Sermon of the Month - December 2008
Christmas in John
Introduction
In December we’ve been looking at the Christmas story as told by the different gospels.
If you were here earlier Sunday mornings, you will have heard me quote the whimsical take that, at a pinch, you could see the gospels as a bit like different newspapers with their different story. When it comes to Christmas, we haven’t looked at Mark with his Daily Mirror-like approach, because Mark gets straight to the action. He misses out Christmas altogether, then has just a few verses on John the Baptist, before getting straight to the action, with Jesus calling his disciples and healing the sick.
But we did look at Matthew with his Daily Telegraph-like take on Christmas – steady, reliable, a bit conservative and traditional, rooted in the past with his start with the family tree of Jesus, showing how Jesus is the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecies and hopes for a Son of David, the one through whom “God is with us”.
And we looked at Luke, with his more Guardian-like progressive, socially-inclined feminist angle, with his story centred on the experience of the women, Mary and Elizabeth, as much as that of the men, Zechariah and Joseph, and also his account of those outsiders, the shepherds, invited by angels to witness the baby Messiah.
Today we turn to John. If we try to match John with a daily newspaper it doesn’t quite work, because he has a very different way of doing things to Matthew, Mark and Luke. So if you really want a contemporary parallel, you’re going to have to think of those weeklies, The New Statesman and The Spectator, which concentrate less on the events, on home in more on the meaning of those events.
That’s John’s approach. Towards the end, he tells us exactly why he wrote his account of Jesus, and why he made the selection of episodes from his life: these are written that you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
John’s account is peppered with statements that sound simple and straightforward, but once you look and listen properly turn out to work at level after level. Just take that well known phrase, you must be born again: the word used, anwqen (anōthen) also means ‘from above’ – you must be born from above. Not only is this a call for a new birth, but a birth from above, from heaven. And that’s just the first of many, many subtleties we could see in that comment.
1. Full of truth
Now let’s turn to one of the big themes of this gospel: the truth. Jesus said I am the way, the truth and the life – and this theme of truth recurs throughout this gospel, including Pilate’s notorious comment (is it dismissive or simple bafflement?), What is truth? This concept of the truth among many other things is one of the many aspects in this rich word, Word in this account of the meaning of Christmas: In the beginning was the word. This word is the word of God, it is also the word of truth. But who listens to the truth any more. John’s gospel is full of challenges to listen to the truth. But we live in an age when truth is seen as subjective. We say believe in Jesus, in Christmas and so on, and other people can say, “How nice for you!” Truth is seen as a supermarket commodity to be purchased or not at will from a variety of options on the supermarkets shelves of life.
Or at least that’s how it’s been for the last 25 years. But things are starting to change. One sign, a straw in the wind, has been the new campaigning, hostile atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others, which rejects truth as ‘what we feel’. They are trying to pull us back to 1960s scientism, with a clear, objective take on truth, and a conviction that science is ‘true’ and religion is ‘false’. Much of this is very selective, blinkered and opinionated, but it is a sign that the old question of truth is beginning to return.
But the credit crunch is providing another aspect.
Did you hear this week’s story of economic disaster? All the jokesters are making great play on the fact that his name is “Madoff” [made-off] – Bernard Madoff, the tycoon who has made off with $50 billion dollars. This is the biggest swindle in history. It’s as if he stole nearly $1,000 from every single person in the United Kingdom. It’s a phenomenal scam. Banks have been left with losses of hundreds of millions to this man. Some of the brightest economists and businesspeople have made staggering losses. Nicola Horlick, to name one British example, has lost £10 million.
And what did Mr Madoff say about his scheme. “It was all one big lie.” Does the truth matter? The old assumption of the 80s and 90s that truth is subjective, that your truth is as good as mine is dead and buried. Truth and lies – they are different. If you can’t tell the difference, and you invest your millions in a lie, then you lose everything.
But people are not just investing money in terrible lies. They can also invest their lives in terrible lies.
Truth and lies – no matter of feeling and taste: we must tell the difference, or wreck our lives, not just our economies.
There is one big truth at the heart of John’s gospel, and at the heart of Christianity: The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. “Full of grace and truth.” He is full of truth. He is the truth, the truth of God. He is the means by which we know the truth. This also underlies the evocative phrases about him being the true light that gives light to everyone, or as in John 8 and John 9, where Jesus himself says, I am the light of the world.
2. Jesus is in the world, but not of the world
To coin a phrase, Jesus is ‘in the world, but not of the world’. John 1, verse 10: He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognise him. He was in the world, but not worldly. He was clearly different. This will provide the model for us, his followers. Just like Jesus, we neither disengage from the world, nor align our values with this world’s selfish values. Just as we need to be born again and born from above, so Jesus is the one who enables us to be born again and born from above, the one who enables us to be in the world without being compromised by its selfishness and corruption.
But John goes on. In verse 11: He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him… This indicates that he came to those who should not have been compromised by the pagan world, to Israel. They should have recognised him and the Spirit of God within him. But far too many did not. In the main, they did not. Even the house of faith proved to be a house of the world.
Yet some did recognise him. John goes on in paradoxical manner to state this. Having said his own did not receive him, he states straight after, Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. Jesus has followers. He should have the whole house of Israel, but he does have followers. But John then goes on in one of those tantalisingly teasing comments to describe such believers, those people who can now be described as children of God, he adds, children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
I said early on that John does not include many of the actual events, but instead gives us the meaning of those events. One of those events he does not include is the virgin birth. The account of Jesus born of a virgin is clear in Matthew and Luke, but not narrated in John. But to my mind it is clearly hidden in these words. Jesus was born not of natural descent, nor of a human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. He does not tell the story of the virgin birth, but here gives one aspect of its meaning. When Jesus is born of a virgin, its meaning is not simply that something special has happened, but that the one to be born is born of God. That in Jesus we have the one who supremely is born from above. But he calls us to be his followers, that we may, too, be born from above, that we too may experience our own ‘virgin birth’, our own miracle, in which we are born of God, of the Spirit, born from above, born again.
The same process of more than meets the eye is true in that most extraordinarily important verse, John 1:14: The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us. Have you ever thought why the NIV has that oddly awkward translation lived for a while, when the old KJV has the simpler dwelt – The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. They are trying, not very successfully you might suspect, to translate a very unusual word. The word is ‘tabernacled’, ‘pitched his tent’. “The word became flesh and pitched his tent…” What a strange phrase. But there’s more: and we beheld his glory – we have seen his glory. Glory and tents. Here again something extraordinary is hiding in the text, compressed in John’s rich account. It is the transfiguration. Once again, you won’t find the actual story of the transfiguration in John (unlike Matthew, Mark and Luke), but here you find its meaning. In the story told by Matthew, Mark and Luke, Peter stammers and blurts out, on seeing Jesus transformed in supernatural brilliance and suddenly in the company of the greatest heroes of a millennium earlier, Moses and Elijah; he blurts out, it is good Lord that we are here, for we can pitch three tents, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah. Tents, glory and Moses. That’s the story. Moses? Even his appearance is implicitly commented on here: The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus the Messiah. But what is the meaning? This is the meaning: The Word became flesh and pitched his tent here among us on planet Earth right in our midst, in Jesus Christ, and we have seen his glory, we have seen the transfigured sight. And through him reality itself and our lives are forever transfigured too, shot through with that brilliant glory of God.
3. Jesus is the Word of God, the Son of God, God incarnate
This then is the crowning glory. For this Word has been described in extraordinary terms right at the start. In the beginning… well we know how that carries on. We’ve been reading our Genesis: In the beginning, God. So when John carries on, In the beginning was the Word, we already have the deliberately provocative identification of this Word with God.But it is spelt out: and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And in that extraordinary challenge of the Scriptures which we can see in different ways also in Paul’s writings in Colossians and Philippians, and in the letter to the Hebrews, the Word of God is the Son of God, is the expression of God, is God, is Jesus.
I am certain that we are still in Genesis 1 verse 1 when John asserts in verse 3: Through him all things were made; without him nothing has been made that was made. But all is even clearer when we reach verses 4 and 5, for they take us back to Genesis 1 verse 3, where God said, Let there be light, and there was light. Here is John 1, vv.4-5: In his was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome/understood it (that’s another word with two intended meanings). Jesus is the word of God. But what is the ‘Word’ of God? Your word is what you say. So is mine. God’s Word is what he says. We use our words to express ourselves, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so well. But God speaks his Word successfully: he communicates himself utterly completely and truly. God speaks in Genesis 1 verse 3 and says, Let there be light. And his speech is effective: there was light. And so it continues throughout Genesis 1: God speaks his creative Word and creation occurs. Now this word is therefore the Word through which all things were made. And now comes this extraordinary twist: The Word became flesh. This Word of God which expressses everything that God is truly and absolutely, this Word has become flesh, it is become a person, it is expressed and revealed in all divine brilliance and transfigured glory before which, like Peter, we can only stammer: this whole reality of God is expressed fully, truly, absolutely, uniquely and solely in Jesus.
The truth matters. Lies destroy; lies bankrupt; lies wreck. But the truth liberates, the truth renews, the truth saves. And Jesus is the Word of God, grace of God, the truth of God. Shun all lies! – all short-cuts, all fashionable opinions and passing fads and fashions – and cling to the truth! Follow Jesus! – for in him and in him alone can we know God’s salvation, and the key to everything worthwhile in life and in eternity.