Christmas Homily

1st Sunday After Christmas

29 December 2002

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

And the Word became flesh and lived among us… John 1.14

The Holy Family

When I saw on the Ordo Calendar that today, the first Sunday after Christmas, is “Holy Family Sunday,” my residual Protestant, low-church sensibilities were put a bit on edge. The piety that sanctifies Mary and Joseph seems, to me, to dilute the uniqueness of Jesus and lose the real-world, historical significance of Jesus’ birth in a haze of sentimental folklore. On the other hand, there’s the man New York who told me he had grown up assuming that “Christ” was Jesus’ surname, that Jesus was the first-born son of Joseph Christ and his wife Mary Christ.

I was much happier when I saw the Gospel lesson, those majestic opening words from John’s Prologue: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Far better, I thought, John’s profound testimony to the historical meaning and cosmic purpose of the child born into that obscure Jewish family. To hear it as John’s first readers must have heard it helps to keep in mind the intellectual world in which he wrote it. For John commandeers the philosophical language of his day to make the most radical claims imaginable about God and his Christ. The educated reader in the late first or early second century would have been familiar with the idea of the One God, and many would have been open to identifying this God with the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, the God who covenanted with Abraham and revealed his Law to Moses. But the philosophers’ God was utterly holy, too holy to have anything to do with this material world and the sinful creatures who inhabit it. This where the Word comes in. The Word is a kind of demigod, a quasi-divine being who isn’t too holy to mingle with the likes of us. God sends the Word down to the evil material world as the savior of all those who live virtuous lives and are thus worthy to escape this world. All this was spelled out by Plato several hundred years before John appropriated his vocabulary. By the first century these ideas had become the basis of a variety of popular religions.

John turns these sensible ideas on their head: first he says the Word was God: not a being less than God who serves as an intermediary between a holy God and a corrupt world, but God himself. The one high God doesn’t send a lesser being; he lowers himself to commerce with this evil world. That’s bad enough. But it gets worse; John plunges on to say: and the Word became flesh and lived among us! If the Word was God and the Word became flesh the inescapable conclusion is that God himself became flesh. With this, the whole framework of religious assumptions crashes down. We’re offered a God that makes no religious sense to the Hellenistic mind. John’s reckless proclamation that the child born to Mary and Joseph is very God of very God, which today we hear as weighted with theological dignity, then defied commonsense, insulted decency and profaned humanity’s best thoughts about God. God’s answer to this world of sin, suffering and death is to make it fully his own, to live, suffer, and die as a condemned criminal in it. It’s a claim whose sheer craziness has become softened by years of repetition; we need always to hear it afresh.

John calls Jesus the Word – in Greek, the term is logos: the rationale, the explanation. He’s telling us that Jesus is the logos of the world, the reason for its existence. By him and for him all things were created. There’s a long Christian tradition that pursues this to its logical conclusion: God’s becoming human is not an ad hoc, emergency response to human sinfulness, but what God had in mind all along. Even if things had gone right, even if Adam and Eve had not disobeyed, if humankind had not rejected its Creator and Lord, God would still have become incarnate. God created this world for the purpose of there being creatures like us, and always intended to become one of us, dwelling with us forever, in this way drawing us into his own life, the everlasting communion of Father, Son and Spirit. That’s the holy family: all of us made God’s own not because we are good – let alone holy - not because we do or believe the right things, but because God is who he is: the Loving Father who gives himself to us by way of his Son, the Child Christ; the God whose aim it is to have us share in the fullness of his everlasting and joyful life. As Paul wrote to the Galatians: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.”

God, in his patience lets us have things our way, as insanely self-destructive as that way so often is. He lets us do our worst. The saving Word is shouted down. The world’s king is executed for sedition. God incarnate is put to death for blasphemy. Yet God in the end has his way. Christ ignominiously crucified becomes Christ gloriously resurrected. The weakness of God overcomes the powers of this world. With all its outrageous simplicity, this is all we have to put our trust in. It’s all we have to offer this world in its present darkness.

The unnamed narrator of J.D. Salinger’s short story “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor” is in Bavaria, a few weeks after VE day. The unspeakable horrors he has seen in the weeks since the D-Day landings have pushed him to the edge of a nervous breakdown. He is billeted in the house of a low-level Nazi official, a woman he himself arrested and sent away for interrogation. In the house he finds a copy of a book by Goebbels, Die Zeit Ohne Beispiel (The Time Without Precedent): “he opens the woman’s book and finds a brief inscription on the flyleaf: written in ink, in German, in a small hopelessly sincere handwriting were the words ‘Dear God, life is hell.’ Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page…the words appeared to have the stature of an uncontestable, even classic indictment. [He] stared at the page for several minutes, trying not to be taken in. Then, with far more zeal than he had done anything in weeks, he picked up a pencil stub and [with his badly shaking hands] wrote under the inscription in English “Fathers and teachers, I ponder, what is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love” He started to write Dostoevski’s name under the inscription but saw - with fright that ran through his whole body – that what he had written was almost entirely illegible. He shut the book.” He then turns to a pile of accumulated mail from home and proceeds to tear it up and throw it away unread.

Left to ourselves, we have no answer to this world’s despair, no intelligible response to its suffering, no power that stands against its wickedness. But God has come in the flesh. God speaks in Christ. Where we are incapable of love, lost in hell, he first loves us. His salvation shines out in the darkness. His Word is legible: the child whose birth we celebrate.

Amen