Sermon for Christmas Eve
“God … hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son”
There is very little that is sentimental about Christmas Eve, contrary perhaps to all our expectations. We hear in the readings from Hebrews and the Prologue from John’s Gospel tremendous things that awaken wonder. But we hear nothing about the baby Jesus, nothing about the stable or manger, nothing about shepherds visited by angels, nothing about a star in the east, nothing even about Jesus or Mary by name, apart from their mention in the Christmas anthems and the hymns. Yet everything about this holy night speaks to our hearts and minds.
Christmas speaks to the meaning of our humanity embraced by God in Christ’s holy birth. Far from being a touching and sentimental story about the birth of a child, a miracle of nature, as it were, our readings speak about the miracle of the Son of God, this day begotten in the flesh but who is from everlasting, the first-born brought into the world whom the angels of God worship and whose throne and kingdom is for ever and ever, as Hebrews puts it. The Son is the Lord who in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth and the heavens. He is eternally God who speaks to us in these last days. For, “the Word made flesh” is the Word, Son, and Light of God who was “in the beginning with God”, and has come unto the world made by him and has come unto his own; in short, to us.
This is a curious kind of speaking, to be sure, speaking here is a metaphor about the nature of God’s revelation to us, thus using aspects of our thinking and being to make known something which is entirely beyond our imagining in any other kind of way. It is quite simply the mystery of God’s eternal love for our humanity made manifest so that we might live through the only-begotten Son of God. Only-begotten eternally in the mystery of the Trinity; only-begotten for us as conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary, made man and born this night of her. It is the divinum mysterium revealed in the fullness and wonder of this holy night, a challenge and a blessing but not one which we can take for granted nor one which we can in any way domesticate and reduce to ourselves. We cannot make Christmas. The mystery of this holy night seeks to gather us into the mystery of God with us. God speaks things into being. God is the maker.
Hebrews exalts the mystery of Christ eternally. John signals both his eternal birth from the God the Father everlasting and his birth in flesh and in time through Mary. Yet John also signals the further wonder: he comes into the world which was made by him and yet knew him not, he comes unto his own, our humanity, yet his own received him not. There is at once the affirmation of the wonder of the Word made flesh dwelling among us and the wonder of his being rejected by the world which knew him not and by his own which received him not; all so gently, so firmly, so poetically stated. A testament to human perfidy in the face of God’s infinite love and faithfulness. Such a wondrous mystery; the wonder of God’s doing in the very being of our humanity. How can our hearts and minds not be moved? All this belongs to the mystery and wonder of Christmas in and through all of the richness of the images that circle around the Bethlehem scene.
