Christmas Day 2022: John 1:1-14

 When I was in seminary, a classmate had a practice of making memes out of our professors. He did it in the safest way possible: by putting direct quotes of theirs over their pictures. Although entirely out of the context of the lectures, it led to such gems as our theology professor saying, “we’re the jellyfish of grace; just supine and flopping around unable to assist in anything.” Or our preaching professor saying, “It’s kind of unprofitable to sin by yourself.” Or our history professor saying, “and then he sold out the peasants.” I was also in all of those classes and don’t remember the context of any of these quotes. I’m sure our professors had larger points. But my favorite, and one you’ve probably heard me quote surrounding Holy Week and Easter, comes from our liturgy professor: “Jesus is not a groundhog.”

I do remember the context of that. In celebrating Holy Week and Easter, Christians often need the reminder that Jesus doesn’t die and rise again every year. Unlike Puxatawny Phil, Jesus rose once. While we remember his death, we do so while living in the resurrection. Even on Good Friday, he is risen. In the same way, the incarnate God that in the person of Jesus was just as present two days ago as he is today.

We do a better job with remembering that Jesus isn’t being born every year at Christmas than we do surrounding his death during Holy Week - partially because we have a similar celebration in our culture: the birthday party. And while I appreciate the “birthday” celebration keeping us in the knowledge that Jesus is already here - not being re-birthed every year - by treating Christmas as Jesus’s birthday more than as the Feast of the Incarnation, we risk minimizing the power of the incarnation.

John really drives home the power of the incarnation in the poem that begins his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Jesus, God the incarnate son, is eternal. He was not created but was before creation began and is imperishable. He was and is and is to be. But more than that, He is the incarnate logos. I’m not going to take issue with the translation as “word” - it is perfectly acceptable. We in the modern Western world really like that translation. We are comfortable with personification as a literary device. The challenge with a lot of philosophical and theological concepts, is that there usually isn’t a great one-to-one translation. For instance here, logos can also be translated as “reason” or “plan”. In ancient Greek philosophy - and early Christian theology - logos is the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it meaning. This identification of Jesus with the logos is based on Old Testament concepts of revelation, such as occurs in the frequently used phrase “the Word of the Lord”—which connoted ideas of God’s activity and power—and the Jewish view that Wisdom is the divine agent that draws humans to God and is identified with the word of God. John’s use of this philosophical expression, Jesus is the logos, would have been easily recognizable to readers in Greek culture, to emphasize the redemptive character of the person of Christ, who later in the Gospel of John describes himself as “the way, and the truth, and the life.” Just as the Jews viewed the Torah as preexistent with God, so also John viewed Jesus. The difference is John interprets the logos as inseparable from the person of Jesus and does not imply that the logos is simply the revelation that Jesus proclaims. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

All of this to say: Christmas is so much more than a birthday party, and Jesus is so much more than the personification of an idea. We say in the Nicene Creed that Jesus is “of one Being with the Father” and “begotten, not made.” This means that Jesus wasn’t created by God like we were, but that he came from God - he is of the same essence as God. He is God’s essence enfleshed in humanity: both fully human and fully divine. Jesus is God becoming like one of us to show us how it’s done. To show us what a life of perfect love of one another and perfect obedience to God looks like.

What does it look like for us to live like Jesus is here? For while we say in our Eucharistic prayer that “Christ will come again,” in the meantime, as St Teresa of Avila reminds us that that means, “Christ has no body now but yours.” It is our privilege as Christians to be the body of Christ in the world. To show the world what we learned from Jesus’s earthly ministry and how it continues to move our hearts and our feet.

So while Jesus is not a groundhog, he is also not simply the “birthday boy.” And while it’s important to mark the activity of our timeless God within our time on this Christmas morning, it is just as important to remember that Jesus is. He is yesterday and tomorrow. He is last week and next year. He is the “I am”. The presence of Jesus reminds us of our ever-present God and His never failing love for us. Amen.