Readings:
Sermon:
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
I never cease to be amazed by those words from St John’s Gospel, talking about Jesus, the Word, and how he took on our humanity and pitched his tent among us. And what it would be good for us to reflect upon for a moment or two now, is why Jesus did that? Why God did that?
I’ve been reflecting a lot about power recently and spoke about it in my Christmas message. I’ve had power on my mind for a number of reasons. The recent cold snap meant the power we need to heat our homes has been in the news, as has the worry of how we might pay for it in this time of extremely high energy costs. Across the globe many people don’t have access to that power at all: I think particularly of Ukraine, where Russian aggression has caused people to be completely without power in much colder temperatures than we have suffered here.
And that suffering is all the result of President Putin throwing his power around. He’s the one, who with his henchmen has caused all the difficulties. He and malign leaders like him have an awful lot to answer for. They want to throw their power around so as to inflict their will on others, causing immense suffering as they do so. In Ukraine and across the world as far as Putin is concerned.
When we think of power, we tend to think of world leaders and those seeking to dominate our globe. Those who seek to force their power on others, sometimes by violence. It’s so easy for us to forget that the greatest power in the universe, the ultimate power, is not violence, but love. And that’s what God came to reveal to us in Jesus.
“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.”
Jesus is the manifestation here on earth of the God who is love. It’s not just that God approves of love and thinks it’s a good thing. St John tells us elsewhere that God is love, it is his very nature. God yearns to communicate that love to us, so he does so in a language that we can understand. The life and death and indeed resurrection of a human person: “The Word became flesh.”
At Christmas, in the birth of Jesus, we see the truth of God’s love revealed for us. God came to us as a vulnerable child to show us the depths of his love. Later, when he was a grown man, he said to Philip – ‘to have seen me, is to have seen the Father’. Now God is a God of love, not a God of force, of violence. And it is by love that we shall be saved. The love of Jesus, not by the power of any world leader, good or evil, or any power of our own. We shall be saved by the invincible, eternal love of God.
So my hope and prayer for you this Christmas is that you will feel yourself embraced by that love, feel that depth of power, the greatest power in all creation, and that you’ll be given the will and the means to share that love with others in your life.
May you be richly blessed by the Christ-child, this Christmas and in the year to come.