postID: 7046; title: The First Sunday After Christmas: The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
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The First Sunday After Christmas: The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
Almighty God, who hast poured upon us the new light of thine incarnate Word: Grant that the same light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through the sameJesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.Amen.
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Scripture citation(s): John 1:1-18
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
John 1:1-18
✛
Theology and the Christmas Story
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This that you just heard is the very traditional gospel for the Sunday after Christmas. It is the same as the gospel for Christmas Day, except that on this Sunday we go further, continuing from the beginning of Saint John’s gospel through verse 18; on Christmas Day we stop at verse 14. At night on Christmas Eve, and also at an early morning service on Christmas Day if we had one, the reading is from Luke, the story of the birth of Jesus in the manger, and the angelic announcement to the shepherds, and the shepherds’ coming to the manger to worship and then going out to tell the tale.
There is something to learn here, between Luke and John, between Christmas night and Christmas day. What the church is showing us is how to move from story to theology.
The story is very well known, at least to most of us here (yet we should be saddened to think of how the efforts to suppress public displays of religion have kept a large number of people from even a bare acquaintance with this story). A young pious Jewish woman, Mary, was visited by the angel Gabriel who brought her a message of God’s favor to her. Mary conceived willingly the Son of God while herself remaining a virgin. At the time of the child’s birth, Mary and her husband, Joseph, were in Bethlehem, staying in the same shelter as some animals. There her baby was born, and they named him Jesus. Nearby that same night, shepherds were visited by a host of angels who filled the night sky with light and song, praising God. They were told what had just happened—that the Son of God had been born, and they were told where they could find him. They went and saw Jesus the baby, with Mary and Joseph and the animals. Then they departed and told about it to everyone they saw.
Thus Saint Luke’s gospel—Christmas Eve—the story.
Saint John gives us the theology. His gospel famously opens: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This is an incipient grasp of the sublime reality that God is Trinity. There are both God and Word at the beginning; the Word is “with God,” and thus there are two; yet the Word is God, and thus there are one. Word and God are distinguished yet also identified. At the end of our passage (verse 18) John does the same again, but there he speaks of “Father” and “Son”: “No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.” Here God is both Father and Son: “No one has ever seen God” means no one has seen the Father, but the Son, who is also called God, “God the only Son” has made the Father known. This God the Son is “in the bosom of the Father.” And so the two are with each other and yet the two are one.
So John gives us the beginning of a teaching about the Trinity, about God’s own being. In the middle of the passage (verse 14) he gives us the other fundamental claim of Christian theology, that the Word or the Son “was made flesh and dwelt among us.” When this happened people were able to see God. It is the Word or the Son and not the Father or God who takes on flesh and becomes a man; nonetheless, since the Word (the Son) is God, it is God who takes on flesh and becomes a man, and it is God who is seen—“we have beheld his glory.”
In short, Luke tells us the story that we depict, for instance, here in this manger, but John tells us what it means, John gives us the theology of the story.
But that’s not the end of it. When John says that “God the only Son has made the Father known,” that verb “has made known” is a verb of narration. It can mean “telling” or “explaining, interpreting,” and when translated into Latin it was “enarravit,” the cognate of “narrated.” The theological truth that John is telling us is that the Son has narrated the Father for us.
Imagine that you are a character in a story, say, you are Bilbo Baggins. As a character in a story you may have a lot of adventures, and if it is a good story you will learn something and grow. You may get to see a lot of things in your story, and meet a lot of people. But one person you will never meet is the author of your story. Bilbo Baggins meets dwarves, trolls, elves, even a dragon, but he cannot meet J. R. R. Tolkien. On his way to the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo is not going to run into someone who says, “By the way, I’m the author of this story that you are a character in.” It’s just impossible.
And yet—it would be really wonderful to meet the author of the story! Perhaps we could get to know his character, and if we knew his character, perhaps we’d get a sense of what the whole thing means. The truth at the heart of our story could be revealed to us if we knew the author.
What John tells us, when he gives us the theology of the Christmas story, is that in this story the author becomes a character. God the Father, whom no one has seen, has been “narrated” to us by God the Son, who is in the bosom of the Father—who both is with God and is God. To be more precise, the doctrine of the Trinity tells us that the author has become a character without ceasing thereby to be the author.
The child in Mary’s womb is the author of the story in which Mary is a character. The baby in the manger, worshiped by the shepherds, is the author of the story in which there are shepherds. And it goes on: the young man who tells Peter and James and John to follow him is the author of the story in which Peter and James and John are characters. The man who receives brutal capital punishment at the hands of the Roman authorities is the author of the story in which there are Roman authorities.
And he is the author of your story. You and I have an author, someone who has written us into being. Within the story, we are able to think, to feel, to love, and to choose. And yet we are utterly dependent for everything about us upon this mysterious and unknown author of our being. However, he is no longer mysterious and unknown. It is not only we who have stories, but God has a story. That’s what we see in the manger. It’s the story of God. And it tells us that God does not want to be unknown and mysterious, but he wants to be (in the deepest sense of the word) our friend. And since friends share all things in common, God wants to share a human life, from conception and pregnancy, to birth, to growing up, to adulthood, to the end. He also wants not only to share the human life that we have, but by making us his friends to fix our human life, to remove from it everything that is not worthy of us, to make us as his friends fully human.
Theology shows us how the Christmas story is a window into our lives today. The story of God is that the author of our being wants, more than anything else, to be our friend indeed.
And the entire universe waits with baited breath to see how we respond.
