Sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas
“Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son
and shall call his name Emmanuel”
(Isaiah 7.14)
“When the fullness of the time was come,” as Paul puts it, “God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.” A powerful statement about the meaning of the Incarnation, the meaning of Christmas, it highlights at once the extravagant and wonderful idea of the intimacy of God’s engagement with our humanity and its meaning for us. God sent forth his son born of Mary that we might become the sons of God. His phrase captures the vocation of our humanity. God calls us into communion with himself through the Incarnation.
Matthew in the Gospel which accompanies the Epistle reading from Galatians tells us about the birth of Christ. Christmastide is all about the richness of the stories of the Incarnation and its purpose and meaning. The Nativity accounts are in Luke and Matthew but as direct and straightforward as they are or at least seem to be they are far from simple linear accounts. They are themselves profoundly poetic and philosophical.
It is easy to raise skeptical questions about the details of the Nativity. The stories are ones which have come down to us long after the events they relate. But it belongs to almost all forms of writing, including journalism, to create a narrative, a story with a meaning, to take the events or the so-called facts and put them into an order without which there is no story. At the heart of the Christmas story is that ordering of ideas by the Evangelists and others that open us out to a new reality, the reality of God’s intimate engagement with our humanity. There is, inescapably, the awareness of the something new and different, something which changes our entire outlook. With Paul it is the concept of the fullness of time; with Matthew, the sense of the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy.
I know of no passage of Scripture about which so much ink has been spilled and to so little purpose than the passage from Isaiah that Matthew quotes. (more…)
