Christmas Day
Tonight we share in one of the most ancient traditions of the Christian Church. As soon as Christianity became accepted in the Roman Empire, a lady called Egeria made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and wrote of her travels. She saw that Christians would go to Bethlehem on this night for a midnight vigil. They, like the shepherds, ‘watched by night’ as we do tonight. This was followed by a torch-lit procession to Jerusalem, arriving at the Church of the Resurrection at dawn. Perhaps I should explain that Orthodox Christians still call what we refer to as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built centuries later, by its original name as ‘The Church of the Resurrection’ because of course no-one is buried there, but, far more importantly, it is the place where the risen Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene at dawn on Easter Day. It is not just an empty tomb. It is the place of the resurrection. In one night, the Christians of Jerusalem celebrated both the birth and the Resurrection of Jesus. They were making the point that we only celebrate Christmas because of the resurrection. And this is what we do in this Eucharist.
So tonight, to present the complete picture of the meaning of Christ’s incarnation, our gospel reading comes from the majestic opening of John’s gospel.
‘In the beginning was the Word’. With this astonishing opening to his gospel, St. John re-writes the entire creation story. He knows that there is no more need for the ancient myths about creation, for he has seen God face to face in Jesus Christ. And what he has seen is that God, simply, is love. The child born in Bethlehem, the child laid in a manger, is love personified. And that love fills all creation.
The message is not confined to John. ‘The ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God’ says Isaiah. The writer to the Hebrews echoes the opening of the gospel. ‘In these last days God has spoken to us by a Son, through whom he created the worlds.’ Literally, all things and all ages.
St. Paul shares the same understanding, writing to the Corinthians 1 Corinthians 8:6: ‘But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.’
In another Christmas reading, Paul quotes an early Christian hymn in Colossians which sings the same story. ‘Colossians 1:13-20: ‘Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for through him were created all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, thrones, dominations, principalities and powers, all things were created by him and for him.’
The creation story must be re-told, so ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ To make a modern analogy to what the apostles discovered, take a motor car. In the old story a creator, the factory, makes the car. And when it goes wrong someone else, a mechanic, fixes it. In the old story creation and salvation, creation and redemption, are two different things. But they are not.
We do St. John a disservice when we read John 3.16 and translate it as ‘God so loved the world.’ What John wrote was not just world, but, in Greek, and in English ‘Cosmos’. God loves the whole of his creation, and everything that exists is the fruit of God’s love. All things came into being through him. It is not a narrow story about personal salvation, it is ‘Joy to the world – let heaven and nature sing.’ And here, in flesh, is the Word who produces order out of a seemingly chaotic universe. Through the Word there is light and there is life, and life moreover, that has a potential for knowing its creator, for knowing that it is created, and wanting to know what the creator is like.
But this is what the world has missed. As St. John says, ‘the world did not know him and did not accept him.’ The world gets is way by wielding death. In Jesus’ day it is Rome overcoming all opposition, or it is the people of Jerusalem fighting to expel the Romans from their holy city. In the Christmas story it is Herod ordering the massacre of the innocents of Bethlehem in his bid to destroy this king. In our day it is the bombing of Syria and Yemen, it is by everything from threats of nuclear war to attacks on a conference in Fishmongers’ Hall, assassinations of critics of Russia or Saudi Arabia and cyber warfare.
The fundamental mistake about God is that God might seek to control the world by using death as a weapon, just because humans, since the myth of Cain and Abel, have wrongly supposed that this was the way to power.
But the truth of what God is actually like did not emerge until after the resurrection. It did not dawn upon the disciples until then. Up to that point they, like everyone else, were completely wrong about what God is like and who God is.
St. John says, ‘He came to what was his own and his own people did not accept him.’ Our gospel writers tell the story against themselves of how, so often they missed the point. But no wonder, for how pervasive this culture of death has been. The tragedy is that it is all too easy to fall into the trap. We turn St. George, a Christian martyr put to death in the 3rd century in the time of Diocletian, the last pagan emperor to persecute the Christian church into an emblem of crusaders. Christians, and others, go to war over Jerusalem when Christ himself did the exact opposite, he was executed there and foretold that its entire destruction would be inevitable. And when the crusaders invading Jerusalem rebuilt the site of Christ’s resurrection into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, they were part of a culture which had turned away from the resurrection gospel and glorified slaughter.
The satisfaction theory of the meaning of Jesus’ death gives the impression that God required the death of his son to appease his righteous wrath. No, says St. John, again and again and again. ‘God is love.’ It’s as simple as that.
So, this Christmas we need to renew ourselves in that love. We need to make a spiritual journey, the ancient tradition of making our pilgrimage from the site of Christ’s birth to the Church of the Resurrection. We go to Bethlehem and then join in the song of the angels ‘‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to his people on earth!’ Peace is the first message of the risen Christ on Easter Day to his disciples in the upper room. ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.’
Tonight this service is our spiritual pilgrimage. We come in the middle of the night to where a replica of Jesus’ crib is set up. We come to where sins are forgiven and where God’s Spirit is received. We come and join the song of the angels. We share God’s peace with each other, and we share in this Eucharist, the foretaste of the banquet of heaven, which celebrates our risen life in Christ. We celebrate the entire gospel, acknowledging with John that ‘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.’