God’s Meaning, Intention, and Self— Fully Human
John 1:1-18
Homily delivered First Sunday of Christmas (Year B RCL TEC)
28th December 2008: 8:00am Said and 10:15am Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, Seattle Washington
Readings: (Isa 61:10-62:3; Ps 147, Gal 3:23-25; 4:4-7; John 1:1-18)

God, let us not accept the judgment that this is all we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

I am very grateful for Fr. Peter’s invitation to preach here this morning. Though I count West Seattle as my home in the U.S., I currently live in Hong Kong where I am a deacon in the Anglican/Episcopal Church there, the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui, preparing to be priested this September. I currently serve as a chaplain at the Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist and a lecturer in Biblical languages and literature at the Anglican Seminary there, Minghwa Theological College.

My wife and I are visiting Seattle for the holidays to be with our children and grandchildren during the holidays. All the time we have been spending with three year old Emma and six month old twins Delia and Elsie has made both of us very thoughtful this Christmas about that universal human experience, babyhood. And our need to use borrowed vehicles and snow shovels has reminded us of how much relying on others makes you closer to them. Together, the experience has made me reflect on just what it means when we Christians worship the Baby Jesus.

Frankly, it is something of a scandal. “O Come, Let us adore Him,” we sing, without a thought about what we are saying. Worship a baby? Barely born and in diapers? (That’s basically what the “swathing bands” were for.) Worship a little creature with a brain that is just beginning to organize sensory input and is still years away from rational thought? How can this be?

But other lines of carols seem to have given the matter some more thought: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the incarnate Deity,” “Of the Father’s Love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,” and “God from God, Light from Light Eternal, Lo he abhors not the Virgin’s womb. Very God, begotten, not created. O Come let us adore him.”

Gerard (Gerrit) van Honthorst (1590–1656), Adoration of the Children (1620),
Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Italy.

The Gospel reading today is the prologue of the Gospel of John. It cites an early Christian hymn, whose rhythm and balance is clear once you remove the interposed verses that talk about John the Baptist. The text is the source of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, and contains a sentence that sums the doctrine up: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.”

The doctrine of the incarnation, of God becoming a human being, was a scandalous idea from the start. The basic problem is simple—we tend to define the word God by what we are not. We are contingent; God is sufficient. We are changeable; God is unchanging. We are masses of conflicting urges and desire, most of them selfish but none of them formed by a self that is in any way complete or whole. God is being itself, pure intention, pure love. We are incomplete and sick, God is wholeness and health itself. We are sinners; God is perfection itself. We can be pretty benighted and false; God is light and truth. How can these two polar extremes be reconciled, let alone combined?

The Church during the first six centuries of its existence dealt with these issues in a series of ugly arguments that are called the “Christological controversies.” In this discussion, the Church looked again and again to our text in John and to the description of Christ in Hebrews 4:15: He is wholly able to sympathize with our weaknesses because he was tested in every way, suffered every trial just as we—yet was without sin.

Icon of the Emperor Constantine and the Holy Fathers at Nicea.

The doctrine of the united Church—the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church that we confess in the Creed—was worked out during those controversies and by those Councils. The Creed itself, together with the list of what books we accept as the Holy Bible, stand as the primary legacies of those Councils.

I can’t go into the detailed history and doctrinal differences here. What the Church gradually recognized is that in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Love and Power that brought the universe into existence and still sustains it embraced and took on in every way the weakness, limitation, handicaps, and contingency of being human. The Councils declared that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully Man, 100% God and 100% Human being. He was not a 50-50 mix, half God and half human being.

To those who stressed the oneness of God at the expense of the divinity of Jesus, the Creed states, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father (that is, there never was a time when he was not thus begotten), God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.” It is the Creed that the carol quotes when it says, “God from God, Light from Light Eternal,” and “Very God, begotten, not created.”

At the other extreme the Creed also sought to correct those who stressed the divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity. Some believed that Christ was fully God and thus only seemed to be human. The letters of John in the New Testament condemn these people because they “do not acknowledge that it is in the flesh that Jesus Christ came” (2 John 1:7). Later Gnostics even split the human Jesus from the divine Christ, and pictured the unsuffering, unmoving Christ looking down upon Jesus on the Cross, laughing that people would mistakenly think that he, the Christ, had suffered. To all of these, the Creed states, “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, . . . he became incarnate (that is, took on flesh) from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.”

Mural of the Emperor Constantine and the Holy Fathers at Nicea.

Popular Christian legends from those early years show some of the confusion that prevailed—many of the infancy Gospels rejected by the Councils for inclusion in the New Testament portray not a helpless, speechless baby Jesus, but one that can give his Mother sermons the day he was born and that as a child has an unfortunate tendency to miraculously kill off his playmates when they are mean to him and then equally miraculously to resurrect them when his Mother would tell him it was not nice to kill one’s playmates.

Against all these views, the Church teaches that as difficult as it may be to understand, Jesus Christ was both truly God and truly Man.

Reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable natures—divine and human—is only part of the problem, however. The changing ways people had of understanding the historical Jesus himself was the root of the problem.

It was only over time that the people around Jesus came to understand his unique character. Today’s Gospel was a key part of that process.

From fragments here and there preserved in the Gospels, we know that the people who actually knew Jesus while he was alive had no problem seeing his human nature--

In Mark 3 we read a story about Jesus’ family trying to get Jesus to come home and start acting normally after he began his public ministry. They do this because they believe he has gone insane. Later in the chapter we read about Jesus publicly disassociating himself with his mother and brothers and saying “Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother.”

His family wasn’t alone in thinking that he was behaving in unexpected, if not inappropriate, ways. In Matthew 13 people from his home town wonder how on earth Jesus could be so wise and work such wonders, since he was just a local boy whose father, Mother, brothers, and sisters they all knew.

Even those who followed Jesus had a great difficulty coming to an understanding of who he was. When Simon confesses Jesus as the Messiah at Caesarea Philippi, this is seen as unusual. Jesus praises Simon’s acceptance of the witness of Heaven about Jesus’ identity by giving him a new name—Peter—that plays on the idea that such acceptance is the solid foundation of faith, (“You are a little stone—Petros, and upon this Bedrock—petra—I will build my Church…”)

It is about those who rejected Jesus’ mission because they could see only his human side that today’s Gospel says, “he came unto his own, and his own people rejected him.”

Clearly, Jesus’ bodily reappearance after what they all knew was his death made his disciples reconsider things and start reinterpreting what they had experienced with Jesus. After all, he was for many a close family member and friend who had said that somehow God was actively present in his person, who called God, “Father,” and said that their being right with God somehow depended on how they reacted to him.

In the Book of Acts, we read that shortly after Jesus’ death, reappearance, and final departure, his Mother and brothers had finally joined together with his disciples (Act 1:14).

Because of Easter, Jesus’ followers recognized that their Master was at the very least what the prophets of Israel had promised-- the ideal King of Israel anointed by God’s spirit to save his people and establish a kingdom of justice and peace. But this anointed one, or Messiah, had turned out to be not exactly what they had expected. He had not overthrown the foreign invaders, not brought history to an end, not set up the everlasting peaceable kingdom they had hoped for.

So their ideas of what the Messiah would have to change. They began to use one of the less common honorific terms for a king of Israel to describe him—Son of God. In the Psalms God says to the King of Israel, “You are my son, this day I have begotten you.” They now remembered that Jesus had repeatedly referred to God as “Father.”

They thus only came to recognize his true nature gradually, and as time moves on, they understand more and more, and the earlier they think it is that Jesus’ divine sonship was clearly established.

Saint Paul, whose writings are the earliest ones we have preserved in the New Testament, in about 50 C.E. says that Jesus Christ was “constituted as Son of God” as of his resurrection from the dead (Rom. 1).

About two decades later, the earliest Gospel, Saint Mark, says that the “beginning of the Gospel of Christ, the Son of God,” was at his baptism by John the Baptist, when God’s voice declared “You are my beloved Son,” the Spirit descended upon him.

Another decade or two later, in the late 70s and 80s, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke each tack on to the beginning of Mark’s story a couple of chapters of very divergent legendary material about the birth of Jesus.


But despite the unharmonizable differences differences in the legendary details, both Matthew and Luke agree in proclaiming the Jesus was Son of God from the moment of his conception in Mary’s womb.

You see the direction of the development? The more time goes one, the earlier it is that Christians believe that Jesus was constituted as Son of God: Paul says as of his resurrection; Mark, as of his baptism; Matthew and Luke, as of his conception and birth.

The latest Gospel in the New Testament, Saint John, was written around 100 C.E. Today’s Gospel reading says that it was not at Jesus’ resurrection, nor his baptism, nor his conception, that he was constituted as God’s Son. John says that it was always that way. Jesus was always in God and of God.

The hymn to Jesus Christ as the Logos, the eternal word of God, in John chapter 1 begins: “In the beginning was the word.”

This translation misses the richness of the Greek en arche en ho logos. Another way of translating might be, “At the start, at the root of all, the logos existed.” The writer is referring to a word with a long background and heavy baggage, both classical and Semitic.

The Greek word logos is where we get out word logo, our word logic, and our words analogue and dialogue. It means much more than just “word.” At its root, it means whatever it is that makes or conveys meaning or sense, whether in our minds or on our lips. The word logos in some ways includes the meanings of both the Latin words oratio “speech or utterance” and ratio “intelligence, rationality, sense.” Thus, a good way to translate the first verse is, “At the root of all things, there existed Meaning.”

But the Logos is not just meaning and utterance of meaning. In order to build a fence around the Law and avoid uttering “in vain” the name of God, Jews had begun to find ways of referring to God without using God’s name. The first action of God in creation is Genesis chapter one is speech. “God said, Let there be light, and light came into existence.” And so the creative active speech of God became one circumlocution for God proper, just as hashem, the name, did. But Dabar ha-Elohim “the word of God” became a powerful image of the power of God manifested in history and in personal lives as well. Later, the Aramaic term Memra “the word” became one the ways of referring to God as present, active, and discernable in the world.

I am sure that John has both images of logos, the Greek and the Semitic, in mind when he quotes this hymn about the logos who in the beginning is with God and is God.

The hymn says that the Word/Meaning/or Active Principle of God took on flesh and “dwelt” among us. The choice of the word “flesh” is almost certainly deliberate. In Semitic culture, basar “flesh” was the physical, earthy part of a person that you could see, touch, and smell. It was a key part of you, and not that separable from your mind or spirit. The symbol for a man to be part of the covenant that God made with Abraham was that he be circumcised in his flesh. For Greeks, sarx “flesh” was the changeable, impermanent part of a human being. For some Greek philosophers, it was the part that resisted reason and had a mind of its own, the part that I think we would identify by talking about addictive, obsessive, or compulsive behaviors. It was in this sense that Saint Paul had occasionally used the word—sarx for him sometimes is shorthand for that part of a human being that resists God’s intentions for us.

When the prologue of John says the logos became sarx, it means that Reason itself, Meaning itself, God’s Active Intention itself took on all it means to be a human being: all the limitations, all the doubts and fears, and the ignorances, all the handicaps.

The hymn softens this by adding “he dwelt among us.” The word used for “dwelt” is eskenasen: he “pitched his tent” among us. The image is of a temporary habitation, like the Tent of the Meeting or the Tabernacle of the ancient Israelites, where God Himself was made manifest to Moses. I usually translate it as “he dwelt for a time in our midst.”

The hymn adds, “and we saw his glory, as of the Only Son of the Father, full of Grace and Truth.” Perhaps a better way to express this would be “we saw his glory, as of someone from the Father who was absolutely One-of-a-kind, someone full of Grace and Truth”

It is here that for me, at least, the conflict between divine and human is resolved--Grace and Truth. For despite all our limitations, we human beings can on occasion transcend ourselves and open ourselves to Grace and Truth. On even fewer occasions, we can even become the instruments by which Grace and Truth can be given to others.

“We saw the glory of God made flesh, we saw the Glory of Meaning Itself placed within this apparently meaningless world—and we recognized that glory as Grace and Truth.”

Here is the squaring of the circle and the reconciling of the polar opposites—God revealing Himself as Grace--undeserved, unconditional, one-way love, and Truth—the acceptance of things as they are with a willingness to conform to things as they ought to be. It was in this that John says Jesus was recognized as the Logos from all eternity. But he adds-- Jesus was monogenes—one-of-a-kind. We occasionally can transcend ourselves. Despite all the limitations his humanity imposed, He is Transcendence Itself.

John affirms in his prologue that Jesus was in God, with God, indeed, was God from the beginning. This is part of larger effort in the Gospel to play down the earthly origins of Jesus and the patent humanity he enjoyed in order to make what really mattered stand out.

In John chapter 7, some of Jesus’s opponents complain that he could not be the Messiah because they knew he was from Nazareth, and they believed a tradition that the Messiah’s origin’s. Later in the chapter, other opponents say he cannot be the Messiah because they know he is from Galilee and they believe that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, the city of David. To the former, Jesus replies that the people around him do not truly know where he is from—he is from the Father above, and those about him don’t see this. To the latter, he does not say, “Oh yeah, well I was secretly born in Bethlehem, not Nazareth.” What he does say is this: “You have no idea where I am from.” Again, the point is clear: he is from above, from the bosom of the Father.

The hymn to the Logos ends by saying, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.”


In his Christmas Day sermon of 1611, the great Anglican divine Bishop Lancelot Andrewes commented on this chapter. Andrewes was a scholar, and was a major translator and editor of the King James Version of the Holy Bible, published earlier that year. This is what he said about the incarnation of Christ, the word being made flesh:

“I add yet farther; what flesh? The flesh of an infant. What, Verbum infans, the Word of an infant? The Word, and not be able to speak a word? How evil agreeth this!”

He uses the original Latin meaning of the word “infant,” namely, a person who is not yet able to speak, and thus portrays the Word made flesh as “the Word that cannot even speak a word.” There is something wrong in this to Andrewes: had he been speaking modern English, “how evil agreeth this!” would have been “This just isn’t right.”

The word that is unable to speak—Andrewes meant by this two things: the utter helplessness and powerlessness of God made man in a little baby, and the inexpressible depth of the revelation of God thus made.

Andrewes continues (I have updated his language a bit),

“And how was He born, how welcomed? In a stately palace, cradle of ivory, robes of estate? No, (here he borrows from the Gospel of Luke), but a stable for His palace, a manger for His cradle, poor clouts (rags) for His array. This was His fleshly beginning. But follow Him later on in life, it gets no better. Shivering when weather is cold; sweaty and faint when it is hot. Suffering hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. And is His end any better? It sums up his whole life—what is His flesh then? Scourged and beaten, black and blue, bloody and swollen, rent and torn, thorns and nails sticking in His flesh. When John says “became flesh and was made a human being” this is what the word “flesh” means. If the ever-lasting Word of God had been made head of all the angels, that would have been an abasement; to be a lesser angel, even worse. But listen to Old Testament passages applied to our Lord in the flesh that he was born to, “he was despised, rejected among the people,” and “I am a worm, and not even a human being.” “Born thus, clothed thus, housed thus, treated thus—this is as bad as it can get. He truly was among the lowest of the low. By thus being “made man” He was unmade. To take on this flesh, he had to lay aside much, and not merely play at lowness, but to suffer lowness by being low. I want you to think on this—why ever would He have done such a thing? Why such great indignity? What was it that made the Word thus to be made flesh? Certainly not some human motivation or principle. That already is flesh, and thus cannot provide a motive to become flesh. It was God alone, and in God nothing but love. Love alone did it. Love, as Saint Paul says, is not jealous, does not keep score, is not worried about status. And this emptying out of self is the core characteristic of love. This Love did not count costs, and thus did not worry about what flesh it would be made, but rather, how it would remake flesh.”


This helpless baby was God made one of us. We must treat all the helpless with the respect and compassion. The Ultimate Meaning of the universe found a place in human flesh, in the person of this speechless and helpless baby, who was only beginning to enjoy the good things life offers. But he was also just beginning to suffer everything that life can throw at any of us. Yet despite it all, he remained ever steadfast. This only Son of God offers us Grace and Truth, and gives us the chance to be adopted as Children of God. As helpless, pathetic fellow human beings, let us accept what he offers, and in Love offer the same Grace and Truth to those around us.

In the name of God, Amen.