Well, I still don’t quite have myself together health-wise. I’ve gone from one virus to a cold, but I am still getting the headaches that wake me in the night. Both my GP and my osteopath think they are stress-related. I have some things to examine in my life as a result. In particular it seems that spiritually there is a lot of giving out and very little opportunity to receive, and this has depleted my adrenal glands.
So – sob story over – I’ve decided to cut some corners in preparation for my remaining Christmas services. (I have three on Christmas Eve and two on Christmas Day.) For the evening one (NB not a midnight one, thankfully) I’ve dusted down and adapted a sermon from three years ago on the same Lectionary passage,a nd redaction critics will see clear evidence of this in the Introduction. There is some virtue in keeping your old sermons. In fact one old minister of mine only ever got out old sermons and worked them over, because he felt that if he couldn’t improve an old sermon there was something wrong with him.
This, then, is what I have come up with. It’s an attempt to show how unique and supreme Jesus Christ seen in the Incarnation is when compared with other faiths. But I hope I have not done it in too much of a triumphalist tone.
Introduction
At this time of year we hear more and more stories of
‘politically correct’ attempts to excise Jesus from Christmas. Three years ago Buckinghamshire County Council banned
Christian Christmas cards and in the same year the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s
official Christmas card contained Muslim and Hindu images but no Christian
ones.
How refreshing, then, this year, to hear that in the United
States, Wal-Mart (not a company for which
I usually have any great affection) is allowing its staff to greet customers
with the words ‘Merry Christmas’ rather than the usual ‘Happy Holidays’.
Without in any way wishing to be one of those miserable
Christians who want to condemn everything about the way Christmas is
celebrated, I nevertheless want to say that this season is one particular time
for affirming the supremacy of Jesus Christ. It’s something the writer to the
Hebrews lays out clearly in the first four verses of his epistle.
He is writing to a group of early Christians who are under
pressure to renounce or dilute their faith. They come from a Jewish background
and are being pressed to return purely to Judaism. So the writer sets out to
show them why he believes they shouldn’t retract their confession of Christ.
And in a nutshell his big reason for doing so is – Jesus. There is no-one else
like him. No-one can compare, no other faith can compare.
And in that respect his writings become particularly
relevant to us. We live in a multi-cultural society – that is simply a
description of fact – but the pressure is on us to see all faiths as more or
less the same. And without resorting to the ‘crusade’ mentality of previous
generations of Christians it is still our call to maintain our loyalty to
Christ, because there truly is no-one like him. Let me set out for you four
ways in these four verses from Hebrews that we see the supremacy of Christ. I
pray they may they be reasons that inspire our worship as we celebrate his
coming, and give firmer foundations to our faith in challenging days.
1. The Supremacy Of
The Son In Revelation
Verses 1 – 2a:
Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in
many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to
us by a Son
These few words distinguish the Christian faith from several
others today. They make us different from the Mormon faith, which requires its
believers to follow the Book of Mormon which Joseph Smith claimed to have
received from an angel called Moroni.
But God has spoken to us by his Son: there is a finality about Jesus Christ
because of who he is. And one thing it means is we close the canon of
Scripture. The New Testament writings, being either from apostles or close
associates, are where Holy Writ ends. God still speaks – of course – but all is
to be tested by Scripture, because Jesus has brought a climax to the Bible.
These words also distinguish us from our Muslim friends,
because the Son is clearly greater than the prophets. Muslims claim that Jesus
is a prophet but not the Son of God. And even then their basic creed is to say,
‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet’. Islam explicitly says,
‘God has no son’, but the Gospel contradicts this. God has a Son, and he is the
climax of revelation.
Then these words show that the Christian faith is in
continuity with the Old Testament, but Christ is its fulfilment. That
differentiates us from the Jewish faith, which is the foundation of
Christianity. But our confession is that the coming of Christ fulfils all the
messianic hopes, even if they are in a very different shape from original
expectations.
At Christmas we celebrate the fact that a helpless, crying
baby is God’s ultimate word to us.
2. The Supremacy Of
The Son Over Creation
Verses 2b-3a:
whom he appointed heir of all things,
through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory
and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his
powerful word.
If Jesus is the ‘heir of all things’, then creation belongs
to him. It’s his inheritance. And therefore creation is not a part of God, nor
is God a part of creation, as our Hindu neighbours would believe. Rather, Jesus
Christ is the Lord of creation.
And if God ‘also created the worlds’ through him, then this
supports other New Testament texts in John and Colossians that teach that Jesus
pre-existed creation with the Father. So the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who follow an
ancient heretic called Arius, in affirming ‘there was a time when he was not’,
are also wrong. The Jehovah’s Witnesses think that biblical descriptions of
Jesus such as ‘Son’ and ‘first-born’ mean he is a created being. But this is
never the meaning in the context: they are terms that teach his supremacy.
‘He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint
of God’s very being’: hence Jesus in adult life was to tell his disciples, ‘If
you have seen me, you have seen the Father’. So our Christmas confession is
that at this season we do indeed see God – lying in a manger.
‘And he sustains all things by his powerful word’ – this is
far from the ancient myth of Atlas with the world on his shoulders: this is an
active, ongoing and dynamic. There are those around who would say with the
Australian singer Nick
Cave, ‘I don’t believe in
an interventionist God’. They believe there is a God but not that he is at work
in the world. In the eighteenth century some of these opposed Wesley: they were
called Deists. But we believe in a Christ who is involved in his world. And
never more so than in the humility of the Incarnation.
There is a beautiful irony in the birth of Jesus: he is
dependent upon Mary for his nurture and well-being, but she, like everyone, is
dependent upon him for existence. This is a Lord to worship.
3. The Supremacy Of
The Son In Redemption
Verse 3b:
When he had made purification for sins,
he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high
‘When he had made purification for sins’ – sin is the human
predicament. This is why Jesus came. It is why he came as fully divine and
fully human, to reconcile God and humankind. Only he can resolve it. Any
philosophy or faith that says we need to put it all right ourselves is doomed
to failure. And so you get eastern faiths like Buddhism and Hinduism looking
for people to behave better in each successive incarnation, only to be plunged
into a hopeless ongoing cycle of rebirths as one creature or another. It is a
counsel of despair. The Good News of Christmas is that Christ came to deal with
this problem. The weight is off us. He came to take it, to bear our burdens in
his life and supremely on the Cross. That is why we joyfully sing,
He breaks the power of cancelled sin,
He
sets the prisoner free.
His blood can make the foulest clean,
His
blood availed for me.
(Charles Wesley, 1707-1788)
And ‘when he had made purification for sins,’ our writer
adds, ‘he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high’. He sat down.
Don’t you get a sense of satisfaction and completeness when you have finished a
job and sit down? So it is with Jesus. It is all done, there is nothing to add,
nothing has been missed out and salvation is complete. Now Heaven and God’s
Kingdom awaits his people, with the resurrection of the dead to a transformed
physical existence in the presence of God. It is nothing like the Buddhist
belief in nirvana, where all our cravings end, there are no more rebirths and
we become absorbed into the great nothingness. There is no great nothingness
for the followers of Jesus. Instead there is the new heaven and the new earth,
all secured for us by Christ who came for us, died for us, rose for us and is
ascended for us.
Truly in the Incarnation Jesus was born not only to live but
also to die. Mary was told that a sword would pierce her own heart and she
would watch her Son be crucified – but she would become one of his followers. The
road to Bethlehem leads inexorably for the
Christian to Calvary. We cannot look at the
crib without looking at the Cross. Jesus embraced this in the Incarnation.
4. The Supremacy Of
Christ Over History
Verse 4:
having become as much superior to
angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.
Go away from the great classic religions to some of the new
religious movements and you will find a burgeoning interest in angels. The old
notion of ‘guardian angel’, which as far as I can tell is nowhere to be found
in Scripture, has been souped up. People believe that everyone has their
personal angel. Some believe they have been assured of the presence of an angel
with them by a feather having been left behind. Many expect to have visions of
angels, but rather than the biblical visions of angels where these messengers
of God point people Godwards, they just get a little bit of comfort and
spiritual mollycoddling.
Sometimes we find similar beliefs in the church. I had a
church member once who believed that your guardian angel accompanied you in or
on your car, but if you exceeded the speed limit the angel deserted you to any
consequences.
The writer to the Hebrews also faced a contemporary interest
in angels, but in a different way. And like him we can say, why go to the
angels when you can go to someone superior? Not to be dismissive of angels,
especially at Christmas when they feature so significantly in the birth
stories, but why get obsessed with them when Jesus is superior? The angels are
not divine: Jesus is. No angel took on human flesh for the salvation of the
world: Jesus did. No angel received the Father’s vindication of their mission
in the way that Jesus did for his: ‘the name he has inherited is more excellent
than theirs.’
In Jesus, God has done something greater than anything else
in history. His work in Jesus is unique. The incarnation and redemption are
unrepeatable. Here is where history turns. However we look at the problem of
evil in creation, this is the point of God’s decisive world-changing act.
Conclusion
So why go through all this? Hasn’t the world had enough of
Christians (or people of other faiths, for that matter) who have a smug
superiority and who use that feeling to tread other people down? Shouldn’t we
be listening to those who call for peace, tolerance and dialogue among the
religions? Shouldn’t we just live and let live?
Certainly there is much to be ashamed of in the history of
religion and of Christianity. But the Incarnation gives us the clue as to how
we should respond. Did Jesus come with violence and coercion to force people to
follow him? Quite the opposite. He came in weakness and in humility. That same
Incarnation which shows us the uniqueness and superiority of Jesus Christ which
we cannot negotiate away without betraying him also shows us the gentle and
gracious way in which we firmly, lovingly and winsomely hold to our faith in
him as we swim against the tide in our culture.
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