Introduction to series
For Advent this year, I want to explore one of the great Bible passages – the one that above all talks about ‘The Mystery of the Incarnation’, as it is often called in carol services.
It’s the passage we more widely call ‘The Prologue’ – but people of a certain generation must not think about Frankie Howerd and Up Pompeii when I say that!
It’s The Prologue to the Gospel According to John, the first eighteen verses of the wonderful Fourth Gospel, in which the evangelist introduces many of the themes of his Gospel in the context of Jesus’ birth.
There are so many ways we could explore this passage, for there are so many riches there. A friend of mine wrote his PhD on it, and I could easily imagine preaching every Sunday for a year on these verses.
But I’m going to resist that temptation! This is just an Advent series. And one way of exploring the Prologue over the four Sundays of Advent is to take a particular strand in it about Jesus’ relationships. So we shall look first of all at Jesus’ relationship with the Father, and in other weeks at his relationships with Moses, John the Baptist, and human beings generally.
I am not the most avid television watcher, but I did set our satellite box to record Monday night’s quiz programmes on BBC2 – Only Connect, Mastermind, and the one that goes right back to my childhood, University Challenge. That was something we used to watch as a family on Sunday lunchtimes – that and Thunderbirds.
For some reason, I still remember one starter question from an early series: ‘Which two books of the Bible begin with the same three words in English?’
Now, leaving aside the awkward issue of differing translations, the answer they wanted was Genesis and John’s Gospel, both starting with the words, ‘In the beginning.’
And that’s where we’re going today – to the beginning, to that relationship between Jesus and the Father that existed before creation and led to creation. I follow those scholars who say that the inner relationships of the Trinity are demonstrated in their actions towards human beings and the world. In the case of the Incarnation, they tell us something about why Jesus came, and that’s what we’re going to explore today.
Firstly, unity:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning.
Note those words ‘with God’, ‘was God’, and ‘with God in the beginning.’ The Word, that is, Jesus, and the Father are united in fellowship and very nature. Theirs is a perfect and pure unity of relationship. They are one in heart, mind, and spirit.
It is this inner experience of unity that Jesus comes to bring at the Incarnation. It is the knowledge that human relationships with God, each other, and creation are broken that leads him to come. This is not what was intended. Humankind was made in the image of God, the One God in Three Persons who is unity, but sin has distorted and destroyed that.
So when Jesus comes, his is a mission of reconciliation. He wants human beings at one with the Godhead again. He wants human beings reconciled to each other. He wants the alienation of human beings from the creation healed.
To bring this unity will involve a great cost. It will take him from Bethlehem to Calvary, from the manger to the Cross. It makes me think of a Graham Kendrick Christmas song, ‘Thorns in the straw’, where he imagines Mary seeing the thorns for Jesus’ crown of thorns in the straw of the manger.
Therefore as Christians we remember our need to draw ever closer to our God, as we receive the forgiveness of our sins. We remember our need to work for unity with one another, putting right our broken relationships, and finding reconciliation with each other. We remember that our reconciliation with one another is one of the deeds that witnesses to our preaching about reconciliation with God.
And we remember our calling to bind up the wounds of the creation – not out of the desperation many have over things like climate change, but in the Christian hope of the God who is making all things new.
Let us remember this Advent that the unity of Father and Son leads to Jesus’ mission to bring unity. And just as that was costly for him, let us be prepared to pay a cost to proclaim and demonstrate Christ’s nature and message of unity to the world.
Secondly, love:
3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
Jesus is the Father’s agent in creation. But what has that got to do with love?
Let me ask you a question that the famous twentieth century Swiss theologian Karl Barth asked: was it necessary for God to create?
Barth answered that question with a ‘Yes’, and so do I. Here’s why. It’s certainly true that love between people can be personal and exclusive, but it is never private. If two people love each other exclusively but it never touches others for good, how is it so very different from mutual self-indulgence?
Take marriage as an example. The most common way in which a married couple express this love is when they are able to have children. Their personal and exclusive love naturally reaches out in a creative act and they sacrificially love their children.
Of course, I know that many couples don’t want children immediately and others cannot have children at all. So one of the things I do when I prepare a couple for marriage is I challenge them to show the love they have wonderfully discovered between themselves in service of others. Can they do something in their community? Is there a cause they could support?
I think something like that has happened on a cosmic, spiritual scale in the Godhead. Such is the love between the members of the Trinity that it has to be expressed beyond them. The Father creates through the Son and in the power of the Spirit. A universe is created beyond the Godhead for the Godhead to love.
And it is out of this love at the heart of God that Jesus comes in the Incarnation. Seeing the brokenness and lack of unity that I talked about in the first point, it is his very nature of love that brings him to earth. Remember that most basic of all statements about God in the Bible: ‘God is love.’
What I’m talking about here is what Christina Rossetti wrote about in one of her Christmas carols:
Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love divine;
Love was born at Christmas,
star and angels gave the sign.Worship we the Godhead,
Love incarnate, Love divine;
worship we our Jesus:
but wherewith for sacred sign?
There it is: Jesus comes in love because the very nature of the Godhead is love.
And Rossetti also tells us what the only fitting response is:
Love shall be our token,
love be yours and love be mine,
love to God and all the world,
love for plea and gift and sign.[1]
If the Incarnation is about the love at the heart of the Godhead coming to us in Jesus, then our response is ‘love to God and all the world’ – love God and love our neighbour, as Jesus was to say the two greatest commandments were. Even the new commandment he gave was about love: ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’
Howard Thurman, who was a great influence on Martin Luther King, wrote a short poem called ‘The Work of Christmas.’ It says this:
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among others,
To make music in the heart.
Thirdly and finally, light:
4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
At the heart of God’s life is light: purity, wholeness, righteousness, hope. But we have a world of darkness: sin, brokenness, injustice, despair. So when Jesus brings very inner character of God to Earth in the incarnation, he comes as light, the light of the world who ‘stepped down into darkness’[2].
Wherever we experience darkness, Jesus comes to shed his light. It may be the darkness when we know ourselves to be a moral failure, but the light of Jesus’ seventy-times-seven forgiving love draws us back to him again.
It may be the wounds we carry through life that leave us with low self-worth or even a sense of self-loathing, but the hope found in Jesus gives us strength to carry on.
It may be that a particular issue of injustice in the world affects us and we get involved with campaigning but nothing seems to change for the better. I listened to a talk recently by a Christian journalist whose life work it is to expose corruption in the church, but she has suffered attacks and false accusations from parts of the Christian community for her work. She has been tempted to give up, but the light of Jesus keeps her persevering for justice in the darkness.
Or maybe it’s bereavement. Six years ago when my father died, I said that a light had gone out of my life. He had modelled for me so much of what it meant to live with integrity as a Christian man in the world. Yes, he was just two months shy of his ninetieth birthday. Yes, Alzheimer’s Disease had taken his true personality before death took his body, and you could say it was a merciful release. But you know what grief is like. The logical answers don’t remove the pain.
Dad died on 1st August. It was not until Advent that year and reading John 1 that I felt a sense of hope. It was verse 5: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’ that made sense of things for me. Jesus gave just enough light in the darkness to take me forward in hope.
Let us begin this Advent with a sense of hope. The relationship between Jesus and his Father may seem like hi-falutin’ brain-bending stuff, but at its heart are characteristics that stretch out from the inner life of God to us through the Incarnation of Jesus. Let that unity, love, and light give us strength and hope.
[1] Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) in Singing The Faith #210.
[2] Tim Hughes, op. cit., #175.
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