December 29, 2024, The Splash of the Incarnation, John 1:14 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ December 29, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

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The first chapter of John is so beautiful to read and to listen to. It’s poetry, and it’s theology, and it’s all about the thing we call the Incarnation. The doctrine of the Incarnation is how Christians throughout the centuries have done their very best to express what exactly happened when God’s Holy Spirit quickened the egg in Mary’s virgin womb, and the child grew and was nourished by her body for nine months and was born into the world the way we were all born.

The doctrine of the Incarnation says that that little baby, Jesus, is one and the same being, one and the same person, as the Son of God, the second member of the Holy Trinity. The doctrine of the Incarnation says that Jesus, born of Mary, was one hundred per cent human, but at the same time he was fully and entirely God. The doctrine of the Incarnation says that because Jesus was both man and God, he suffered the same pains and weaknesses that we suffer ourselves, but he never sinned. And maybe the greatest mystery of the Incarnation is that even though the man, Jesus, was subject to death just like we are, he existed with God from before the dawn of Time, and he will reign with God for ever and ever, time without end.

But John is really not so much trying to lay out a doctrine explaining the finer points of the Incarnation as he is just describing what happened when the Lord and Creator of the Universe decided to move into our neighborhood. Because no matter how much theology we study, no matter how brilliant we are, we will never be able to really comprehend how it could be that the little baby nursing at his mother’s breast, and waking her up at 2 in the morning for a diaper change, was also and completely and at the very same time the Almighty, Eternal God. That will always be a mystery.

What John wants to tell us in this first chapter of his gospel is what happened, what kind of a splash it made, when God showed up and became our neighbor. And one of the things that happened is that nobody recognized him. And really, can you blame them? When people are waiting for a celebrity to arrive, and they’ve got the red carpet all ready to roll out, and the champagne chilling, and the orchestra tuning up, and then your next-door neighbor shows up, in sweatpants and crocs and a baseball cap – nobody is going to believe it. Some people will be disappointed, and some will be offended, and most of them will turn their backs and go home.

And that’s how it was. The Jewish people had been waiting hundreds of years for God to send his Messiah, who would come in glory and vanquish the enemy and set everything to rights. But what they got was the kid next door. whose father mended the broken leg on their kitchen table, whose mother and brothers and sisters they passed on the street every day, that same kid, suddenly claiming to be some kind of itinerant preacher. Even when Jesus had gathered a following among the poor and the sick and the outcasts, who were healed and taught and fed and loved by Jesus: in the end, when they saw him powerless and humiliated at the hands of their enemies – even they joined the chorus crying out, “Crucify him!” along with all the rest. Because how is it possible that God could be someone like us? How could “human” ever be good enough?

There’s a song called “One of Us,” and the chorus asks:

“What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin’ to make his way home?”

God was one of us, he sat right next to us on the bus, and we didn’t recognize him. He came to his own, John tells us, and his own people didn’t accept him.The message of the Incarnation is that we should never despise what God has created; we shouldn’t look down on our own humanity.

But because Jesus was truly one of us, he knows what it’s like to be us, from the inside. He knows what pain feels like, and sickness, and grief. He knows what it’s like to be afraid. He knows what it’s like to be tempted to do what he knew he shouldn’t do. He knows what anger feels like, and loneliness, and every other human emotion or sensation. “We don’t have a high priest who can’t sympathize with us in our weakness,” says the writer to the Hebrews. “We have someone representing us before God who has been tempted in every way we are – but, without sin.”

There’s an old saying that if you really want to understand a person you should first walk a mile in their shoes. When people say that they mean you can’t empathize with someone unless you know what their life is like, what problems they face. But the Incarnation means that Jesus didn’t just walk a mile in our shoes. He lived a whole lifetime as one of us. We can come to him with perfect confidence, because we know that he knows us. We can be sure that we will never be condemned for our weakness. We read in Hebrews that we will always find grace and mercy to help us in our time of need. The message of the Incarnation is that God knows everything about us, and he is not ashamed to call us his brothers and sisters.

He knows us. But the other side of the Incarnation is that we now have a chance to know him. “No one has ever seen God,” John writes. Luther’s Catechism gives this classic definition of God: “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” God is so far beyond us, so far beyond our experience, that we could never in a millions years hope to know him. Even Moses, who of all human beings spoke to God as a man speaks to his friend, even when he wanted to see God, God had to hide him in the cleft of a rock until he had passed by, so that Moses saw only his passing glory. We are feeble creatures of clay, and God is perfect glory. We could never hope to see or know or understand him.

Until Jesus. Because the most wonderful part of the mystery of the Incarnation is that Jesus is God with skin and bones, God with hands that can touch and a voice that can speak, God with eyes that can weep and arms that can hug lepers and hold little children. In Jesus we can see that God is love. In Jesus we can see perfect love, in human form, love that pours itself out, love that kneels down and serves, love that gives each and every one of us the right to be beloved children. God the Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, has made God known to us, just as we have been fully know by the Father from the beginning. The message of the Incarnation

is that now we have actually seen God, but more than that – now that we have seen God, we can see God in each other.

Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.

Amen. +