Homily for Christmas 1
December 27, 2009
If church buildings could speak, then I think our little church would probably beg for some rest after last Thursday night’s service. Actually, never mind the church – that’s probably how we all feel! (Hence the lack of Sunday bulletins and the hay all over the floor here.)
Anyway, today, the first Sunday of Christmas, we can all get a little of that. And I always like that we read this passage from John’s Gospel every Sunday after Christmas without fail, because it really appeals to that post-holiday urge to clean up and quiet down.
This is John’s version of the Nativity story, and once you know that, the first thing you probably notice is what isn’t here: there are no sheep, no shepherds, no crowded inns, no census. There’s no Mary or Joseph, no hasty trips to Bethlehem nine months into Mary’s pregnancy, no vindictive Herod or wise men or manger or hay or cows or even an infant Jesus. Unlike the other Gospels, it’s a very orderly account of how Jesus came to be.
The common thinking is that John wrote for a more philosophical audience, one that might have objected to the cruder aspects of the Nativity stories in the other Gospels. So he set out to write this orderly version to sort of correct those. It’s not my favorite of the three accounts we have in the Gospels, but I think we can all agree it has its place – perhaps no more so than today.
Along with its orderliness, there are a couple of other ways I find this passage reassuring, and I’m going to just point those out and leave it at that for today.
First is its scope. If you read the opening chapter of all four Gospels, you’ll notice that, the later the Gospel was written, the further back into Jesus’ life it looks. So, for instance, Mark was the first Gospel, and it picks up when Jesus is about 30 years old. Luke is the next oldest, and it reaches back to Jesus’ infancy. Matthew, the next to be written, goes back to Jesus’ ancestor David, who lived 1000 years earlier. And finally John, the last Gospel, traces Jesus’ life all the way back to the beginning of time, placing it in this eternal, cosmic time frame.
John probably did this to appeal, again, to that philosophical audience, and while it can make the passage a little confusing, there’s also something very basic and appealing about what he’s doing here.
There’s a line by the American poet Franz Wright that reminds me a lot of this aspect of John’s story. It’s from a poem in his collection Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, and in it he urges the reader to, “Set the mind before the mirror of eternity and everything will work.” Which is kind of what I imagine John trying to do to his readers: remind them that, if you consider your life and your problems in the context of eternity, then you’ll probably gain a much healthier – and maybe more hopeful – perspective on them.
“Set the mind before the mirror of eternity and everything will work.”
The other reason I find this passage reassuring is just a few lines from the end, where he says “From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.” In fact, by way of a little personal anecdote, I distinctly remember reading this passage in church at this time last year, and that line really jumping out at me for the first time after so many years of reading it. (I also recall not liking my sermon manuscript all that much, and considered just repeating that line a few times and sitting down rather than slogging through what I’d written!)
But it’s really striking. “Grace upon Grace.” Grace is one of those things that, by its very definition, is superfluous and overly abundant, so the redundancy here is meant to make it jump out at us. The image that it conjures for me at this time of year is of warm blankets piled one upon the other so that you’re never in danger of being cold: “From his fullness, we have received grace upon grace.”
SO, order, perspective, and warmth – all things we need at this time of the year, and all here in John’s Nativity.
