Christmas Sermon, 2024
Cathedral 10.00am HC
Hebrews 1: 1-4; John 1: 1-14
Do you ever find yourself asking a question like this? God, if you are real, could you make it a bit more obvious? He could answer it and there would be a world where there was no room for Nietzsche’s and Richard Dawkins' ideology because the evidence against was overwhelming. More importantly, we might see more obvious signs of intervention in the travails of the world: war in Ukraine, climate catastrophe and people’s personal suffering. We might hope for more intervention to deal with the church’s failures and incompetencies, particularly over safeguarding, given that we are meant to represent him. Believing in God as he is, in the world as it is, seems to be takes quite a bit of work.
The reading from John’s Gospel grapples with precisely such a question in his poetic and philosophical way. John’s conviction. Along with all the other New Testament writers is that God’s definitive and final revelation of himself is to be found in the person of Jesus Christ, not in philosophical reasoning, or the folk who try imperfectly to represent him, even though he uses a bit of Greek philosophy to get there. He recognises the problem I identified at the beginning. In v. 5, ‘the light shines in the darkness’; in v. 10, he was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognise him. He certainly wasn’t immediately recognised by his contemporaries as anything other than a craftsman from 'up north'. Even his family, when he began his itinerant ministry, tried to take him away at one point. They thought he’d gone mad.
John raises the intriguing possibility that the evidence for the reality of God and his character is there, it's just that (for all sorts of reasons) people struggle to see it. For John, the problem doesn’t lie with the broadcasting but the receiving. There is something stopping the signal getting through.
Now, there are number of reasons why we might not recognise someone we ought to know. When I went to university I had grown a beard, quite a big one and people first knew me with that configuration. After a few weeks, I got bored with it and shaved it off. I had a week’s anonymity. People I knew well walked right past me, and even when I spoke to them it took them a while to make the connection. My friends were working with an expectation of what they thought I should look like. There was a set of expectations in Jesus' time that made the real Jesus very difficult to see. It was a combination of desperation at Roman oppression and a deep, visceral hunger for rescue, combined with a world view that could only see such rescue in political and military terms. When Jesus began his earthly ministry there was none of that. Veiled allusions to who he truly was, coupled with extraordinary miraculous signs, were not what they were expecting. Their view of God as exclusivist, nationalist and judgemental didn’t match with the Jesus whose kindness, humility, love and sacrifice he claimed were what God was really like. There just wasn’t enough smiting – especially of the Romans and their Jewish collaborators. All this begs the question as to whether our expectations of what God should be like cohere with the reality or are projections of our own aspiration.
Similarly, we might not recognise God in the same way we fail to recognise someone we haven’t seen for some time. A friend of mine was brought up in the far east just before the second world war. Her father was a soldier and was captured by the Japanese. He escaped and after a long trek through the jungle made his way back. At first glance he was so emaciated that she simply didn’t recognise him. Time and his transformation changed them both. Such separation can be forced or come about by neglect. We may have had a childhood view of God that was simplistic and hasn’t been able to withstand the rigours of the real world. It may be that Christmas marks a periodic attempt to renew acquaintance. It may feel like a real engagement with God would be like one of those awkward re-unions with someone from whom you departed on bad terms years ago. I remember a school re-union like that a few years ago. I was never very happy at school and went back under sufferance. But I was delighted and surprised how well we all got on. I hope that the re-telling of this Christmas story might re-assure you that God is waiting hopefully to renew an acquaintance with you. The image of God shown us in Jesus Christ really is the real deal. God’s infinity dwindled to infancy, as Gerald Manley Hopkins put it in his poem, ‘The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe’.
And finally, we can fail to recognise someone fully because of context. If I may be a bit confessional. After 11 years a vicar, towards the end of my time there, I would sometimes see people in the street and struggle to remember whether I had married them, baptised their children or buried their parents. I knew it was one, but it took a bit of a conversation for the memory to trigger. The remarkable thing is that God can encounter us in any context. I would wager that even if coming to Church is a rare thing for you, your life this year has not been devoid of spiritual experiences. You may have sensed something on a wonderful holiday, or a joyous family event. You may even have sensed something beyond yourself as you sat at the bedside of sick friend or committed a loved one at a funeral. I always think it's quite difficult to be an atheist in Herefordshire. The landscape and the natural beauty say something, or more particularly someone, lies behind it. You may have ascribed that experience to something else, but these things are hints of the reality of God, the God who is constantly reaching out to us as Jesus did to call us home; the God who can be encountered outside the church as easily as inside. “The Word (indeed)became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth”.
And John invites us to go deeper. As he says in verse 12, “yet to those who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent, nor of a human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God”. Encounter and experience can lead to relationship. Relationship can lead to life. Mystery will always remain – the light shines in the darkness, but Jesus shows us enough of God to trust in the midst of it. I pray for all of us this Christmas that experiences may translate into encounters into relationship into trust. May we know him more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly, now and always. Amen.