I am unemployed at the moment, so won’t be preaching on Christmas Day as I have most of the last 50 years. It’s something that gives me joy. You see no one gets as much from a sermon as the preacher himself – always looking for a new angle – and there is always a new angle! I have chosen John 1 as my text.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it …
The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth… No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.’
A few years ago in Cape Town a group of Muslims asked to visit one of our churches. After the service their leader, the head of the Islamic Propagation Centre in South Africa, addressed us. The gist of his message was this: Christians and Muslims have a great deal in common. If Christians could see their way to relaxing a few teachings that are particularly offensive to Muslims, we could join together and fight the real enemy, Secularism. One of the offensive teachings was that Jesus and God are one. He then read from the report of an Anglican doctrinal committee in England, which said that to be a Christian you needed only to believe that Jesus was special, you didn’t need to believe he was God. ‘Muslims believe Jesus is special,’ he said. ‘He was a great prophet.’ He went on to quote many Church leaders who no longer believe Jesus is God.
In replying I said that the heart of Christianity was God becoming a human being in the person of Jesus – not an idea, but a historic fact – and those who denied it could no longer be regarded as Christians; there was no way any true follower of Jesus could abandon this understanding.
When we look back through two thousand years of Christian history we see many church movements straying away from the central truths of the gospel. Islam is one that is still with us. Before that there was Arianism. Its slogan was “There was when the Son was not.” In other words, Jesus was a created being, though he was special. Unitarianism was a more recent attempt to do away with this truth. Its central conviction is that God is one; Jesus therefore cannot be God; though they saw him as special. The Jehovah’s Witness movement believes that Jesus is a great angel, but not God. Many modern-day churches are also following the unitarian heresy: Jesus was a great teacher, but not God.
In my answer to my Muslim friend I drew heavily on the Gospel of John. Many Muslims respect our Scriptures, even when they disagree with some of their teachings; Muhammad called Christians and Jews “people of the Book”. He saw we were not idol worshippers – just mistaken, he thought. Muhammad taught his followers to read the Injil – that is the Gospels.
John begins his Gospel with a three truths: ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ ‘The Word was with God,’ and ‘the Word was God.’ What does he mean by ‘the Word’?
A word can be a group of letters that stand for an object or action, or anything – like ‘Christmas’. Kxyz is not a word, so if someone puts it down in a Scrabble game on a triple-word square and claims 81 points, everyone shouts, ‘But it’s not a word.’ It’s not a word because it doesn’t mean anything. A word is sensible, rational. So, a word can also be a message: ‘My word to you this morning is this sermon. I hope it makes sense.’ A word can also be a body of teaching: ‘Christians believe that the Bible is the Word of God.’ The Greek for word is logos. We say ‘psycho-logy’ and mean all that is known about the psyche – the mind. “Geo-logy” is the study of Ge, the earth. When John was writing there was a movement called Stoicism which believed that the world was rational: everything seemed to fit in with everything else; there must be a kind of universal blueprint, a world soul. They called this the Logos, or Word. This was close in some ways to the Jewish idea that behind the world of things lay the mind of God, a principle of order. They called this mind or plan, “the Word of God”. So, what did John have in mind when he said, “in the beginning was the Word.” One thing all uses of the word have in common is sense. If it makes no sense, it is not a real word. A word is an idea expressed.
So, words are about communication. They indicate two things: someone is putting out an idea, and they are doing it for someone else. Language means there is more than one person. Persons are communicating. So, if I were a Muslim or a Jehovah’s Witness, I would not be able to say that a Word was there in the beginning; because, according to them, in the beginning there was only one person. God was alone. There was no need for communication. But John says there was.
When he tells us about the beginning John is thinking just about the creation of the world, but about deep eternity. He makes his meaning clear by the word he uses for was. He chose this word carefully. If he meant that the Word was created at some time in the past, we would have said, ‘In the beginning the Word became.’ Later he says, ‘There became a man whose name was John.’ ‘Became’ is a different word. But to say that in the beginning the word was, means that as far back as you want to go you will always meet the Word. He always was. So, the first truth we learn from John is that communication was happening from before time began. God was speaking, and that means he was speaking to someone – eternally. He was speaking with an eternal person, and what he said made sense. ‘In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God.’
The second thing John says is that the Word was with God. The way he says this means that the Word was in personal relationship with God. Literally he says the Word was towards God, facing him: they were in face to face contact. We learn from this that personal relationships did not begin when humans were created. God was relating to the Word in a personal way before ever there was a universe or a human being. The significance of this for human life is immense. It means that our friendships derive from God. God is love, and love comes from God. Knowing this makes a big difference to how we treat other people.
The third truth John tells us is that the Word was (and is) God: ‘The Word was God … All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.’ So, don’t get the idea he is talking about a second god, or a lesser god. Some Hindus are happy to have Jesus as one of their gods; Jehovah’s Witnesses believe he is the chief angel; Muslims believe he is the Messiah – but not the Creator God. But John doesn’t believe in two gods. He believed passionately that God is one. But God’s Word, which is his expression of himself, is himself, is God, but is somehow separate, and able to communicate with himself, and the self who knows is different to the self who is known. And all this was true before ever there was a world. When he created the world God (the Father), the Word and the Spirit were in it together, communicating.
The fourth truth brings us to the first Christmas: ‘The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.’ He is talking about Jesus.
Sometimes when we say, ‘Jesus is God’ – just like that – it sounds absurd. Sometimes it sounds like we are making God too small. We need to remind ourselves who God is.
All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made.
The Word of God is the Creator! The way the Bible speaks of this is that God the Father gave the command, God the Son put it into action, and God the Holy Spirit was the wisdom and power that thought it out and made it happen. I am getting old and sentimental. I can stare at a flower, even a petunia, and wonder at its construction, and marvel at how it could actually exist. On Friday night I was in the bush. I barbequed a cob of corn and examined it carefully. All those kernels packed together perfectly, each one connected to the cob, each one with its own personal thread in the tassle needing to be fertilized. The flower on top dropping its pollen. It is all so clever. God made everything through his Word. When I was younger I was mesmerized by power. Firing a rifle here and exploding a bottle on a post thrilled me. The Bible says God spoke the universe into existence: ‘God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light.’ The Word went into action to create the world.
Every time they invent a more powerful telescope they find out that the universe is bigger that they thought; I lost count when they got to a billion billion stars. And the smallest sun has power beyond our imagining. What does this tell us? It tells us that God is great and powerful and intelligent, beyond our ability to imagine. Yet he became a man in the person of Jesus: not an idea, mind, but a fact.
Or we can go the other way. Instead of looking out into space we can turn out attention to the little things. The ancients used to wonder how many pieces you could get out of a block of cheese. You cut it in half and quarters and keep going. When you have only a tiny speck of cheese you cut it in half again, and you keep going. If you ever get to a place where you can’t cut anymore, you would have an atom of cheese. Atomos means uncuttable. That was their question; they did not have an answer. In the last two hundred years scientists discovered the answer. There are atoms, roughly a hundred different kinds. They the building blocks of everything. There would be more than a billion billion in a gram of cheese! But then they started wondering what atoms are made of. And it turned out they are mostly empty space. Radio waves can pass through them, through a solid wall. Then they discovered that there are ways of breaking them down into smaller parts. When I was at school we learned that atoms were made of protons and electrons and neutrons, but now they have started messing round with these and we have mesons, and positrons, and neutrinos, and Higgs bosons, and I don’t know what else. It seems like the further you look down into things the more you find. We can’t seem to get to the bottom.
Some people will make fun or your faith by pointing out how immense the universe is. How can you possibly believe that humans are anything when we crawl around like ants on a tiny planet in an insignificant solar system in the midst of a billion other solar systems on the edge of a second-rate galaxy, in the midst of a billion other galaxies? And it does sound crazy. But then you realize that actually we are approximately halfway between the bigness and the littleness, and for all you may say about our size, it works for us. We can live and be happy, and enjoy looking at the sky, and invent telescopes and microscopes and get a buzz out of trying to understand how it all works. And it works for us. The little things are like they are so that the bigger things will work – the things we handle every day: light, electricity, bricks, steel, butter, water, oxygen, spit. The world is complicated and it was all thought up and made and arranged by the Word. And this is the God who made you and me. And this is the Word who became a man to save us.
Let me go a little further! Did you ever wonder how things move? If you went to school you would have learned that objects move when they are subjected to a force. And once they get moving they will keep moving in a straight line until a force changes their motion. So, a rocket, once it has escaped the gravitational force of the earth will keep moving out into space forever. But why will it keep moving? Well, because of what I just said. It just does. But can’t we say more than that? Boil it down to its absolute basics and you have to say that things behave the way they do because God makes them behave that way – by his Word. Even a table – it feels quite solid – is there because God made the trees that provided the wood, but also because God holds it in existence every moment. If God did not will it to exist – by his Word – it would no longer exist. That is what the Bible teaches about the Son of God, that he upholds the Universe by the Word of his power. Which means that your life is willed by God. Every heart-beat is powered by him. This is the God who John says is the Word. He is not saying a little thing when he says the Word became flesh.
John goes on to say, ‘In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.’
Just as in the beginning the Word was, so in him life was. This is important, especially for us today. Because at school our kids are taught that in the beginning there was nothing, then there was a big bang, then as things expanded and started to cool down the elements formed, then stars, then planets, then our planet, then seas, then somewhere on earth a chemical soup, then big organic molecules, and at last life. Life was a freak accident that happened (it became) on an insignificant planet. It will last awhile and then vanish into the cold blackness. But life didn’t become, says John. It was! There at the beginning with the Word. You might even say he – the Word – is Life. We have to decide which way we will go on this one. Either life is of no ultimate importance, even if it is all we have. So, we will try to suck as much from it as we can and throw the skin away. “I came from nothing, I mean nothing, I go to nothing. Life sucks.” I don’t think many of us would say that, though some people do. Instinctively we know that life does mean something. And John tells us this is true. So, the alternative is to treasure life as an eternal thing that has been given us for a while by an extraordinary God, and, though it is threatened by the darkness – by sin and unhappiness and sickness and death – the darkness did not overcome it.
Jesus became a mortal man and death swallowed him whole. That is the way it seemed – until God raised him from death. He conquered death. The darkness tried to “take him down”, but it failed. Life proved its power over death. Our society believes death will have the last laugh. Jesus shows us it will not. Life triumphs over death. Jesus’ resurrection proved that.
The question is whether for us death will be our destiny, or life? Just because Jesus rose, doesn’t mean we will. It raises the question why the Word became flesh. Why did God come to live amongst us for a generation? It could have been to check us out. And we didn’t shape well. We resented his presence in our world. Listen again to what John says:
The true light that shines on every person was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world became through him, and the world did not know him.
The world failed to recognize its own Creator; it still fails. We showed him the door. We killed him. Still today we want him gone from our society. If Jesus was on a fact-finding mission we are doomed. Whatever Life’s future may be, we will not be part of it.
But John goes on to say these words:
But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.
As we read on in John’s book we discover that Jesus was not on a fact-finding mission. He already had all the facts. He came into a world of death and sin, a world which he knew would hate him. And his purpose was life. He brought life, and still does. His purpose is that everyone who believes in him should have life and have it forever. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
When we celebrate someone’s birthday, we don’t often dwell on their birth and babyhood; we celebrate the person they have become. Christmas is about the birth of the world’s true and future king, about the Word becoming flesh, about the grace and truth of the life he lived in our midst. And it is about what he did: dying to establish his kingdom and giving to men and women and children the right to become children of God. This is the great Christmas gift. You can be a child of God, if you wish to. Sure, you can stay with the skeptics and doubters, with those who killed him, and in one way or another go on refusing him, but is that what you want? Or you can believe in him, and become a child of this extraordinary communicating God, whose Word made you and keeps your heart pumping, who became the man Jesus, who died for your forgiveness—and who is coming back one day to be our king. Something to celebrate, don’t you think?
David Seccombe
Holy Cross Church Balcatta: 22 December 2019