Christmas Day, 2005
Texts: Heb. 1:1-12; Jn. 1:1-14
The Rev. Jerry Kistler
“God has spoken… And the Word was made flesh”
Merry Christmas! It’s wonderful to see you all here today, especially after having seen a report on the evening
news this past Thursday of how many people were planning to stay away from church this morning, to the
point that many of the largest churches in the nation would be closed today. And the newscaster gave this
report with some alarm. “We expect, he said, banks, and schools, and businesses to be closed on Christmas,
but of all days, churches?” We know we’re in trouble when the world is scandalized more than Christians at
the closure of worship services! But it’s just another indication, isn’t it, of the drift of our culture: that even
Christians are giving up the Holy Day of Christmas for the holiday of Christmas. If we won’t uphold the
sacredness of Christmas, how can we expect our culture to? I could go on and on, but as Forest Gump says,
“That’s all I have to say about that.”
So it is good to see you all here on this most blessed day in which we celebrate the birth, and participate in the
worship of, our newborn King.
Now I suppose some of you, who are not quite as familiar with the Prayer Book as others might think they are,
might have been a bit surprised at the choice of the Epistle and Gospel readings for today. You might have
expected to hear the familiar story of the birth of Christ from the Gospel of Luke. But instead we hear two
rather difficult passages of theological reflection on the nature of Christ from the opening words of the Book of
Hebrews and of the Gospel of John. What’s going on here? "Okay, so we came to church on Christmas day;
don’t’ we at least get to hear the Christmas story?" Well, yes you do, just from a different perspective; from
the perspective that makes the birth in Bethlehem those two-thousand years ago truly the most wondrous and
astounding event in the history of this planet. We are the “visited planet,” as someone has put it. So we see
Christmas this morning from the perspective of heaven itself; from the perspective of all eternity past and of
the vastness of the eternal realm of God, which in a sense becomes small and enters into our space and time
history in the form of a little child. And in that little child God reveals himself to mankind, and offers to enter
into a saving relationship with us. That’s our perspective on Christmas this morning.
And so we begin with the opening words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and what a amazing passage of
Scripture it is, full of deep and wondrous statements of theological truth. But beneath all the words and glorious
phrases of those opening sentences lies a very simple but very profound truth, and it’s just this: that God has
spoken. God has spoken.
From all time man has been a mountain builder, building his Tower of Babels, his ziggurats, his sacred
pyramids, to try to climb up to heaven to see what God is like, to know something of who God is, and to
receive some authoritative word from on high to make sense of his world and his place in it, and to have some
guidance on how to live his life. Oh how we all long for and seek an authoritative word when we’re trying to
figure things out in our lives! When we’re sick, what do we do? We go to a doctor to get the authoritative
word about what’s wrong with us, and what we need to do to get better. Some of us will be going home from
the service this morning to try to figure out how to put together those toys for the kids that say on the box
“some assembly required.” So what do we hope? That the guy packing the box didn’t forget to include the set
of authoritative instructions on how to put the darn thing together. (Not that we men really need them, right
guys? Your wives say, “Ya, right!”). When trying to figure out our taxes during tax season, we want the
authoritative word of a CPA or someone else who knows the tax-law – which is completely beyond knowing
by most mortals - so we can pay the right amount and not be penalized for not giving every drop of blood the
IRS demands. You see, all aspects of our lives are governed and guided by authoritative words. So with regard
to the larger issues of life - the meaning of life, where we come from, and where we’re going; Who God is,
and who we are in relationship to Him; and how we may come to have eternal life – isn’t it truly a wonderful
thing that the greatest authority in the universe, God, has spoken and given us His Word?
But if God has spoken, what does He have to say? Well, when you add up everything God has ever spoken to
mankind, He really has only one Word to say to us, and that one Word is “Jesus.” Jesus is everything God has
ever wanted to say to mankind. The whole Bible, the Word of God, from Genesis to Revelation is about Jesus.
The Law of God is fulfilled by Jesus. All of the ceremonies and feasts and sacrifices pointed forward to Jesus.
All of the prophets prophesied of the coming of Jesus. The whole experience of the nation of Israel is summed
up in the person of Jesus, the One true Israelite. All of the Wisdom of God, the Proverbs and the Psalms, find
their embodiment in Jesus. It’s all about Jesus. Jesus is God’s Word to the world.
But then when we go over to our lesson from the Gospel of John, we find something truly amazing. We find
that God’s Word is God. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God.”
Now the Jews of the John’s day would have understood this passage a lot better than we do because it was
written in their vernacular, their idiom - and not in the Greek idiom, by the way, but actually in the Aramaic
idiom – Aramaic being the language that Jesus and John and the rest of the apostles spoke - although it was
translated into Greek by John in His Gospel. Because you see, in the Targums, the Aramaic paraphrases of the
Scriptures by the great rabbis, which were read in the synagogues as authoritative in John and Jesus’ day,
every place in the Old Testament where God manifests Himself to man, the Targums read, instead of “God,”
“The Word of God.” So, for example, instead of Moses speaking to the Lord in the burning bush, the Targums
read that Moses spoke to “the Word of the Lord” in the burning bush. “And the Word of the Lord said to
Moses, ‘I am He who said unto the world, “Be!” and it was’” (Ex. 3:4 Jonathan Targum). Rather than saying
the people went out into the desert to meet God, the Targums say that the people went out to meet the Word of
God. Instead of saying “the Lord was revealed to Abraham between the divided parts, the Targums say “The
Word of the Lord was revealed to Abraham between the divided parts.” Again in the Targums Hosea 1:7 reads,
“But I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and I will save them by the Word of the Lord, their God.”
You see in the Targums, “The Word of God” is clearly seen as a Person, a Person identifiable and equal to
God, a person to be worshipped, served, obeyed, spoken to, and prayed to, as God. Even in the minds of the
Jews of Jesus’ day, the Word of God was not just scratches of ink on a page, although that’s the Word of
God too. But ultimately the Word of God is a Person. The Word of God is God.
So when John says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,”
actually he’s right in step with the tradition of his day. But John goes much further. Oh yes! While the people
of John’s day may still have thought of the Word of God as an invisible influence to be contemplated, or a brief
manifestation of God that was only sporadically revealed to man sometime in the far distant past, the radical,
earth-shattering news John proclaims is that the Word of God, the Revelation of God to man, has come so
close to us as in fact to become one of us. “Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld His
glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
“What if God was one of us?” the song asks. Well that is exactly what John is proclaiming in these glorious
opening verses of his Gospel. And this truth literally turns the world upside down. It’s no longer man
scampering up the mountain to try find out what God is like and to get a Word from the Lord; God the Word
has come down the mountain to us to show us what he’s like, and to live among us as the final, perfect,
authoritative Word for our lives, indeed for our eternal lives.
“God who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these
last days spoken to us by His Son.” But you see, the Word of God is not just about Jesus; the Word of God is
Jesus. Jesus is God’s Word to the world. And so if you want to know something of Who God is and what He’
s is like, if you want to know that He is a God of mercy and compassion and forgiveness, and if you want the
word of the highest authority there is about the meaning of your life, how you ought to live your life, and how
your life may be transformed from one of sin, and degradation, and death, to one life, and light, and godliness,
then all you need to do is to look to and hear Jesus, for He is the Word of Life.
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we
have looked upon, and our hands have handled, “concerning the Word of life. – the life was manifested,”
writes John in opening verses of his first epistle. That’s what Christmas is all about. God’s Word to the World,
His Word of Life, was manifested. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. “In Him was life, and the
life was the light of men.” The great and glorious truth of this most blessed and holy of days is that, even
through a little baby lying in a manger in a stable outside of Bethlehem, God “has shined in our hearts to give us
the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus” (2 Cor. 4:6). And having the light of Christ
shining in our hearts, we have that Word of Life, that Word which brought light into the darkness at the first
creation, and that Word which brings light into the darkness of our own hearts in the new creation, we have
that Word dwelling with us, and in us, still to this day.
And so we celebrate today, on this Christmas morning, that God has indeed spoken …and the Word was made
flesh. Glory be to Jesus. +