Christmas 1 Year B

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John 1:1-18

Those words, In the Beginning, ring familiar do they not? If I were to read only those three words, and then ask you from what book of the Bible I was reading, I think most minds would wander back to the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis, where the great creation stories begin with the words, In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

St. John says in this week’s Gospel: In the beginning, the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John is giving us his “birth narrative,”not in the context of first century Roman history in the little town of Bethlehem, but in the context of the majestic and powerful story of the creation of the universe.

We have come to cherish the simple story about a baby being born under a star and lying in a manger, but the first verses of John’s Gospel tell us that the One who sets the stars in their places and all the galaxies into motion is the One who reached down to inhabit the earth with his Holy Word at the first Christmas!

From the beginning the Word was with God, and all things came into being through the Word.

Wow, this Word doesn’t sound like the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes we read on Christmas Eve. This Word who was with God sounds so transcendent, so powerful, so mysterious. But when we read, The Word became flesh, are not our minds directed right back to that dependent and defenseless baby in the stable? We can’t avoid it, and why should we ever want to?

It really doesn’t take us very long to realize that John and Luke are saying exactly the same thing; only their writing styles differ. But here’s some appropriate questions to ask in this season:

Why wouldn’t the Almighty Creator God of the universe come to earth in a more Omnipotent God-like way?  Why didn’t he come as a fifty-foot tall, winged giant breathing the fire of righteous truth, instead of a baby sleeping on hay? Why couldn’t the Vision of God be embodied on this planet in something or someone more prominent, more powerful than a child who cries out only when he needs his mother? Why?

I submit that the reason is simple. Our God is a God of love, and aGod of love doesn’t get a charge out of looking Supreme and sounding scary.  A God of love wants only the best for his beloved. A God of love wants us to get his message of love and will do anything so that we might understand the message!

I had an eighth-grade teacher who was like a God of love…. He looked at this awkward, nerd of a thirteen-year-old boy who was far too tall for his level of coordination, with his much-maligned red hair, and the stigma of being the newest student in the school, and somehow, he saw something in me that no one else, save my own mother and father could see.

When this teacher paid that little bit of extra attention to me on the playing field and after school, and when he embraced me with his presence, just by being there for me, he was sending me a clear message: You’re not condemned. . . you’re valuable. . . you’re worthy of love!

Everybody needs to hear those words. I submit that when the Word became flesh, humanity and divinity participated in the first Cosmic group hug, and in doing so, God had found a way to whisper those precious words in our ears for eternity! That’s why our God of love came to be flesh of the Virgin Mary and was born as a baby in the little town of Bethlehem.

It may not be the ONLY way, but surely it was the best way that God could convince us that we are valuable, that we are loved, that we are most definitely not condemned but saved!

 Several years ago, a schoolteacher accepted the volunteer position of visiting and teaching children who were inpatients in a large city hospital. One day the phone rang, and she received her first assignment as a new volunteer. She took his name and room number and was told by his teacher that this boy was studying nouns and adverbs in his class before he was hospitalized.

It wasn’t until the visiting teacher got outside the boy’s hospital room that she realized that he was a patient in the hospital’s Burn Unit. She was prepared to teach English Grammar, but she was not prepared to witness the horrible look and smell of badly burned human flesh. She was not prepared to see a young boy in great pain either. She wanted to hold her nose, to turn and leave faster

than she came.

She couldn’t just walk away, so she clumsily walked over to his bedside, and she simply said, I’m the hospital teacher, and your teacher has sent me to help you with nouns and adverbs. The next morning, a nurse from the burn unit asked her, What did you do to that boy? The teacher began to apologize profusely, but before she could finish, the nurse interrupted her:  You don’t understand. . . We’ve been really worried about him. His condition has been deteriorating over the past few days because he had completely given up hope, but ever since you were here with him yesterday, his whole attitude has changed, and he’s fighting back and responding to treatment. It’s as though he decided to live!

When the nurse later questioned him about it, the boy said, I figured I was doomed, that I was going to die, until I saw that teacher. As a tear began to run down his face, he finished:

But when I saw her, I realized that they wouldn’t send a teacher to work on nouns and adverbs with a dying boy. . . would they?

Isn’t part of the wonder and awe of Christmas wrapped up in the fact that we realize that God wouldn’t send his only Son into our world, his very flesh, if our world wasn’t redeemable. God wouldn’t become flesh if we were doomed to simply live out our lives until some cataclysm befalls this puny little planet. . . would He?

He wouldn’t have suffered teething and growing pains, and the anguish of adolescence, and the rejection of peers and the hurt of brokenness, and the stripes of torture and the nails of the cross unless there was hope for us. . . would He?

The Word became flesh. Do you know what this means to me?

It means that God took skin just like ours to save our skins!  A God of love would never use a party line or call collect, but only person-to-person. A God of love will take enough interest in us that we should be convinced that we are not condemned to darkness, but we can clearly see, just as if the cosmic light switch was turned on!

As St. John says it, the true light which enlightens everyone was coming into the World!

Christmas offers us a way out of merely existing by revealing just how sacred and holy we really are in the sight of God. 

Christmas proclaims that when the Word became flesh, God had managed to slip into the flesh of the healthy and the sick, the young and the old, and yes, even the flesh of an out-of-shape baby boomer, like me, who still sometimes hears that haunting voice of the thirteen-year-old repeating its message that condemns self-esteem and denies self-worth.

Christmas reminds us that the majestic God of Mount Sinai who was once admired only from a distance has now come closer to us than we are to ourselves.

And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us!