The First Sunday of Christmas
The First Sunday of Christmas
Light of Christ Anglican Church
The Rev. Michael Moffitt December 29th, 2024
John 1:1-18 “Once You Understand the Beginning”
Today is the first Sunday in the Christmas season. We have left the Advent season and entered into the 12 days of Christmas which will end on January 6th with the beginning of Epiphany.
I recently read an article about the importance of the liturgical year that I found helpful. Author Winfield Bevins wrote in the Anglican Compass:
“The Church Year sets aside certain days and seasons of each year to recall and celebrate various events in the life of Jesus Christ. The church year calls us outside of our own time and reminds of God’s time, which is holy time or sanctification of time. Mark Galli reminds us, ‘The church calendar aims at nothing less than to change the way we experience time and perceive reality.’ As Anglicans, our liturgy reminds us of the importance of following Jesus throughout the Christian Year.”
When I first read that quote it sounded nice but rather vague. However, as I thought about in light of our scripture readings for this week I remembered how the seasons of the church lay a foundation to build upon throughout the year. Suddenly Bevin’s quote got some traction.
In Advent we focused on remembering that Jesus came for us the first time as a baby born in poverty and humility to make a way for us to be reconciled with God. The fact that Jesus was sent to our rescue is because of the unexpected yet amazing love of the Father for us. The fact that Jesus intentionally came to die for our sins gives us the anticipation that he will come for us again to establish the New Heavens and the New Earth. In fact we remind ourselves of this every week within the liturgy of the Eucharist when we proclaim the mystery of faith that “Christ has Died- Christ has Risen- Christ will come again”.
In the Twelve Days of Christmas we celebrate the mystery of the incarnation by remembering the virgin birth and the faith of Mary the mother of Jesus, Joseph, the shepherds.
I think it important that we consider not just what was done for us within these stories but who it was that did it. If we focus on that I believe it will grow our faith in the God who pursued us. We need to focus on the truth that it was God who came for us, not that we pursued Him.
We’ve only been in the new church calendar since December 1 yet we have already seen that it was God the Son, the second person of the Trinity who condescended to come down to us and become one of us. That should change everything for us, unless we’ve grown so used to the story that it loses the level of importance in our thinking.
Today through the Gospel of John 1:1-18 we’ll consider the gospel writers emphasis on the identity of “the Word”. Once we allow the Holy Spirit to open up our understanding of what was done for us and who it was that did it, it should revolutionize our anticipation for the stories yet to come in the church year.
Stories about subjects like the resurrection from the dead will be seen through the lens of the stories previously studied concerning the one who was resurrected from the dead. My prayer for us is that we might come alive in our faith like never before. I believe that the further we travel throughout the seasons of the church year the more in love we will be with our Savior and Lord. That is the goal.
Last Sunday and at our Christmas Eve service we considered the story of the birth of Jesus from the perspective of the Gospel of Luke. We saw that Luke taught using contrasts. For example, the contrast between the response of Zechariah, a Jewish priest and Mary, a young virgin. Both were given a similar message from the angel Gabriel, but each had a different response of faith.
Luke was also unique amongst the other gospel writers, Matthew, Mark and John, in that he told the story from the perspective of the humanity of Jesus his birth to his ascension back to the Father.
His story enables the reader to see how Jesus came to us in the same way that we entered life, through the womb of our mothers. Luke wonderfully pointed out that the Christ child was born in humility to a teenage mother and a blue-collar father. He was the promised King of Israel, but his first throne room was a stable and his throne a feeding trough for animals.
We read how an angel of the Lord came to the shepherds announcing the birth of the Christ child and the Heavenly hosts showed up singing praises to God because of the birth of this baby.
What were the heavenly hosts, the armies of God so excited about? The word “host” in the Greek means army, a band of soldiers. This heavenly army announced peace, but peace only comes after enemies are destroyed. That God’s army announced peace implies that the peace being referred to was to be the end of hostility between God and man. In addition, the restoration of the Kingdom of God under Jesus would include inner peace and peace between men. How could the angels know this and why were they so excited and joyful? The answer is that they knew who the child was and what it would mean for all creation. There is an exceptionally good reason for us to join with the angels singing praises to God for the birth of the Christ child. Luke started his gospel by focusing on the humanity of Jesus, John begins by focusing on the divinity of Christ. You see it is not a story of what the child was to become, but who he has always been and will always be. That changes the story considerably.
The gospel of John was the last of the 4 gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the “Synoptic Gospels” because they tell the story of Jesus from a similar point of view. There are many stories in the synoptic gospels that John left out of his because they were already told in the other ones. Towards the end of John’s gospel, he gives the reason for his writing it. In John 20:30-31, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”
This story is simply about God, the glory of his character, the nature of his life and his desire to share that life with his creatures. It is about God come amongst us and the mixed response he received to his offer of divine life.
John does not gently ease us into the story by leading us up to the situation at the time of the birth of the Christ child, instead he plunges us immediately into the heart of the revelation of who it was that came for us. At the beginning he was preparing his readers for the themes that will enable them to view the coming narrative correctly. From the beginning there was to be no doubt as to the identity of Jesus. Let us begin with considering John 1:1-5.
The beginning that John is referring to is not the beginning of the creation of the heavens and the earth that we read about in Genesis 1. The beginning that John refers to is eternity—a concept that we cannot comprehend. With us all things have a beginning and an end and are framed in time and space, but that is not true of God who is eternal and not limited by anything. We cannot grasp such an idea, but most admit that it is ultimately true. At some point we just have to admit that something or someone is eternal with no beginning and no ending.
So, the first thing that John shows us is that in the beginning the Word was. He was the eternally existing one and he was in the beginning with God. In other words, the Word has eternally co-existed together with God. This is one of the most profound verses on the Trinity in the Bible in that it makes a distinction of persons in the essential unity of the Godhead. The Word was not only with God but was God as well and it was through this Word that all things were created. Since creation is a function and activity of God, the Word is to be understood as God. John knew that in order to understand the identity of Jesus we must begin with the relationship that Jesus had with the Father “before the world began”.
The Greek philosophers saw the word (logos) as the power that puts sense into the world (Kosmos), making the world orderly instead of chaotic. The logos was the power that set the world in perfect order and kept it going in perfect order. They saw the logos as the “Ultimate Reason” that controlled all things within the kosmos. So, when John used this opening to his Gospel he was pointing to Jesus as the true and living (Logos) Word. For centuries Jews and Greek philosophers had been referring to the “Logos” in their conversations and writings, so John was identifying Jesus in a way they could understand.
James Montgomery Boice put it this way, “Everything that can be said about God the Father can be said about God the Son. In Jesus dwells all the wisdom, glory, power, love, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth of the Father. In Him, God the Father is known.”
So, to fully grasp the identity of Jesus as the agent used by the Father in creation it needed to be perfectly clear that “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” which is further evidence of the divine nature of the Word. John 5:26 says, “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.”
Life as we know it emanates from the Word who is the creator, but he also is the light of men which points back to creation where the light dispels the darkness in Genesis 1:2–4. John 1 introduces the beginning of the New Creation and the light that exposes and defeats the present darkness through the living Word.
God the Father is viewed throughout the Gospel as the ultimate source of all, including the Son and the Spirit. But life did not simply come through the Word but was in the Word (1:4). Only God is the source of life, and it is a mark of Jesus' distinctness and deity that the Father "has granted the Son to have life in himself" (5:26). John emphasizes that there were no exceptions: the existence of absolutely all things came by this Word.
Dr. Rod Whitacre in his Commentary on John’s Gospel wrote: “Although with verse 3 we move from eternity to creation; we are still dealing with facts hard to comprehend. Until discoveries made in the 1920s, the Milky Way was thought to be the entire universe, but now we realize there are many billions of galaxies. Science is helping us spiritually, for it silences us before God in wonder and awe. But this verse also helps us put science in its proper place. The universe is incredibly wonderful, so how much more wonderful must be the one upon whose purpose and power it depends. "The builder of a house has greater honor than the house itself" (Heb 3:3)
This is a very different emphasis than the one chosen by Luke in his gospel, but both are essential to understand the identity of Jesus Christ, the Word who became flesh.
To some of the ancients, gods were thought to visit at times in human likeness but to others the spiritual and divine were totally opposed to matter and flesh, which was considered inferior. Now John was proclaiming that the one true and living God had actually become flesh and had chosen to dwell in the midst of his creation, as a created one.
This offended many who could not accept as truth that God would demean himself by living amid humans, as a human, and certainly God would not allow himself to become self-limiting by his humanity. By choosing to take on flesh Jesus would by necessity have to deal with the problems and limitations of the flesh. In Luke 4:9 Satan tempts Jesus to jump off the temple because Psalm 91:11–12 said that the angels would not allow the anointed one to even strike his foot upon a stone. Even Satan knew that Jesus, in his humanity could not merely jump off the temple and fly. He would also be dependent on the protection of his heavenly Father.
No one saw this coming, and no one interpreted the prophets to foretell such a thing. Who would want a God who looked like us and lived among us? Most people are more comfortable with the idea that God is up there somewhere looking down on us, not here living among us, but caring for us from afar. One of the most compelling aspects of this is that the Jewish followers of Jesus believed that he was both God and man. Judaism taught that there is only one God and that no human is divine. Yet, they had encountered the God/Man and lived with him, not only seeing the miracles but feeling the power of his love and presence, so there was no other way to understand his life and teaching.
Jesus was not teaching them that there are multiple gods but there was a divine Trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Son had come that we might know the Father through him and be filled with the Spirit, like he was. No one saw that coming either. The gospel of John is a great source of teaching on the triune God who in his oneness manifest himself in three separate and distinct persons. In John 14 Jesus declares that he is the only way to the Father and that he will send back the Holy Spirit to comfort and empower those who followed him.
We affirm this teaching every week as we say the Nicene Creed. The Scriptures emphasize the general distinctions among the works of the three persons; the Father initiating, the Son complying and the Holy Spirit executing the joint will of both. We must pay equal attention to and give equal honor to, all three persons, while always remembering that we worship only one God in these three persons.
In all of John’s gospel his primary focus is on the divinity of Jesus and the unity of the Godhead but there is one part that I want to focus on this morning in the time we have left. That can be found in John 1:10–13,
“He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”
God came to the same world He created, to the creatures made in His image, and yet the world did not know Him. They were not looking for someone like him. This shows how deeply fallen human nature rejects God, and that many reject God and the light he brings. They preferred the darkness.
He came to His own, even to the very nation that were the people of God. We might say that Jesus came home. When the Word came to this world He did not come as an alien. He came home to the world and the people that he created. How was he received?
Those who were looking for the Messiah did not receive Him. Luke 20:14, the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, “But when the tenants saw him, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir. Let us kill him, so that the inheritance may be ours.’ Jesus was pointing to those who should have known him as those who were going to kill him. His point was not that they would kill him because they did not know who he was but because they did.
They did not want a king like him, a carpenter’s son, a traveling teacher, one who exposed their treachery, and godlessness. They wanted a warrior king who would vanquish the Roman’s and establish Israel as a mighty nation. The one thing that was characteristic of Jesus’ ministry was the rejection of those to whom he came initially. It was not the ones who considered themselves righteous that were drawn to Jesus, but those who knew that they were not. John is pointing out that human beings are not children of God by nature.
This is often a misunderstanding by many. Even though we are all made in God’s image, and everyone still reflects that image to some degree, this does not make God their Father, it makes him their creator. It would be those who received Jesus as the only hope for salvation, and as Savior and Lord who would be given the right to become children of God. John points out that it is not because of human birth (flesh and blood) but because of the sovereign and gracious action of God - without denying the human response in believing and receiving. What is being offered to those who will surrender is extremely intimate and personal.
I think we can become so used to the verbiage of “giving our lives to Christ” that we miss the actual invitation of God given to us, and by extension we miss the deepest meaning. Many think of committing their lives to Jesus Christ, as eternal security and as a guaranteed ticket to Heaven but that’s a very shallow concept. The offer of God is that we come out of the darkness and walk into the Light of Christ. The difference is blindness verses the light that continues to reveal the glory of God and the desire for a deeper walk with Jesus.
The idea of “receiving Jesus” for who he is means we embrace and receive Him unto ourselves. “As many as received Him” is just another way to say those who believe in His name. Charles Spurgeon wrote, “Faith is described as ‘receiving’ Jesus. It is the empty cup placed under the flowing stream; the penniless hand held out for heavenly alms.”
John reminds us of the nature of the new birth. Those who received Him are born of God, but not of human effort or achievement but because they have seen Jesus for who he is and run to him for mercy and grace.
This is the profound joy of the newborn King born so long ago. He came that we might have new life that would be a restoration of all that God intended for us in the beginning. It changes everything- here and now. Charles Spurgeon describes the change: “The man is like a watch which has a new mainspring, not a mere face and hands repaired, but new inward machinery, with freshly adjusted works, which act to a different time and tune; and whereas he went wrong before, now he goes right, because he is right within.”
This is the reason we come to celebrate the Christmas season! We have been given the greatest gift of all- salvation and eternal life with God- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Rightly understood, this message should be embraced continually, and I believe it should cause us to pursue the Sovereign Lord who pursued us first. Never allow the revelation of Jesus Christ as the “Light who shines in the darkness” to become merely a fact among many other facts. Let it be the motivation to want a deeper understanding that brings about the longing for more of Him revealed through His Word and Holy Spirit. As we travel along the path within the church calendar pray that you will never stop anticipating what God is willing to do in and through your life for His glory and your salvation. Let’s pray!
