Episcopal Church of the Incarnation

West Point, Mississippi

The First Sunday of Christmas (A)

Isaiah 61.10-62.3 Psalm 147.13-21 Galatians 3.23-25; 4.4-7 John 1.1-18

May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart, that

I may rightly and truly proclaim His holy Word. Amen.

“No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” St. John begins his Gospel with the great Hymn to the Logos, the great hymn we have just heard, in which he makes it abundantly clear that the Good News which he proclaims is that the one eternal, all-powerful God, the Creator of heaven and earth, is interested in us, cares for us, and in involved intimately in our lives. This is not some distant Creator who has made the universe and then left it to its own devices, but a personal God, who having made the universe remains involved, both in how the earth orbits around the sun and in how the life of each of us is formed, and how we are each called into a greater knowledge and love of Him.

The one eternal, all-powerful God, the Creator of heaven and earth, not only created but creates. At every moment the universe is created anew, vivified by His power and His love, expressed in His holy Word; His Word (Logos in Greek) by which is meant His creative power. And this very same Logos is what–is who–became flesh and dwelt among us. God became one of us that He might call us into greater union with Him; not only that we might know Him better but–in the words of today’s Collect–that His light “may shine forth in our lives”.

Think about that for a minute. The next time you are tempted to wonder whether life has a purpose, remember that it is each one of us, it is you, who are called to participate in God’s work in this world. You are called to work with God, that His light may shine forth in this world through your life. God is personal because He works through people; He works through each one of us, and that is why St. John can say at his ending of the Hymn to the Logos, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”

How has Jesus, the Son, made God known to us? Consider for a moment the word “consolation”. This word is virtually identical to its Latin root, con solatio, “to be alone with,” “to share in aloneness”. God consoles us because He shares with us the terrible human isolation of suffering. He shares with us the feeling of being cut-off from all in our suffering, for He too has felt this. Jesus reveals the eternal, all-powerful, creator God to us in the face of the One who suffers on the cross.

Take a look at a crucifix. A crucifix is the image of One in agony, of One dying for us, the One of whom St. John says, “God the only Son, ... has made [God] known.” In becoming incarnate–in taking on our flesh and dwelling among us–God shares in our suffering, our grief, our disappointment, our loss. The eternal, all-powerful, creator God, the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost is beyond time and all limitation, and thus beyond suffering. God cannot suffer, but He can suffer with, He can be the One to “be alone with” us, for in the flesh He has felt our pain, our isolation, and has walked the way of all flesh, even unto death, that He might call and lead us to life beyond death.

Consider the last words of Jesus on the cross, as recorded by Mark and Matthew: Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” These may strike us as words of despair, as words of one without hope, and yet they are the beginning words of Psalm 22, in which all that happens at the crucifixion is recited, recited in a psalm written hundreds of years before the fact. The psalm begins with this despairing cry, but ends how? It ends by reciting God’s greatness. And what is this greatness? That God does not despise the poor or hide His face from them; that He hears those who cry to Him; that His kingship extends over all the earth; that those who confess Him are the Lord’s own people who shall proclaim His saving deeds. Far from being words of despair on the cross, Jesus’ words are the recitation of the greatness of God.

Or are they? Are not these words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” not also the words of one feeling abandonment? They are, and there’s the paradox: the God who saves, the God who recites His saving power, is also the God who bears the pain of the one who suffers. Jesus as one of us, as the One who has become flesh, feels pain, but lifts this pain up to His own Godhead knowing that redemption lies there. God cannot suffer, but He can suffer with, He does suffer with us, each of us, and redeems us in this suffering.

That’s the paradox that’s so hard to get, even for the disciples to get, as in John 14, when Philip says to Jesus, “[S]how us the Father, and we shall be satisfied.” What does Jesus say in reply? “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” We who see Jesus on the cross see God; we see that God bears the suffering of the world, He suffers with us even though He is beyond all suffering. Our burdens does He bear when we but offer them to Him, and it is in this offering of our own lives that God’s light, the light incarnated in Jesus, shines forth.

When we bear one another’s burdens, God’s light shines forth in the darkness of these burdens. When we extend the arm which consoles–when we share in the aloneness, the solatio, of another’s loss–God’s light shines forth. When we offer of ourselves in service, God’s light shines forth. When our hearts listen and our voices console, it is God who shines forth, and each time we have compassion for any in need we share in the one Passion by which we are all saved, that “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have life eternal.”

Com-passion, sharing in passion, sharing in suffering. We have seen God as the One who suffers with us, and in this season of Christmas, as we celebrate that the Word has become flesh and dwelt among us, let us each live in hope and in thanksgiving. Hope because God is with us. Thanksgiving because God comforts and redeems us. Let us celebrate this incarnation of the Word, the Logos, that was with God and is God, by allowing His light to shine forth in this darkness through our own lives; in how we are His arms which reach out from the cross to envelop those in need in love; the love that suffers with, the love that gives of itself.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son,

and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.