Christmas Day + John 1:1-14 + December 25, 2017
The Nativity of our Lord
John 1:1-14
December 25, 2017
John 1:1-14
December 25, 2017
Grace
and peace be unto you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
The
Lord says in Micah
5:2, “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, Though
you are little among the thousands of Judah, Yet out of you shall come forth to Me The One to be Ruler in
Israel, Whose goings forth are from
of old, From everlasting.” The prophet
records that the Messiah, the Christ, would be born in the little town of
Bethlehem. So Joseph of Nazareth goes to Bethlehem to be registered for Caesar’s
tax “because he was of the house and
lineage of David” (Luke 2:4). He
takes his legally betrothed wife, Mary, with him and she gives birth to her
firstborn, a son. The Scriptures cannot be broken. The Lord will not let any of
His words fall useless to the ground. He fulfills that which He prophesied
through the mouth of the prophet Micah.
Micah’s prophesy is about more than just the Christ’s
birthplace though. The one who will be born in Bethlehem will be “Ruler in Israel,
Whose goings forth are from of
old, from everlasting.” How is it
possible for one to be born and yet be from of old, from everlasting? It is as
St. John writes in today’s Gospel lesson, “The
Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of
the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” The child born
of Mary was no ordinary child. The child is the Word of God who assumed human
flesh. The son of Mary was first Son of God. The birth of Christ is the birth
of God according to human flesh. St. John begins his Gospel with these words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” The
Word was not a creation of God that God made sometime before what is recorded
in Genesis 1:1. The Word was God
Himself, and yet the Word was distinct from God, for John writes that “He was in the beginning with God.”
The author of Hebrews describes the Word as “being the brightness of His glory
and the express image of His person” (Hebrews 1:3). The Word is to God what brightness is to light. You can’t
have one without the other. A light without brightness isn’t light. Similarly John
calls the Word “the only begotten
of the Father” meaning that the Word was begotten, not made, of the Father
from all eternity, or as the prophet Micah says, “from everlasting.” God is Father from eternity, always having had
His only begotten Son, the Word.
Not
only was the Word with God in the beginning, but John says that “All things were made through Him, and
without Him nothing was made that was made.” God the Father created the
cosmos and all things in them by the Word. Moses writes that in beginning God
created the world by the power of His Word. Genesis 1:3 says “Then God said, "Let there be
light"; and there was light.” “Then
God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters’” (Genesis 1:6). “Then God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together
into one place, and let the dry land appear’;
and it was so” (Genesis 1:9). The
words become a refrain in the opening chapter of the Scriptures “and God said .
. . and it was so.” David rejoices in this in Psalm 33: “By the word of the LORD the heavens were
made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. For He spoke, and it
was done; He commanded, and it
stood fast” (Psalm 33:6, 9). God created all things visible and invisible
through the Word, of whom John writes, “In
Him was life, and the life was the light of men,” created all things and
sustains them by His divine power. This one, the Word, who was with God in the
beginning, the one who is the brightness of His glory and the express image of
His person, the only begotten Son of God “from everlasting” is the one who
becomes flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary and was born on this day.
The Word
became flesh and dwelt among us. The eternal Word, God the Son, takes on our
human flesh, body and soul. The Word of God, who is “from everlasting,” humbles Himself by becoming flesh, taking on our
nature and becoming like us in every way, except He was without sin. That is,
after all, the reason the Word became flesh. When God created Adam He breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life. At the very end of Luke’s Gospel he calls
Adam “the son of God” (Luke 3:38).
Not like the Word is the Son of God, of the same substance with the Father, but
son of God by adoption. But Adam disobeyed God in paradise and his disobedience
spread to all men, since Adam was the father of our race. The Lord had told
Adam that on the day he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he
would surely die. That was most certainly true, for in that moment Adam died
spiritually. He willingly listened to the word of the devil and cast aside the
word of Christ, whose life was the light of men, and is cast into darkness. Adam
lost the image of God in which He had been created. It was a total loss, for
when Adam brought for his son Seth, Moses writes that Adam “begot a son in his
own likeness, after his image”
(Genesis 5:3). Adam was no longer the son of God as he had been created to be,
but was now a child of darkness, a son of the devil, whose word he had
followed. Since Adam was the head of race, this is true for each of us.
So
the Word, the one who created Adam and breathed the breath of life into Adam’s
nostrils, assumes Adam’s flesh in the incarnation so that He might redeem Adam’s
race and restore them to righteousness and rescue them from the darkness of the
devil and the slavery of sin. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, yet
many received Him not. Most rejected Him, in fact, in the same way that most
reject Him today. God the Father “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge
of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). Yet, as it was in Christ’s
day, so it is today that many “reject
the will of God for themselves”
(Luke 7:30). “But as many as
received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who
believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh,
nor of the will of man, but of God.”
God the Son becomes man so that men might become sons of God. Christ, the Word
made flesh, “suffered for us in the flesh” (1 Peter 4:1) to atone for our sins, and not ours
only, but the sins of the entire world. God the Son acquires a perfect
righteousness in His innocent life and His bitter sufferings and death that is
available for the all the children of Adam, so that “whoever believes
in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Believing
in Christ, which is more than simply believing that He existed, but rather is a
trust that His merits are ours so that our sins are forgiven, that faith is counted
to us for righteousness. “For you
are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26).
This is why we gather on this day, as Christians
have gathered on this day since the mid-2nd century: to celebrate
the fact that God Himself assumed our human flesh, a body, a soul, and was made
like us in every way so that He might die for us to atone for our sins so that
by trusting His promise we might have life in His name and be made sons of God
Father once again, inheritors of all the blessings of Christ and the benefits
He earned for us on the cross. The Son of God is born as a Son of man today,
that we, by faith in His merits and death, become sons of God. Amen.
May the peace of
God which surpasses all human understanding guard your hearts and minds through
faith in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.