Luke 1.26–38
A 2023 Christmas Eve Message from St Margaret’s Church Nedlands
I wanted to wish Happy Christmas to all my website subscribers. The easiest way to connect with you all is to post an article. What better than the Christmas message I am preparing for Sunday! I have added some names—you can easily unsubscribe if you are overloaded with emails. If you dont, you will receive anything I post up, which is mostly sermons, although there are not so many these days. Subsequent to publishing this I noticed a few howlers, and also discovered that a section of my subscribers list were not receiving my posts. Here is the edited sermon, which some of you will be receiving for the first time. Now that I am back in business I will send the New Year’s Eve sermon, which was a follow-on from Miracle upon Miracle.
At Christmas there are three questions we should be asking:
Who is he? Who is he really? But is he really?
I’m talking about Jesus of course. Who is he?
This is not difficult to answer at one level. Luke, the closest to a historian in the New Testament, tells us he was a Jew, born in Bethlehem in Judaea and raised in the small town of Nazareth in Galilee—today both are small cities in Palestine’s West Bank—to a virgin mother called Mary. Mary was a common name then—so was Jesus—but I guess you could have tracked down her children and heard her story.
There were other stories told. Like, he was fathered by a Roman soldier, Ben Patnera. It looks like some joker played around with the son-of-a-virgin story—Ben Parthenos in Greek—and came up with Ben Pantheros—Son of a Panther. There are different versions: Ben Patnera was the one best known to Jewish people in the Middle Ages, when stories explaining Jesus away were popular. Actually, both Judaea and Galilee were part of the kingdom of Herod the Great; the Roman army was not there area at that time.
We will run with Luke’s account, which is corroborated by Matthew. Both of them wrote when some of Jesus’ brothers and sisters were still alive. Jesus’ best-known brother, James, was stoned to death in Jerusalem at the same time Luke was about to publish his history; but I don’t think the news had got to Luke, who was in Rome at the time. He had last seen James three years earlier and would have heard Mary’s story then.
So, who is he, this Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary, father unknown? Let’s keep an open mind for now.
But what a strange question to ask of any person: who is he, or who was he? Do you know anyone else who has that question asked of them? Who is Anthony Albanese? Of course, if you’re a new arrival in the country and you hear of him for the first time when you are watching television, you might ask the question, and someone will say: “He’s the President of Australia!” “Oh!” you answer. Ditto with Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, even Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler—no mysteries about any of them. But Jesus … they asked that question even when he was alive, and we have asked it ever since.
Who is he? For Jews in his day that meant one thing. Does he have something to do with God? Something about him raised that possibility. Did God send him? And if he did, how does he fit in with what the prophets said was going to happen in the future. Even in his own time people were asking “Is he a prophet, is he the new Moses, is he the promised Elijah, could he be the promised king, the Messiah?” These were God questions. And this is still the question: Did he come from God?
I want to pause here and think about God, because in our age of skepticism it is easy to dismiss the whole Christianity thing as ancient mythology. Many people wonder is there even such a person as God?
One hundred years ago the big names in science were saying no. Science and God are two explanations of the world; science is the correct one, they said. The universe just is—it always has been. Fast forward a hundred years and it is not so clear. It is now accepted that the universe had a beginning; it is not eternal, and how could that be? Stephen Meyer’s latest book is titled, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. Stephen Meyer is a Cambridge trained philosopher of science. It’s a good read if you want something to stretch your mind over the holidays. He lists some big-name scientist and philosophers who have now abandoned their atheism, because it just doesn’t make sense, given what scientists now know. As a schoolboy science-nerd I attended two National Summer Science Schools at Sydney University. One speaker was Professor Herman Bondi, a leading mathematician; another was Thomas Gold, a brilliant radio-physicist. They were both champions of Fred Hoyle’s steady-state theory of the universe. Many scientists at that time disliked the idea that the universe had a beginning; it was too much like creation in the Bible. The discovery that the universe was expanding, pointed to a beginning, but it was countered by Fred Hoyle’s theory that its expansion, could be eternal, balanced by the constant creation of matter. As I said, when I was at school this was the leading viewpoint. It was just after this that Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation and realized it matched exactly to what was predicted by the unpopular big-bang theory. The rest is history. Most scientists now accept the universe had a beginning, which brings us back to the God-question—as do Meyer’s two other scientific discoveries. The big bang that started everything off had to be finely structured to give us the universe we have today. Also, the force of gravity needed to have a precise value. A little bit more, and the universe would have collapsed on itself; a little bit less, and there would be no stars of the right size to allow heavy elements such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and iron to form. There would be no world and no life.
It was the atheist, Fred Hoyle—a chemist actually—who pursued the question how carbon could have formed in stars, and came to a startling conclusion. It could only have happened if the force of gravity was a very precise value. When I returned to Perth, I joined a group of atheists and Christians who met to discuss each other’s books. “It’s simple,” said one chap. “It all goes back to gravity.” “And what is gravity?” I asked. And yes, anyone can tell you it’s what makes heavy objects attract each other, but what is it that makes them attract? And why is it just as strong as it is? The “gravitational constant,” as it is called, could presumably be almost anything, what it is, is one part of one in a hundred billion trillion trillionth of this “almost anything” (1 in 1035). This discovery put an end to his agnosticism. “A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”[1] Many other laws of nature are of a similar kind.
Meyer does not try to “prove” the existence of God. He is looking for the “most likely” explanation for the way things are. A powerful intelligence comes way out in front of all the other possible explanations. The third “discovery” is that the DNA molecule, that determines much of what goes on the biological world and in our bodies, carries a load of information in a code, which certain protein machines in cells can read to produce more proteins, cells and bodies. There is about a library’s-worth of information in the human genome. Unbelieving scientists cannot explain where this information comes from; all our experience tells us only intelligent minds can produce meaningful information. Computers and artificial intelligence cannot create information, only process it.
Darwin looked at the cell through a microscope. It was visible as a tiny globule pushed around from the inside by unknown forces. Chemists at that time supposed that millions of years ago in a warm pond of organic molecules, some of them joined up to from complex molecules and cells which under the forces of natural selection grew into the vast array of present-day life forms. It is now known that at the heart of every cell is an immense DNA molecule which carries the information needed to create new cells. The chance of such a molecule happening by accident is impossible. If you think of a warm pond with enough molecules in it, and you work out the chances of enough of them meeting and joining up to provide the information chain for one gene, it would be like you were blindfolded and asked to draw one particular numbered ball from a barrel containing ten trillion trillion trillions of differently marked balls. As James Tour, one of America’s leading organic chemists puts it, “Based on what we know of chemistry, life should not exist anywhere in the universe. Life’s ubiquity on this planet is utterly bizarre and the lifelessness found on other planets makes far more chemical sense.”[2]According to astronomer, Alan Sandage, another big-name scientist who has given up on atheism, “If God did not exist, science would have to invent the concept to explain what it is discovering.”
Enough of this. Let’s get back to Christmas and Luke. I only wanted to show that the common line, “Science disproves God,” is not only false, but the boot is entirely on the other foot. Science suggests the existence of an eternal, powerful intelligence outside nature. It is what Paul said two thousand years ago, that ever since the creation of the world God’s eternity, invisibility, power, and right to be worshipped—has been clear to an intelligent mind in the things he has created.[3] When Luke speaks of God, he talks sense.
Who is Jesus? Luke gives an extraordinary answer: he was a man, born to Mary, who would grow up and become Israel’s king, and rule over an eternal kingdom.
He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
So now let me digress again to say something about Israel, the nation that is so much in the news today. The war in progress is one more chapter in a struggle that has been going on for four thousand years, ever since Abraham came and camped in Canaan, and God told him the land would one day belong to him and his descendants. Israelis are not the first-nations people of that land; they took it from the Canaanites who have vanished with time. And many nations, most of whom are now extinct, fought them for possession: Moabites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, as well as Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Turks. The Arabs are the current contenders; strangely they also are descended from Abraham, and God said they too would have an eternal future. He made no such promise about Australians! However, Jesus made a general promise that anyone who believed in him would be counted as a child of Abraham, and blessed with all his family which is destined to inherit the earth.
But who is Jesus really? I must be brief with this second question. Luke hints that there may be more to Jesus than meets the eye. There is the question of his human identity, but who is he who became this human being?
The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.
This word “holy” carries a payload. “Holy” means “different”—different like God. I don’t think the Bible calls any other person “holy.” All of us are created and sinful, the opposite of holy. Jesus is holy, conceived by the same overarching Spirit who created the universe, and therefore he is named the Son of God. Luke does not spell this out, and nor do I have time, but what it means is that the answer to our second question, who is he really, is that he was (and is) the eternal Son of God and creator of everything that is; he was God himself before he was born as a man. Which makes Christmas the celebration of the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in the universe since the moment of its creation—including what happened in that first moment. But Luke does not go into this. For now, he wants us to know first that Jesus is the promised king, who will rule Israel forever in an eternal new world, to which we too can belong. Except—and this is another strange thing—Luke says next to nothing in these first two chapters of his Gospel about any other people except the Jews. Later he will write the Acts of the Apostles and show how God’s promise to Israel has been extended to embrace believers of every nation. This is important: Luke did not write the Jews off; nor should we. They have a destiny.
The third, all-important, question, is now before us. Is he really? Is Jesus really the divine Son of God, born into the world as a human being, destined to create a new world for Israel and the other nations, and rule us forever? On the answer to that question hangs whether this Christmas is an old cultural tradition celebrating an event that never happened, but which may have value in promoting values like kindness and humility. Or is it real, and does our future, our personal destiny for happiness or eternal loss, hang on what we do with the one who was born this way?
To get the answer, we must turn away from his birth, and attend to his life and death, and what came after. For this I would recommend for holiday reading the rest of Luke’s Gospel. He believed it was reality, and he tells us why. Jesus did not stay dead, he came alive and never subsequently died. Let me stick my neck out and say, that is a fact of history. And if I may add it to Stephen Meyer’s three discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe, and suggest that if we also pay attention to his life and death, we have this mind behind the universe making it unmistakably clear who he is and what his plans are for our world, and what he wishes for the future of every man, woman, and child.
You may say that bringing Jesus into it makes it different from science. Yes, it forces us into the area of history, but historians do the same as scientists, examine the evidence and come up with the most obvious explanation. I challenge you to do it this Christmas.
And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
He is the divine Son of God become human to establish an eternal kingdom and rule the world for ever. God has given assurance that this is true, by raising him from the dead. Do I want to belong to the kingdom of the future which is already real and gathering its citizens? That is the fourth question.
[1] Hoyle, quoted in Meyer, 139.
[2] Quoted Meyer, 207.
[3] Romans 1.19–20.