Christmas Day
Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews
A virgin conceives. Angels herald his birth. Wise men from the east bring gifts for a king. Later, crowds will be astonished at his teaching, flock to him for healing, clamour for him to feed them. And this perplexes people. Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? they ask. We know his family, know where he’s from, where does he get all this? Perhaps, also, ‘who does he think he is?’
The very start of Matthew’s gospel tends to get skipped over in our lectionary and nativity plays, because it’s a genealogy. But right from the start Matthew is interested in telling us who Jesus is: over three sets of 14 generations he tells us of Jesus’ family tree from Abraham to David, from David to the exile, and from the exile to Jesus.
He establishes Jesus’ lineage as a way of showing how God’s promises were being fulfilled: he is the one in whom the nations of the earth will be blessed, according to the covenant God made with Abraham. He is the promised Saviour in David’s line, and the one in whom the exile, or humanity’s estrangement from its home, is ended. This is how Matthew begins to answer the question about who Jesus is.
Luke tells it a bit differently. He tells us of the angel’s visit to Mary, of her conceiving by the Holy Spirit, in language that heaps up allusions to God’s presence among his people in the Old Testament. He gives us a genealogy too – one that takes in David and Abraham, but then goes back even further: as Luke tells it, Jesus is not only son of David, and son of Abraham, but son of Adam, son of God. So Jesus is shown as fulfiller of the promises made in the past, but also as the one in whom our humanity is remade. Adam was son of God by creation. Jesus is Son of God by nature.
John gives us no human origin story at all. He begins in the heavens, telling us that Jesus is not just from God but is God: the Word who was with God in the beginning, through whom all things were made. John tells us of the time before time was, before creation was, when the Holy Trinity existed in a perfect relationship of love, complete and sufficient unto itself, the Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal: a divine life that constantly gives itself to the other and receives itself from the other. In the beginning, there was God.
And then, by the eternal Word, all things came into being. God, in love, creates a universe that is distinct from him but made to share in his love. And so John’s story of where Jesus comes from is also a story of where we come from. We are made by God for life with him. We are made for love.
But we only need to look around us, or perhaps within us, to know that so often we choose something other than God’s love. Perhaps it’s knowledge we want, or power, or wealth or control. Perhaps being loved scares us because it makes us feel vulnerable, or something we’ve done or that’s happened to us makes us fear we’re unlovable. Perhaps we’ve simply become too jaded to think that love could possibly be what we’re made for.
But the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. For all the ways love goes wrong; for all the ways in which we choose or get entangled in sin, for all the mess we make of God’s creation, God chooses to be born right in the midst of it. Love makes you feel vulnerable? Behold your Saviour, gurgling in a manger. You think God’s love can’t reach you? Here he comes to make his home with you, inviting himself round for dinner, not giving a damn about what the guardians of respectability think about the company he keeps, healing and forgiving our brokenness and sin. And if you think it’s naïve to believe that love can withstand the power plays, violence and sin of the world, you would almost be right. Because this love takes on all that, makes itself subject to it, and is beaten, crucified and buried by it. But this love is stronger than death, stronger than sin. This love is of a length and breadth and height and depth beyond our comprehension. It reaches back to our first estrangement from God, all the way back to Adam. It extends into the farthest parts of the world, reconciling all people to God, as the age-old promise to Abraham foretold. It comes all the way down to earth, to encompass all our human experience, and raises us to heaven, where we find our true home.
‘To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God’, says St John. All the Gospels, in their different ways, tell us who Jesus is. But they also tell us who we are, or who we can be. John starts his Gospel ‘in the beginning’, with the perfect love of the Trinity. And the good news he proclaims is that this is also our beginning: that in Jesus we are given a new birth. This is what Christmas is about: God drawing us into the love and the relationship for which he created us. He shares our humanity so we can share his divinity.
And that’s not simply about what happens when we die, though it includes that. This new beginning is now: if the child lying in the manger is the Word made flesh, the Son of God, then human life is open to God in a new way. Our lives are made his dwelling place, our hearts the space where love finds room. He comes all the way down to make his home among us: into the darkness we fear, into the wounds we often try to hide, into the joy and the mess and the vulnerability of it all. This is where he chooses to dwell. However else you might normally define yourself, whatever story you tell about who you are, at in the incarnation God tells you this: you are loved. Merry Christmas.