How many of you are aware that there are radio towers sending out signals to outer space? The purpose of these signals is to communicate with extraterrestrial life, if in fact it’s out there. These same towers also detect signals from outer space, so if there is extraterrestrial, and it wants to communicate with us, we’ll be ready.
The possibility of intelligent life beyond our planet has always fascinated us. Just recently a reporter asked an astronomer to justify the enormous sum of money expended on the James Webb Space Telescope, which they launched, a week ago yesterday, on Christmas Day. The astronomer replied: “it’s encoded in our DNA to ask the question: “Are we alone in the universe?”
For their part, the people of Israel, our forebears in the faith, didn’t think so. When they looked up into the night sky, they did not conclude they were staring into the void. They were not seized with a sense of cosmic loneliness, which gives rise to the question, “are we all alone in the universe?” On the contrary, they believed that the stars bear witness to the existence of a Creator, to the presence and activity of God. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” the Psalmist exclaims. “Day after day, they pour forth speech. Night after night, they reveal knowledge…their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world” (Ps. 19:2, 4).
The heavens resound with speech because they themselves are a product of speech. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth by speaking everything into existence, according to Genesis 1. “By the word of the Lord, the heavens were made,” declares the Psalmist, making indirect reference to Genesis 1 (Ps. 33:6).
That God is a speaking God is central to Israel’s faith, to our faith. God speaks not only in creation, but also in human history. In Israel God appointed representatives known as prophets, of whom Jeremiah was an outstanding example. He chose them to his bring his own word to his people. The prophets announced to the people what God wanted for them. In our Old Testament lesson today, it is clear that God wanted to restore and comfort his people after the many bitter years they spent in exile from their own land. That is the good news that God entrusted Jeremiah to bring to his people.
Our Gospel lesson for today affirms that God is a speaking God. But it wants to go even further. In the Old Testament, the Word goes out from God with power to make whatever God has decided to make. But in our lesson we learn that God’s Word has always been with God. If in Genesis, we hear about the word of God at the creation, in John we hear about the Word of God before the creation. In the beginning, the Word already was. “He was in the beginning with God.”
But there is even more that John wants to say. He tells us not only about the Word with God. He tells us about the essential unity of the Word and God. From all eternity God and his Word have dwelled together as one. “In the beginning, the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” These two affirmations seem impossible to reconcile logically, but both have been and still are held to this day to be central to a Christian understanding of God.
To speak presupposes the desire to be heard, to be understood, to be known. We know that it’s by speaking that we make ourselves known. If we refrain from speaking, we remain an enigma to those who do not yet know us. If we do speak, then we disclose ourselves to them, provided, that is, we are telling the truth about ourselves.
When God speaks, he cannot do otherwise than tell the truth about himself, for it is impossible for God to lie. When God speaks, when God wants to disclose himself to us, what does he say? What is the message that he wants to convey to us?
God wants us to know that he is life. God’s Word brings into being all that exists. His Word is the origin of all life. “Where is true life to be found?” People still yearn today for vitality, for a sense of aliveness. They look for it in food and drink, sensual pleasure and travel, among other things. These may be good at the right time in the right place, but if we look to them to satisfy our yearning for life, we misuse them and ruin ourselves. John’s aim is to show us that only in God do we become fully alive. God himself gives life; in him is life itself.
God wants us also to know that this life is the light of all people. On Christmas eve, we heard about the angel who appeared to the shepherds, who were keeping watch over their flocks in the fields by night. The light in which the angel appeared to them is the reflected light of God’s own Word. People live and walk in darkness. They stumble and fall, because they cannot see where they are going. Of them it is said that they live in the land of the shadow of death.
Just as darkness and death, so also do life and light belong together. Genuine life emerges from right vision. People today are drawn to Eastern meditation because it promises to give them enlightenment. Siddhartha withdrew from his palace, left his wife and son, in order to go in search of answers to life’s suffering. After undergoing the rigors of a strict ascetic lifestyle, he attained enlightenment. He became the Buddha, which means the Enlightened One.
Jesus is the true light that enlightens all people. He satisfies the yearning of people for light. When I was a child, our Sunday school teachers taught us a gospel song, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine.” As it so often happens, we only realize the true significance of what we learned as children in later adulthood. Jesus wants his light to shine brightly in the darkness of our hearts, so that we may find the courage to let this light shine in the darkness that is all around us.
“The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” It’s here that John tells us something we never could have imagined on our own. In fact, it is so revolutionary that it parts ways with all religious thought both preceding and following it. “The Word became flesh.”
The Word, through which God created all things, has itself become a creature. This is what Christians mean when they use the word “incarnation,” a word that we may hear especially during the Christmas season. This is an important word, which we need to define carefully, especially today, when theological terms are foreign to most people. The theologian T.F. Torrance defines “incarnation” as the “new act of the eternal God whereby God himself becomes man without ceasing to be God, the Creator becomes creature without ceasing to be Creator.”
Torrance believes that the act of incarnation is even more amazing than the act of creation. He notes that in the incarnation God becomes little without ceasing to be the all-powerful God. The self-humiliation of God in Jesus Christ does not mean the self-limitation of God. It does not mean the limitation of his power, but the staggering exertion of his power within the limitations of human existence in space and time.
God sent into the world his Word, to take on our flesh, to become one of us, in order to make himself known and understood. In the incarnation, God speaks to us. Here John shifts to personal language. The Word of God is the only Son of the Father, who reflects the Father’s glory.
When we want to make clear to someone how much they mean to us, we struggle to make ourselves understood. It seems that the more they mean to us, the harder it is for us to find just the right words to tell them. We then go to a trusted friend to whom we regularly go for advice, and tell him about our struggle. The friend tells us: “just speak to them from your heart.”
God wants to make clear to us how much we mean to him. And in the incarnation, God speaks to us from his heart. “God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, has made him known.”
The great nineteenth-century Danish author Soren Kierkegaard tells the fable of a king who fell in love with a poor maid. You may have heard it before. The king fell in love with the maid and wanted to marry her. When he asked his advisers, “How shall I declare my love to her?” they answered, “Your majesty has only to appear in all the glory of your royal raiment before the maid’s humble dwelling, and she will instantly fall at your feet and be yours.”
But it was precisely that very thing which troubled the king. He wanted her glorification, not his. In return for his love, he wanted hers, freely given. Finally, the king realized love’s truth, that freedom for the beloved demanded equality with the beloved. So late one night, after all the royal advisers had retired, he slipped out a side door and appeared before the maid’s cottage dressed as a servant to profess his love for her.
Clearly, the fable is a Christmas story. God chose to express his love for us by becoming one like us so he can be with us. “Behold the Virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and they shall call his name, “Immanuel,” which means “God with us” (Matt. 1:23). The Christmas story is about the incarnation. We are called not to respond to God’s power, but to God’s love. For what God wants is not submission to his power, but rather our love, in return for his love.
That invitation stands open to all. “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”
Many celebrate the New Year, because it marks for them an occasion to turn over a new leaf. They want to discard the old to make room for the new. They want somehow to become a new and improved version of themselves.
Our Gospel lesson tells us that whoever receives God’s Son, the Incarnate One, whoever believes in his name, will be born of God and created anew. They no longer define themselves by the world’s demands, or by their parent’s expectations. Blood no longer has a say. It’s not about ancestry or family history or good or bad genetics. As children of God, we are free of the definitions given us by the world and parents. We are no longer defined by the judgment of people (which is to live in bondage), but by our relationship to God (which is to live in freedom). To be born of God is the true dignity of humankind (A. Gruen).
When we look at Christmas through the lens of our Gospel lesson today, we discover this profound truth: in beholding the child in the manger, we encounter the life, light and love of God. In other words, in this child we behold the glory of God.
And this makes all the difference in how we see: how we see ourselves, how we see God, and how we see people and the world around us. To say that through Jesus Christ has come to us grace and truth is to say that the “veil that has covered and distorted reality has been pulled back” (A. Gruen). For “truth” in the original language means exactly that: the unveiling of that which was hidden. And this is not our own doing. It all comes freely from God. That is to say, it is all a matter of grace.
When God speaks, when God wants to disclose himself to us, what does he say? What is the message that he wants to convey to us? His message to us is Jesus Christ. Did you get the message?