The story we’ve come to church to be reminded of this morning – angels and stars, shepherds and kings, carols and goodwill among men – and all centering on the birth of Mary’s child in a stable – that’s the story we find in Luke’s Gospel and in Matthew’s Luke’s.
What John’s Gospel does is to explain what the birth of Mary’s child has to do with you and I. Listen up, says John, this is what Christmas is really about…
John speaks of ancient wisdom, the word, the logos, life’s true meaning, and how all of that was embodied in this tiny child, and in Jesus’s short life. John is telling us that Jesus is the body language of God.
‘The Word became flesh and and ‘lived’ or ‘dwelt’ among us, and we have seen his glory…’ Actually that word ‘dwelt’, in the Greek, has something to do with tents: The Word became flesh and ‘set up camp’ or ‘pitched up’ among us. And what that suggests is that the Ark of the Covenant has returned. The Ark of the Covenant, God’s original dwelling place among the people of Israel, was a tabernacle or tent that was portable, nifty, and able to lead them through the wilderness. What emerged later was the cumbersome weight of the stone temple, all that architectural paraphanalia of religion and ritual that encrusts the lithe spirit So with Jesus we are getting rid of the heaviness of a religion set in stone, and instead we are once again on the move. All we need to do is follow him.
The real substance of John’s prologue lies not in his masterful summary of Israel’s wisdom literature, and the way he marries this to Greek philosophical concepts through the metaphors of life and light and darkness. Rather it lies in John’s simple and direct appeal to his audience. Listen again to verses 10-13:
[Jesus] was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
Did you catch that? Jesus came into the world that we might become children of God. Children that is, who are not dominated by the circumstances in which we find ourselves, who are not defined by our limitations, or our hurts, and whose destinies are not controlled by others. Rather, we are those individuals who know ourselves to be God’s own beloved children.
John is writing so that YOU, this Christmas, might have LIFE in Jesus’ NAME. Whenever the Scripture talks of God’s NAME, or of Jesus’s NAME it is referring to their reality: ‘in the name of Jesus’ means ‘in the reality of Jesus’.
Here is an invitation to leave the stone temples we have built of our lives, and to come and to camp out beneath the stars. To come alive again. As Jesus says elsewhere in John’s gospel: ‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.’ [John 10:10]
So how exactly are we to do that?
I have two simple yet profound suggestions for you – something I would like each of you to try. Here’s the first: This Christmastide – and Christmastide in the Anglican tradition, starts now, and runs through to Candlemas, The Feast of the Presentation, on 2nd February – once a day, every day (and it will be easier if it’s the same time each day) look in the mirror and say:
“I am God’s child, deserving of love and respect, and God will use me to change the world.” (PERHAPS WE CAN ALL DO THAT NOW)
And the second is acquire, or to dedicate, a piece of jewellery to wear that reminds you of God’s love for you.
Those two practices sound simple, don’t they? But those words are actually rather hard to say and even harder to believe. Which is why we need to do this every day for the next forty days. Because the first few times you say it, you’re unlikely to believe it – after all, we’ve mucked up, we don’t deserve this, we’re too muddled, too slow, too old – put in any adjective you want. Despite all that, John asserts that what is definitively true about each and every one of us is that Jesus gives us the “power to become children of God”.
And nothing can change that. Which is what gives me the confidence to wish all of you a joyful, joyful Christmas!