Christmas Day
Jn.
1:1-14
12/25/13
In the philosophical and religious
language of the first century Greco-Roman world, the term “flesh” was a dirty
word. The word flesh was considered to
be base and vile and abhorrent. As I
have described in catechesis and in Bible class, at the other end of the
spectrum was the word “spirit.” This was good and beautiful and desirable.
The Greco-Roman world set the
spiritual in opposition to the material.
The spiritual was “higher” and good, while the material was “lower” and
bad. And you couldn’t get much lower or
worse than the word flesh.
The flesh was to be escaped because
something had gone wrong for our spirits when they were trapped in flesh. In fact for a number of versions of what we
now know as gnosticism, the fall occurred when our spirits became part of this
material world – when they became trapped in flesh. Salvation was to realize
this fact. And once you realized that
the flesh was evil, you could choose to live in one of two different ways. Either you could decide that since the flesh
is evil, it needed to be beaten down and suppressed by ascetic practices like eating
little food and punishing the body. On the other hand, you could decide that
since the flesh was evil, it didn’t matter at all. Therefore, you could do whatever you wanted
with it. Wild excesses of drinking,
eating and sex were the thing to do.
This is the world into which the
Gospel entered in the first century A.D.
Of course the Gospel came from a very different perspective. It was rooted in God’s revelation to Israel –
what we now know as the Old Testament.
Here the material world was not bad.
Instead, God the Creator had made it on purpose and considered it to be
very good. The body – the flesh – was
not evil and something to be escaped.
Instead God had created man’s body from the dust of the earth and
breathed into him the breath of life in order to make Adam into a living
being. It was in the unity of body and
soul – it was life in the flesh – that was God’s intention for man.
And in fact man was intended for a
life of a one flesh union. Woman
was created as the helper corresponding to man – the one without whom life was
not very good. God created man and woman
to be joined together in sexual union as one flesh. And this one flesh union physically
demonstrated how God viewed them – they were now one flesh in his eyes.
This is what is described in broad
strokes at the beginning of our Gospel lesson for Christmas Day. We hear in John 1: “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 any thing
made that was made.” In Genesis 1 we
hear God say, “Let us make man in our image.”
Here – as elsewhere in the Old Testament – we receive the hint that
there is more to the truth than the simple fact that there is only one
God. We sense that there is a complexity
within this unity.
Our Gospel lesson makes this clear
when it speaks about “the Word.” We learn the Word was with God in the
beginning – an obvious reference to God’s act of creation. And we learn that the Word was not just with
God as some kind of created sidekick.
Instead the Word was God. The Word was – and is – God, and so all
things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was
made.
From the rest of John’s Gospel, and
the New Testament as a whole, we learn that the Word is the second person of
the Holy Trinity – the Son of God. In
the words of the Gloria Patri we confess the basic facts about the triune God –
“Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and will
be forever, Amen.” God is Father, Son
and Holy Spirit. God was this way in the
beginning. God is this way now. God will always be this way, because this is
who he is in his own eternal nature.
The material world was very
good. The flesh of human existence was
very good. The one flesh union between
man and woman was very good. All of this
was true until Adam and Eve decided they wanted to be God. They were not satisfied with being created in
God’s image. They did not want to be like God. They wanted to be God, for that
is the temptation that the devil held out before Eve. He promised that if they disobeyed God by
eating of the forbidden tree they would be just like God, knowing good and
evil.
Adam and Eve disobeyed God and
brought sin into the world. They brought
sin into the flesh. And now flesh, which
was created as something very good, has become ruled by sin and death. Now the flesh is something that sets itself
against the Spirit of God as it spreads to each person conceived and born in
this world. Jesus said, “That which is
born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
The fallen, sinful nature produces more of the same. And the flesh does one thing – it sins. The apostle Paul told the Galatians, “Now the works of the flesh are
evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity,
strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy,
drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before,
that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Indeed, the sinful, fallen flesh dies –
that’s what happens every time.
At Christmas we celebrate the fact
that God was not content to let this situation stand. Instead, he acted in a most surprising and
unexpected way. This is described
briefly in our text – brief words that contain the greatest mystery there has
ever been. John tells us, “And the Word
became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the
only begotten Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
The Word became flesh. The Son of
God became flesh. God, a spiritual
being, became flesh. That’s what
happened as Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the
virgin Mary. Without ceasing to be God,
the Son of God became flesh – he took humanity into himself because he is now
the One who is true God and true man at the same time.
This basic fact which stands at the
heart of the Christian faith – the incarnation – directly contradicted what
almost everyone in Mediterranean world believed about how things worked. The Word became flesh? How absurd!
How offensive! If you wanted to
make up a religion that would be popular and would spread in the world, you
could hardly have chosen a worse foundation.
And so from the very beginning we
find the Church defending the fact that the Word really did become flesh. Jesus Christ did not only seem to be human –
he really was, even as he was also really God.
In his first epistle, John wrote, “By this you know the Spirit of God:
every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from
God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.” And the in his second epistle he wrote, “For
many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the
coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the
antichrist.”
God sent the Son into the world in
the incarnation because it is sin that is bad – not the flesh. He came to redeem flesh from sin, to free it
as the second Adam who removes all that the first Adam caused. St. Paul wrote, “For God has done what the
law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the
likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.” God condemned sin in the flesh on the
cross. He killed the flesh in
Christ. And the on the third he raised
the flesh up. He raised Jesus Christ
with a flesh that is no longer able to die – a flesh transformed and freed from
sin and death.
He raised Jesus with
the flesh that will be ours in the resurrection of the flesh on the Last
Day – for that is in fact exactly what the Latin text of the Apostles’ Creed
says.
Christ has won us forgiveness. He will raise and transform our flesh on the
Last Day. And in the present he gives us
his flesh – he gives us his true body and blood in the Sacrament of the
Altar. The risen Lord gives us his body
and blood, given and shed for the forgiveness of our sins. The Lord gives into
our bodies his risen body and blood, and so we know that our bodies will be
raised too. After all, Jesus said, “Whoever
eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on
the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.”
Through this divine food Jesus
Christ gives us forgiveness and new life.
Through the body and blood of Christ the Spirit nourishes and
strengthens us in the faith. And because
we have received the blessings of what Jesus won for us in the flesh, we now seek
to live in the flesh in ways that share this love. John wrote, “By this we know love, that he
laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.
But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes
his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let
us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.”
On this Christmas Day, we hear in
our Gospel lesson: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have
seen his glory, glory as of the only begotten Son from the Father, full of
grace and truth.” In the incarnation of
the Son, we have received the saving love of God that frees us from sin and
death. We rest secure in the knowledge
that because Jesus’ flesh was raised from the dead and transformed, our will be
too. And as our risen Lord gives us his
flesh – his true body and blood in the Sacrament of Altar – we are nourished
and sustained in the faith so that we can use our flesh to love our neighbor in
word and deed.
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