John Claypool, the Episcopal author and preacher extraordinaire, tells a wonderful story of a time, many years ago. Claypool was in the middle of reading a book entitled, When God Became Man. (This tells you how old the story is. If this book were written today, it would most assuredly be titled, When God Became Human). He and his wife were going out for the evening and had engaged the services of a woman they knew to come and baby sit. As the babysitter arrived, Claypool laid his book down on the ottoman and got ready to leave. When they arrived home several hours later, they found the babysitter in a state of incredible excitement, what today might be described as “bouncing off the walls.” She immediately approached the Rev. Claypool, book in hand, and asked, “Is this real? When did it happen? Tell me all about it!” Claypool described himself as somewhat dumbstruck. He knew this woman to be a member of a mainline Christian church downtown and a member of the choir, as well as someone who worked on the church’s outreach projects. It suddenly struck him after talking with the woman for over an hour that she had been a church-going person all her life and yet she had no idea what the Incarnation was, or what it meant. This is proof positive of the old adage, there is no such thing as a stupid question, because we only know what we learn and retain. This concept – the idea of God coming into the world as a human being – can be so difficult for us to get our minds around, that if we do not do it early on, we can spend a lifetime in the position the woman in the story was in; believing in Jesus without knowing for sure what she believed.
This morning’s reading – the prologue from John’s Gospel, does (to my way of thinking) the absolute best job of setting out the importance of the Incarnation for Christians. What these first eighteen verses of the Fourth Gospel tell us is: Jesus is completely God, God in every way – and Jesus was, from the time of the Nativity to the time of his crucifixion – completely human in every way. That’s the most troubling aspect of the Incarnation for people, that Jesus could be fully God and fully human, AT THE SAME TIME. That does not make sense to us, because we are bound by time, space and the laws of physics and mathematics. But that does not make it any less true.
John begins the prologue with those familiar words, “In the beginning ….” Those words are meant to take us back to the Genesis creation story, the start of both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep ….” John tells us the Word was around then. Jesus, The Word was around before there was anything created by God. Therefore, Jesus was NOT created by God – instead, Jesus was just as much God as God the Father was God and just as much involved in creation as was the Father. John wants to make sure we don’t miss this point. That is why he tells us the Word was with God and the Word WAS God, and all things came into being through Him.
Then the author of the fourth Gospel tells us the thing that people, including John Claypool’s babysitter, have been scratching their heads over for two thousand years: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.” If you want to see how adamant John was about the true and complete humanity of Jesus, you need look no further than the original Greek, in which he said that the Word became (sarx). This is the lowest of all ways for Greeks to refer to human flesh. It is sort of like referring to Jesus as a sack of meat. John was clearly making the point that God, the creator of the universe, completely became the most common of humans.
God. Became. A. Human. Being. Why would the only being with sufficient power to create everything that is, become so comparatively lowly a creature? After all, God had always communicated with people. In the Old Testament, there are countless examples of God speaking to individuals and showing God’s self to groups. Look at Adam and Eve, Moses, Abraham, Noah, and all of the Prophets. They all spoke directly to a God who spoke directly back. Look at the children of Israel who witnessed God’s power at work in the parting of the Red Sea. BUT, and this is a huge distinction, NEVER did any of them SEE the face of God. Moses thought he would, but could not. All of God’s chosen people hoped to, but never did. That is one of the reasons that God became human, to put a face on God, thereby ushering in a new way of human beings relating to God.
Just to be clear: God has ALWAYS understood humans. Sometimes we have made God angry or sorrowful by what we have done, but we have never surprised God. Humans though, never had a chance to know God on that same intimate level, until the Nativity, the Incarnation of God. In Jesus, for the first time, we had the opportunity to see WWGD – What Would God Do? – if God were faced with the situations in which we find ourselves. In Jesus, for the first time, we got to see the power of God, up close and personal, and under such control that we of limited human understanding could get it and not mistake it for a “natural phenomenon.” Jesus stilled the storm, healed the sick, gave sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf – he even raised the dead – so that we might glimpse the power, the majesty, the glory, the mercy and the grace of the God who created us.
There is a story of a man who was born and raised in a large American city. He had never been out of the urban environment in his life, when suddenly he got the chance to go on an African safari. On his first night, lying in his sleeping bag, he heard a screeching sound that frightened him almost to death. He asked his guide what the sound was. The guide replied that it was a tree bear. The man was somewhat comforted to know that this strange sound had a name, but not all that comforted. The next day, the guide came into camp with a tree bear and the man got to look at it, touch it and observe that it was scared of him. After that, he understood what a tree bear was and more about how it acted. The experience changed his relationship to tree bears. That is a shorthand version of the Incarnation. God came among us as a human because God had always communicated with us, but we had never before known what God was like, enough so that we could better understand God.
In this Eucharist service we are about to recreate and celebrate one of the most important sacraments that Jesus gave us during his time as a person, sharing in the gifts of Christ’s body and blood, which nourish, sustain and bring us into everlasting life. This is the other wonder of the Incarnation. That God would become human and live the humble and meager existence of a 1st Century itinerate Jewish preacher, so that not only would people be able to better understand who and what God is, but also so that God could show us the ultimate gracious act of self-sacrifice through a particularly horrible death, so that we could be redeemed and be counted as ready to stand before the throne of Glory on the last day, sure and certain that our sins have been forgiven and forgotten through the sacrifice of the Incarnate God.
In the name of the God who became human to heal, teach, and redeem us. Amen.
[Christmas 1 122720 John 1:1-18]
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