First Sunday After Christmas

(Guest preacher: Malcolm Heath)

The gospel today was the first thing we tried to translate when I took Greek in college.  We sat down, with very little of the language under our belts other than a rough approximation of how we might pronounce the words, and attempted to apprehend the meaning of this passage.

En arche – we sounded this out

En arche ain ho logos – In beginning was the word

kai ho logos ain pros ton theon – and the word was towards the God

This is heady stuff to read in the original.  We got the meaning, but not necessarily the _meaning_.  The translator is a traitor, goes the old saying.  How else could it be?  Take a text, any text, in any language far removed from your own, in time, in space, and attempt to figure out what it meant to the person who wrote it, and to those who first heard it.  What, indeed, would an ad for post-Thanksgiving “doorbuster” deals mean to someone 1500 years from now? 

And this particular text, well this particular text is among I think the very hardest to really understand, because it deals with who Christ is, and was, and perhaps even, who He is to be. 

We just celebrated the Incarnation, Christmas, and we say that this is the time we celebrate a remarkable happening – that God became human, manifest in flesh, and came into the world. 

But, what does that mean?  As it turns out, this has been a central question for Christians for centuries.  And it’s an important question, even know, and I would say, a question that will always be important to us.  It’s a question that’s fraught with complexity, and no small part of danger, theology so thick and dense and difficult that it’s the life work of a believer to attempt to apprehend it.

If we place too strong an emphasis on the divinity of Christ, we may make him too much a God, and too little of a man.  God becomes human, but only in appearances, not in reality.  Clothed in flesh, certainly, but not actually human.  This has all sorts of implications, doesn’t it?  That he didn’t _really_ suffer on the Cross (for how can God feel pain?)  That he knew all the answers, and never doubted himself, and thus, never cried out, never wept, not really, and always knew exactly what to say. 

If, on the other hand, we place too much emphasis on Jesus as a man, we run the risk of making him merely a sage, a wise man, a leader.  Indeed, in the Jewish conception of a messiah, that’s exactly what he was supposed to be – a leader, a king, someone sent and inspired by God, but not God himself.  And if we believe that Jesus was that sort of messiah, then he failed.  After his death, the Romans still ruled over Jerusalem.  The temple still stood.  No golden age followed. 

He must be both – both the God who existed before anything else, in the beginning, but also the babe born of Mary – the one who will come again, to judge the quick and the dead, but also the man who cried out on the cross in pain and fear. 

The god who healed the sick.  The man who yelled at his mother.  The God who walked on water and calmed the storm.  The man who overturned tables in his Father’s house.

The man who was more than just a man, but wasn’t any less than one.  The sort of man who could convince fishermen to follow him with a word or a glance – and the sort of God who could conceive of a victory not over another God King, like Ceasar, but over death and fear and sin.

I find it odd that we’re so quick to think we understand the powers of a God.  That we can detail those qualities of the divine which we seem to easily be able to summon up in our minds – overwhelming love, powerful justice, miracles of healing, and vast creative energies.  And I also find it odd that we are so terribly slow to realize that the power in this story comes not from the powers of a God, but the powers of a human – a human who would stop to heal a leper, who would try to help the blind see and the lame walk.  It’s the God that he is that did those things, but the human he was that thought to do them in the first place.   That thought that it would be good to teach.  To wander far from family and place to try, in however small a way, to heal the world. 

Jesus the Christ – who said his father was God.  And who said that we, too, are children of the most high.  And who raged and cried and laughed and drank and ate, and eventually died.  The secret here, my friends, is not that he was God who was man, or that he was a man who was also God, but that by his very life, he showed that the two are not that far apart – that there can be a union of the divine and the human, with neither sacrificing what each is to join with the other.  God and human, together, at long last.

And now, and still, and forever.

Amen.