And the Word became flesh

Christmas Day, 2009

Grace Church

In the beginning was the Word. Have you ever wondered what that might mean? Are words, is a word, ever at the beginning? I remember when I was in college thinking a lot about words. I repeatedly had the experience, I’m sure everyone’s had it, where I couldn’t quite find the word to express the thought I was having. I would be frustrated because my grand idea never sounded as good when I spoke it as when I was thinking it. As I studied foreign languages, and as I became fluent in German, that feeling became even more common. There were times when I wanted to say something in English, and knew the perfect German word, but no English word seemed adequate. Of course the opposite was true as well.

Words are funny things. We need them to communicate; we also need them to think. Philosophers debate, and have debated for thousands of years, whether the written word is more important or less important than the spoken word, and where the unspoken idea fits, as well. I’m sure you know that the word translated in John 1:1 as “word” can mean other things, among them reason, wisdom, even idea. These verses in the Gospel of John are so important in the Christian tradition because they make the connection between us and God in a profound way. It is fitting that the church has long read this gospel on Christmas Day, because it allows us to reflect on the miracle of the incarnation.

For John to begin this way—in the beginning was the word—is to link Christmas to creation. In the beginning was the word draws our attention away from Bethlehem for a moment and to the whole universe. In Genesis 1, God creates by speaking. “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light and God saw that it was good.”

Creation and Christmas are linked, not just because John 1 is the gospel for Christmas Day. Creation and Christmas are linked because Christmas is the feast of the Incarnation, when we celebrate Christ becoming human. The Incarnation, Christmas reminds us that it the universe in which we live was created by God, and that it was created good. The Incarnation and Christmas teach us the important lesson that the world in which we live, the bodies that we inhabit, were created good.

It is a difficult lesson to learn, because so much of our experience seems to deny that goodness. To deny the goodness of creation is one of the oldest heresies in Christianity. It appears to us in various guises. Sometimes, it rejects the material world, even our human bodies as evil and sees salvation as deliverance from this mortal flesh. Sometimes, it appears in another form, when you hear Christians wanting God to destroy everything, punish the world and all that is in it and start over.

In the ancient world, it was inconceivable for many, especially the more learned, to imagine that the divine might become human. By the time of the New Testament, most cultured Greeks and Romans thought the old myths, even the old gods—Zeus, Apollo, and the like—were nothing more than stories that might have a suitable moral. But for these people, the idea that the divine could become flesh and bone was inconceivable. That bias remained in early Christianity, and for many, it remains today. Many Christians are uncomfortable thinking about a Jesus who had emotions, or was ever hungry, or whose body was limited in the ways that our bodies are.

Of course, that is what the story of Mary giving birth to Jesus in a stable in Bethlehem is all about—that God became flesh like we are flesh. In these verses from John, we here both sides of the paradox that is the incarnation. On the one hand, the profound statement that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” On the other hand, that profound statement, “and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. In that paradox is the heart of the Christian message, that the God who created the World is present among us, recreating us, and the world.

Those Christians who, in centuries past and today, have a strong sense of the fallen-ness of human nature and the fallen-ness of creation are not entirely wrong. St. Paul writes in the letter to the Romans “that all creation has been groaning until now.” The English poet John Milton put it another way. When describing Adam and Eve eating the apple in Paradise Lost, Milton writes “Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her Seat, Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe that all was Lost.”

All was not lost. Milton and Paul are trying to express that deep sense that things are not as they should be. It is a sense we all have when we encounter suffering, or death, or any inadequacy in ourselves or in those around us. But in spite of that, creation is good. It must be, for we believe it was created by God, who is good.

Today on Christmas we celebrate the Incarnation, the word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. I began by speaking about the inadequacy of words. Words can hurt, we can easily misunderstand one another; we find it hard to express ourselves as clearly and plainly as we want. Our faith is expressed in words, and very often those words seem inadequate to say what we think they mean; sometimes we wonder whether we really believe what we say. Christians have fought over words, and still do, we fight over the meaning of the creed and over the meaning of scripture.

In the beginning was the Word—the logos, the idea, perhaps even a conversation that God had with Godself. When God created with the Word, when God comes to us in the Word, God reaches out to us to draw us to God. We don’t need to try to comprehend it, because it can’t be. We need only be assured that God is present, in Word and Sacrament, and in the Incarnation.