Christmas in Three Acts: Part 3–The Bold Assertions of John

In the first of this series I noted that there is more than one Christmas story to be found in the Bible. So far we have looked at the Christmas story from the Gospel of Matthew (1: 18 – 2: 12), and the one from the Gospel of Luke (Luke 2: 1 – 20). While those two are quite different they do bear a family resemblance.

That’s not the case when we turn to the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel according to John. On a casual read, you might not think John 1: 1 – 18 is a Christmas Story at all. No Joseph or Mary; no manger nor angels. And yet it is this passage is most often the appointed reading for Christmas Eve and it is the culminating text in the traditional Lessons and Carols Service.

Why? Why is this passage, without any of the usual Christmas-y trappings, seen as the climactic Christmas text?

Because it is all about, in John’s words, “the Word made flesh.” The big theological word for this is “incarnation,” which means “in the flesh” or “taking on flesh.” In Jesus, God takes on flesh and hangs out with us.

Of which Frederick Büechner wrote in his little book Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC: “Incarnation. ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth.’ It is untheological. It is unsophisticated. It is undignified. But according to Christianity it is the way it is.”

One implication of “the Word made flesh,” and that “all things came into being through him” (1: 3) is that there is no binary of spiritual and material. So, comments Buechner, “All religions and philosophies which deny the reality or the significance of the material, the fleshly, the earth-bound, are themselves denied . . . if we are saved anywhere, we are saved here. And what is saved is not some diaphanous distillation of our bodies and our earth, but our bodies and our earth themselves . . .”

“One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making,” observes Buechner, “is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.” By which he means the fondness of some religious folks for pitting the so-called “spiritual” against the earthy, the messy and material. No, the Word has been made flesh, his name “Emmanuel,” or God with us . . . here.

John isn’t so much giving us a birth story as he is proclaiming and celebrating the truth of the invisible God taking human form and being revealed in Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim.

Many of the treatments of John 1: 1 – 18 go down doctrinal rabbit holes. Maybe I’ve done a little of that, focusing on the “doctrine” of the Incarnation. But the use of this passage as the climax of a Christmas Eve or Christmas Day liturgy suggests another way to approach it. Simply listen to its grand, bold and big declarations. It is less a story than a confession of faith, as assertion of what God has done and is doing.

Some examples of these claims: “He was, in the beginning with God, all things came into being through him”; “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”; “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth”; “From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace”; “No one has ever seen God. It is God the Son . . . who has made him known.”

Such declarations are not only bold, they are weird. And yet if you listen to many of the traditional Christmas carols, you also hear such bold confessions of faith. Unlike some of the music we hear at Christmas the older carols aren’t sentimental or cute, as say the rum-pum-pum’s of a little drummer boy or the chatter of singing chipmunks, as entertaining as those may be.

These carols contain bold theological declarations, like this one from “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen.” “This day is born a Savior, of a pure virgin bright, to free all those who trust in him from Satan’s power and might.” That’s a big claim, a bold assertion.

Or this from “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” “Veiled in flesh the God-head see, hail the incarnate deity, pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel.” God has pitched his tent in the midst of it all.

Or from “O Come All Ye Faithful.” “Yea, Lord, we greet thee, born this happy morning, Jesus to thee all glory given; Word of the Father now in flesh appearing; O come let us adore him . . .” There is no attempt here to prove or to explain, merely the bold assertion that in this Jesus we see God. In this respect, it is much like Handel’s famous “Hallelujah Chorus,” declaring at full voice and volume, “He is King of King, he is Lord of Lords.”

Such bold confessions of faith have suffered an eclipse in the church world of which I am a part, variously known as “mainline” or “liberal” or “progressive,” while in conservative churches they have been hooked to an alien political agenda. We mainlines/progressives tend to tell stories about Jesus (stories of his kindness and compassion), rather than to proclaim him as Lord and Savior.

But this is exactly what John in his prologue, his “Christmas Story,” does. He sings full-throated and boldly of the divine embrace of all of life, of the light that shines in the dark, of God revealed in Christ and in his life, death, and resurrection, and of Christ’s power to shatter Satan’s dominion, bringing grace and a new life to all who trust him.

There’s a story of the 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine and a friend visiting one of the great European cathedrals. The friend asked Heine how people had once been able to build such glorious and awe-inspiring structures, to which Heine replied, “People, then, had convictions; now, we only have opinions.” John’s Christmas story rings with the conviction that Jesus, not Caesar, (or Caesar’s contemporary inheritors) is Lord.