Sunday, January 3, 2016 | 8:00 a.m.

The Word Became Flesh

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 147:12–20
Jeremiah 31:7–14
John 1:1–8

Will you travel by the light of the babe born new?
In the candle lit at night there’s a gleam of dawn,
And the darkness all about is too dim to put it out:
Will you hide or decide to meet the light?

Brian Wren

You can tell from the lighted Advent wreath and sanctuary decorations that this is Christmastide in the church year. We are still celebrating the birth of Jesus. We are still exploring the meaning of his birth.

There once was a New Testament scholar who would receive numerous phone calls from journalists in the weeks before Christmas. His name was Raymond Brown, and his book The Birth of the Messiah is considered the definitive commentary on the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke. So newspaper reporters would call him and ask, “What really happened?” Brown would reply, perhaps with some impatience, that they would do well instead to ask what the real message of the stories was—and is (reported by Fleming Rutledge in the Christian Century, 8 December 1999, p. 1195).

The Gospel of John doesn’t have a story about the birth of Jesus. In the prologue to John’s Gospel, which we just read, we find no reference to Mary or Joseph, or to angels, shepherds, or magi. We don’t even find Jesus by that name. John didn’t care about the who, when, and where. For him, all that mattered is the why, the meaning of what happened.

He opens by saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And later: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The meaning of the birth of Jesus is that God revealed God’s Self to us by coming in the form of a person and living in our midst. No one has ever seen God, but Jesus Christ reveals to us who God is. And that revelation is a light that shines in the darkness, showing us the way of life.

Tom Long tells of a man from a small Southern town whose father had died when the man was just a baby. While other boys would play catch or go fishing with their fathers, he had had no father or any memories of his father. As he grew older, he became obsessed by the desire to learn about his dad. Whenever he met anyone who may have known his father in person—a school teacher where his father grew up, a retired minister who had once served in his father’s home church, an aging cousin of his dad’s—he would ask, “What can you tell me about my father?” He spent his lifetime piecing together shards of recollections, snippets of anecdotes, trying to get a picture of his father—the one who, with his mother, had given him life (Thomas Long, Interpretation: Hebrews, p. 15).

Like that man, we human beings long to know more about our Divine Parent, the One from whom we came and in whom we live, move, and have our being. We yearn to know someone who can reveal to us what our Father and Mother God is like. Long ago God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets. In the birth of Jesus, God most fully reveals who God is. The theological word for this is incarnation, the revelation of God in human flesh and blood. God became human in the person of Jesus Christ.

We might ask, “Why would the all-powerful God, creator of six billion galaxies, ever want to come to earth in the fashion of what begins as a baby?” The answer is suggested by the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, who told the following story more than 100 years ago:

Once upon a time, there was a king who loved a humble maiden. The king wanted her to become his bride. But more than that, he wanted her to respond with genuine love for him. And that posed a problem.

As a king, it would have been easy for him to use his power just to make her his queen. She wouldn’t turn him down. She couldn’t. He would appear to her in his royal finery, and she would fall at his feet and be his. Everyone would congratulate them at the wedding. Everyone would celebrate. No one would dare stand in the way of his plans. After all, he was king.

And it would be wonderful, additionally, because here would be a king of miracles: the young woman he loved was very poor. She lived in a tiny cottage and wore ragged clothes, and she often didn’t have enough to eat. What the king planned to do was rescue her from her poverty and take her with him to live in his castle, to be dressed in beautiful clothes, and to share his banquet table. It would be wonderful.

Except . . . there was the problem I mentioned before: The king wanted her to respond with genuine love for him.

The king got worried. He thought to himself, “If I make her my queen, she’ll do it, of course, because she is one of my subjects. She has to obey me. And she’ll be grateful, because I will do so much for her. She can’t help but respond with love out of her gratitude. But will she really love me?”

Would she ever be able to forget that he was a king and she was only a humble maiden? Would she constantly be feeling that she had to love him out of duty? How could he be sure her love went deeper than that? What could he do?

At this point in the story, Søren Kierkegaard explained that his story was a parable, and that it’s really about God and us. The king represents God, and the maiden represents all of us. The storyteller asked, “How can God approach human beings so that we would respond willingly, in love?”

It might be done by God’s elevating us to God’s high level. But the king had seen that would never do. His queen wouldn’t be fooled into believing that she had really become a different person. She would also see that the king hadn’t been willing to accept her as she was. Instead, the king had tried to change her into someone more acceptable, someone she wasn’t.

Maybe God should appear to us in glory and just dazzle us. Just as the king first thought: maybe he would appear to the young woman he loved in all his pomp and finery. But he realized that wouldn’t work. He didn’t want to scare her or force himself on her. How would it be possible for her to return his love happily, freely, because she really wanted to?

Finally the king had his answer. The way for them to be united, in love, couldn’t be by his lifting her up to his level. It had to be by his going down to join her where she was. So late one night, he slipped out the side door of his castle and appeared in front of the maiden’s cottage, dressed as a servant.

And that is what the meaning of Christmas is all about. That is why God came to us in human form as Jesus. God decided to become the equal of people like us and so appeared as one of the humblest. The infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke portray this humility through a birth in a stable, in the midst of farm animals, with a manger of straw for a bed, alongside very poor shepherds, and to parents who themselves were of humble means. The birth came in Bethlehem in the midst of an occupied land among oppressed people, under the thumbs of Herod and Caesar.

John portrays this humility as light shining in the darkness. There is still darkness, but it did not, and never will, quench the light. The light of Christ can enlighten everyone, yet not all accept him. No one is forced. People are free not to receive Christ into their lives. However, those who do receive and believe in Christ are given the power to become children of God.

God reveals God’s self to us in ways we did not expect. Don’t we still expect Christ to come in power, not weakness? Don’t we assume God will work through the establishment, not on the margins? Don’t we wish God would help us defeat our enemies, rather than tell us to love them? We expected God to make life easier for us, but in many ways it is harder. Jesus asks us to walk the second mile, to honor everyone, to love and serve the poor. He showed us that love—true love—involves sacrifice and, often, suffering. The way to life is through death. The prophets had indeed proclaimed the coming of one who would be called “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.” But that same one we discover as vulnerable, who hung on a cross.

Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was imprisoned and later executed in a concentration camp during World War II, wrote from prison, “God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Christ helps us not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 360).

When the Gospel of John proclaims that we have seen his glory, it is a strange glory indeed. His glory, as preacher Paul Scherer wrote, is “the majesty that had nowhere to lay its head; the grandeur that was meek and lowly; the beauty that had neither form nor comeliness that anyone should desire him; [his is] the splendor of a lonely Wanderer, weary and footsore, with nails through his hands and feet” (Paul Scherer, Love Is a Spendthrift, p. 14). A strange kind of glory indeed. Not what we expected.

We don’t expect God to love us the way God does, either. God loves us within the perimeters of respecting our freedom. God does not coerce us, but only persuades. We are invited, not forced, to receive God into our hearts. We are pursued, but not obligated, to meet God’s light. God is persistent, but comes to us in ways that invite our freely given response.

In her book Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott paints a picture of how persistently God seeks us. She had been living a life of drunkenness and debauchery. In the midst of an especially miserable week, one night she experienced the presence of Christ. Lamott wrote,

This experience spooked me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition, born of fear and self-loathing and booze. . . . But then everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen: you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever. So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my houseboat door when I entered or left [my home].

The next Sunday Lamott went to church. She was deeply moved by the congregation’s singing. She wrote, “I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling—and it washed over me.” She continued, “I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of God’s own dreams, and I opened my door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, . . . ‘I quit.’ I took a long deep breath and said out loud, ‘All right. You can come in.’” This was, she wrote, “my beautiful moment of conversion” (Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, p. 50).

The truth about God, she finally realized, is a loving Person, who comes to us humbly and vulnerably, so that our love back would be free and genuine. God comes to us in ways not the least bit coercive, but persistent. God became the Word made flesh, revealing to us that God continually seeks to love us, to shine light into our darkness, to empower us to be God’s children. Let us open the doors of our lives, let us open our hearts, so Christ may fully live within and among us. Amen.