Word Made Flesh

Propers: The Nativity of Our Lord (Christmas Day), A.D. 2017 B

Homily:

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.”

Famous words. But what have they to do with Christmas?

When Matthew tells the Christmas story, he’s mainly concerned with God’s people Israel. When Luke tells us the Christmas story, he offers a glimpse of the wider Greco-Roman world. But John begins his Christmas story in the highest of heavens, at the very beginning of time, a cosmic Christmas writ large on a universal scale.

In the beginning—the beginning of time, the beginning of the world—was the Word. But what does that mean, exactly? What does John intend for us to understand when he speaks to us of the Word of God? He’s not talking about grammar. There’s a different term in Greek for the written word. Rather, the word John uses is Logos, which means something like reason, logic, the meaning behind it all. And this would’ve been very familiar to an educated Greek audience.

See, the Greeks talked a lot about God. I don’t mean the pagan gods, Ares, Zeus, Athena. Those were fairy stories for rustic rubes. Greek philosophers understood that reason alone pointed to One God, the True God, the God beyond all gods. This God was not bound in space and time but rather was the great Creator who sustains us in every moment, in whom we live and move and have our being. And this God was understood not as a being—not as another thing like ourselves, differing in degree but not in kind—but instead as Being itself, the Source and ground of all Creation, the foundation of reality.

They talked about this God a lot. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, they all knew He was up there. The problem was just how high up there He was. The One God was so vast, so limitless, so brobdingnagian in conception, so alien, so transcendent—that He was far beyond mere mortal concerns. The God of the philosophers was simply too big to be concerned with the small. And so the problem became: How could one bridge that infinite gap? How could there be any relationship at all? How could one span the bottomless chasm between an infinite, transcendent Creator and this limited material world?

Reason, they figured. Logic. Logos. Reason was the bridge betwixt the human and the divine. Reason gave meaning, gave relationship, gave purpose to our world. Reason shaped the cosmos to conform to the mind of God. And so the Logos was the intermediary; the Logos was the connection. They spoke of Logos as the law of generation, as the soul of the world, as the intermediary between God and Man.

Philo of Alexandria—a Jewish Greek philosopher—famously described the Logos as a demiurge, an artisan, shaping the material world to match the plans and ideas of God, like a skilled craftsman working off a set of blueprints.

But what is it, really? What is the nature of the Logos? What is this thing that lets us know and love and relate to God? It’s hard for us to imagine a bridge between the physical and the spiritual. Something can’t be half tangible and half intangible; that wouldn’t make any sense. It would have to be one or the other—a bridge with both ends on the same side.

Some said that the Logos was an angel, or a sort of sub-god working for the One True God. Thus, while the Logos was high and powerful and glorious and spiritual, still it was created, the Firstborn of Creation, rather than the true Creator. Others thought that the Logos existed on a continuum of emanations radiating out from the One God, like Russian nesting dolls, and that the True God at the center of it all wasn’t even aware of all the worlds spinning off from Himself, an accidental Creator. Aristotle called this notion of God the Unmoved Mover.

But we weren’t even an afterthought to that sort of God. If we wanted to get closer to Him, it was up to us to swim against the tide, to rise up to a deity who literally didn’t even know that we exist. Be your own Logos, in other words. Claw your way back up to God.

But that’s not the Word that John knows. That’s not the God of Christmas.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” There is no intermediary here! There is no sub-god, no angel, appointed to relay a message to mankind. No, God Himself—God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God—is His own Logos, His own messenger, His own connection to human beings and to Creation as a whole. God reaches down. God comes down. God falls down to us when we could not rise up to God.

And He doesn’t do it halfway. He doesn’t make Himself half human, half created. He, the Creator Himself, enters His own Creation, becomes part of the work of His own Hand, like an author entering his book or a painter stepping into the canvas. He is both Creator and Creation at the same time: both human and divine, both Man and God. He sends out His Son, His Self, His All, down into this world of mud and blood, down into the depths of hell and back, to love us back to life when the weight of our sin has crushed us into the grave.

This is the Logic of the universe! This is the Reason behind it all! Not a God who stands aloft and aloof up in some unknowable transcendent Heaven, but a loving Father who nourishes, knows, and redeems every last one of His prideful, fallen, broken, beloved rebel children. There is no gap between Heaven and earth, not anymore. God Himself has spanned it, has bridged it, has filled it up with His own lifeblood pouring out from the Cross. For “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, the glory as of a Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.”

This is the God of Christmas. This is the Child of the snows. This is the Word made flesh. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that all who believe in Him may not perish but have eternal life.” And He is born this day, for you.

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