Flesh

Scripture: The Second Sunday of Christmas, A.D. 2016 C

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Such is the Christmas story according to St John. Matthew’s Gospel speaks to us of Jesus’ royal inheritance, of Joseph’s dreams and Herod’s madness, of the Star in the East and the Adoration of the Magi. Luke’s account tells us the Mother’s perspective: the visions of Zechariah, the Annunciation of the angel Gabriel, the Visitation to Elizabeth; the shepherds and angels and manger in a cave. Our Nativity scenes are then rounded out with an ox and an ass from the prophet Isaiah, a midnight birth from the Wisdom of Solomon, and camels as prophesied in the Psalms.

It is, of course, a beautiful scene, at once both common and holy, both personal and universal. Yet it is John who reminds us that this miraculous birth in the little town of Bethlehem is not simply a special child, not merely a prophet or priest or king as of old, not even an angel come down to earth—but the very Word of God made flesh. This is the Incarnation, the “enfleshment,” of the One True God, the Creator, the Source of All Being. And this has ever been both the greatest glory and the greatest scandal of the Christian Church. What sort of God, after all, becomes flesh?

It is nothing for a pagan to say that his god became flesh. Pagan gods had bodies and births and blood and bones, just like us, but shinier. It is nothing for a pantheist to say that God became flesh, for indeed the whole universe is already his God. But for a Jew to say it—that’s really quite shocking, quite scandalous. Blasphemous, even. But then, the Jews were a shocking people to the ancient world. When Hebrews spoke of God, they spoke of the Lord, the great I Am, what Greeks called the Source or the One or the Unmoved Mover. And this wasn’t a god like Zeus or Thor or Isis or Indra. This was the One Above All, the Most High, the unknowable God beyond all gods. All the pagan pantheons had some inkling that He was there, this One Above All, but nobody dared to say they’d seen Him.

Only the Hebrews had the gall to claim this God, the One God, as their own personal deity. Everybody else had sense enough to stay away from things that were too high, too perfect, too far beyond any human comprehension. Better to deal with other, lesser, darker spirits—critters more like us, closer to our own level. It was scandalous enough for this nation of scattered desert tribes to claim that they had been specially chosen by the One True God. Now here were some of them actually claiming that the One True God had become flesh, had become Man! Didn’t they know of Whom they were speaking?

This wasn’t Zeus seducing some coquettish queen. This was the Source of All Being—too high, too holy, too different even to bother noticing little mud monkeys like us. But to dwell with us? To become one of us? What stupidity. What blasphemy.

You see, it’s not that the ancient world didn’t understand the power and glory of the Hebrew God. Quite the opposite. They understood exactly Whom it was that the Hebrews claimed to know personally; they just considered Him beyond their paygrade. Plato and Aristotle had glimpsed Him. Poets had whispered of Him. And they knew very well what infinite glory, infinite power, infinite goodness and truth and beauty implied. They did not reject monotheism because it was too lowly, too limited. They rejected monotheism because it was too high, too great, too much.

I am reminded of an interview with Richard Dawkins that graced the cover of Time Magazine some decade or so back. You remember Richard Dawkins, yes? Widely regarded as the world’s second greatest biologist, he gained brief infamy by denouncing a Christianity that he clearly didn’t understand. Anyway, he said in this interview that he could accept the idea of God—infinite, eternal, all-knowing. That concept was big enough, grand enough, to be worthy of his consideration. What he could not accept was the notion that any sort of omnipotent God would ever bother talking to us. We were too small, too meaningless, for that. It would be too “parochial,” Dawkins said, too undignified.

And that, I think, sums up the entire problem of the godless world. Whether we’re talking about ancient pagans or postmodern atheists, we are generally accepting with regards to notions of infinite power, infinite knowledge, infinite being, even infinite justice. But what we cannot stomach, what we absolutely cannot stand, are notions of infinite love, infinite mercy, infinite compassion, infinite grace. We think that sort of thing below God—or, if we’re to be honest, below us. Dawkins, like Rome, could accept a mysterious God of unfathomable power. What he couldn’t accept was a personal God of unfathomable love.

Make no mistake, brothers and sisters: the Incarnation is every bit as scandalous and unacceptable to our world today as it was to John’s 2,000 years ago. We still struggle with the idea of an infinite and all-powerful God Who would stoop so low as to dwell with us, as to become one with us. It seems too parochial, and frankly too frightening. We are much more comfortable with a distant and dispassionate God, a God Who leaves us alone, so unknowable and so far removed from us that it hardly matters whether He exists or not. But then He goes and bends Himself down to earth, makes Himself flesh through the power of the Holy Spirit and the guts of a girl.

God will not keep His distance. He will not accept our loss. His love is too fiery, too powerful, too all-consuming for that. He comes to us as a Child, as a newborn, as a baby laid in a manger. He comes to us cold and hungry, completely needful, completely dependent. And He refuses to stay separate from us, to stay apart from us, demanding the very milk of our bodies, while offering in return His own Spirit and Body and Blood. He consumes us, entirely, that we may consume Him.

This, for John, is the Christmas Story, the ultimate tale of love divine, all loves excelling. Here is the infinite made finite, eternity in time: Almighty God, born of the Virgin, in Bethlehem of Judea: come to bring His people home; come to heal the wounds of sin; come to conquer death and hell and raise us up to life everlasting; come to claim us as His own! For unto us is born not merely a man, but God made Man, the Word made flesh:

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. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Love has come, and will not be denied.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.