[Sermon delivered at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, on the Sunday within the Octave of Christmas (Feast of St. Stephen the Protomartyr), December 26, 2021 (https://stmarysphoenix.org)]
✠ In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen
People talk about favourites. We have our favourite TV shows, our favourite foods, or God forbid, our favourite children. Scripture is no different; many Christians have a touchstone passage they come back to again and again. I have a confession to make. I too have a favourite passage. That passage we just heard, the Prologue to the Gospel according to St. John.
St. John’s Gospel, if you have not noticed already, is markedly different from the other three. The other three tell us what Jesus did, but this one tells us what Jesus is, and the premise of the whole Gospel is present here. That premise is that God the Word, the second person of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity, came to us to bring us light, to make us children of God, to bring us grace, to show us truth. And, spoiler alert, the Word took on human nature, and this Incarnate God was none other than Jesus of Nazareth.
When you think about it, this is very radical.
People struggle with this. Many are content to think of Jesus as a pious legend, or as a first century rabble-rousing rabbi, a great philosopher like Gautama Buddha, or even a great prophet in the tradition of Moses, Elijah, and John the Baptist. One school of though declares Jesus to be truly the Son of God, but no more than that, created, subordinate, whose person had a finite beginning.
This Gospel, however, tells us otherwise.
When the Evangelist tells us, “In the Beginning,” he uses a word that conveys not so much at a discrete point in time but conveys the idea that the subject is outside the temporal course of events. The word, ὰρχῇ, not only conveys the meaning of beginning, but also source, principal, or foundation.
Not only does the Evangelist tell us that the Word was with God, but that the Word actually was God. I’ve heard people unwilling to ascribe Divinity to Our Lord make convoluted arguments that the structure of the sentence means “like God,” and as a student of Classical Greek I can tell you in a very carefully constructed discussion as this that the argument has no merit and indeed is not only false, but fraudulent. The words are clear, “Καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος,” ABSOLUTELY mean that this Word is the SAME GOD as God the Father.
We go on to read that the Word was instrumental in Creation. While the Father created everything ex nihilo, out of nothing, it was the Word that spoke it, just as the Spirit, as we read in Genesis, moved over the chaos to bring order. Every person of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity worked the miracle of the creation of Time and Space, Created Energy and Matter, but here the Word was the one who spoke, and being of the same substance of the Father and the Spirit possessed Life, and the Uncreated Light. Here we see the transcendent God outside Time and Space as immanent, involved intimately with His creation.
And herein lies the miracle of this Gospel and of this season. This person of the Trinity, in concert with the Father and the Spirit, took flesh of the Virgin Mary and became one of us. And herein the person of the Word takes on another name, the Son. The Son of the Eternal Father, who became Human, who united Divine Nature with Human Nature, bringing together by the Will of God what had formerly been at odds, to bestow God’s grace upon us, and to make us, by the Will of God alone, Children of the Most High.
This, my friends, is love of the highest order. This is the theme of St. John’s Gospel. God became Human to walk among us, not out of a whim, not to make a point, not to participate materially in His creation, but out of love. This is what this Gospel is for, to teach new (and more, um, weathered) Christians who the Jesus of the other Gospels actually is, and why He bothered with us at all. This is why later in this Gospel Jesus proclaims that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. When you are God, you can make these claims. When He says, “No one can come to the Father except through Me,” the claim reflects back to this statement, “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known.”
Who better to show us God than God Himself? Christ Jesus is born, glorify Him!
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Saviour save us. Amen.
