had my brother with me. He lives in Wellington’s CBD, where it’s never ever completely dark. But he took me by surprise when he commented on how dark it was outside. Before I could reply and point out that it was often dark at night. He went on to say that he had no idea where we were. Even though he’d travelled that road plenty of times in the day, he couldn’t recognise anything in the dark; everything looked different.
Implication
So John is saying that in a world used to elevating strength and success, power and prosperity, retaliation and retribution, we too don’t recognise Jesus.
We miss the baby in the manger, born in a peasant house in a backwater rural town that once, a long time ago, boasted of raising a great king.
We miss the son of a carpenter who spent 30 years in obscurity as a tradesperson in a colonial outpost town.
We miss the travelling rabbi with words and works that drew the physically and spiritually hungry, and sent them away whole and full.
We miss the God, incarnate, enthroned on a human torture device, murdered by his creatures.
We miss the empty tomb at dawn on the third day.
When we flatten the world to be just what we can see and what we can make it to be, we lose the ability to see the world theologically and our capacity to hold space for the mystery of the divine.
When we anchor our hope in human systems. In progress, medical advancements and technological marvels. We miss the recreation of our human hearts that only Jesus can fulfil.
But when we do, we become God’s Children.
Explanation
But when we see this light, says John. When we allow ourselves to stop and gaze at this vulnerable child in the manger and ponder who he is, and who God is.
When we receive this Jesus, welcoming him as a guest and as king,
We too become like children, children of God, born and birthed by God.
New birth, new life, new creation. The Dust Creatures remade in the image of the Creator, Word made flesh.
This transformation into new life with God is not something forced onto humanity.
Illustration
It’s not like someone just turning on the bedroom light and yelling rise and shine, startling you and hurting your reluctant and bleary eyes.
It’s an invitation.
As with any invitation, we have to receive it.
Implication
It’s Jesus saying, will you let me shine the light of my love and mercy in the darkest places of your experience and soul. Will you let the Spirit of Christ shape and form your way of seeing and being in the world?
Our transformation, which enables us to live the more excellent way of God’s love, mercy and justice, is not willpower. It’s not self-help. It’s the grace of God who takes the initiative, showing who God is, and who will release this power into a broken world and broken lives, who will make us a child of God.
Closing
Jesus is the fullest picture we have of who God is. In 325, the Church Council of Nicaea said that Jesus and the Father share the same essence, the same substance. In our Vision Statement here at the Village, we have said “God has a name and a face in Jesus”, a way of saying in our 21st century way of speaking that Jesus makes God known to us, that they are one and the same and their intimacy
Jesus is not a human pretending or miscontrued to be God, nor is he God in disguise, but he is God descended. God human as we are human, but full of grace and truth.
A God who is life from the beginning, consistently gracious, whose invitation we sometimes resist, but when we welcome him. We become God’s children, transformed and restored.