December 27, 2024

Midnight Mass – Ms Leslie Spatt – 24 December 2024

Preached by: Ms Leslie Spatt In the beginning…. With these words John’s Gospel throws us backwards to the very first words of the whole bible, IN THE BEGINNING, the first…

Preached by: Ms Leslie Spatt

In the beginning…. With these words John’s Gospel throws us backwards to the very first words of the whole bible, IN THE BEGINNING, the first Genesis story of creation. John doesn’t start with Jesus at his baptism, or birth stories with shepherds and angels, Magi and symbolic gifts, limited to a particular location in time and space. He’s not interested in who Jesus’ ancestors were, or anything about whether his mother was a virgin (or not) or indeed anything about Jesus’ conception. John’s beginning is God’s relationship with everything created, through the Word.

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’. All things came into being through the Word of God. God saw that everything was indeed very good.

This Gospel places the Word, which was God, there in that infinite void; of nothingness before the Big Bang. Or, as some scientists would say, before the most recent Big Bang. And God starts to work in that nothingness. God uses wind, or spirit, to speak words and everything was created.

And the Word, which was with God, which was God, eventually entered into a human existence, the person we know as Jesus, where the divine became inseparable from the human. The Word has always been there, but has not always been Jesus until the Word became flesh, Emmanuel, God with us. God with us, not because the world had become so sinful and depraved that it needed God to visit in person in order to punish the world and everything in it. Not because an angry God demanded a sacrifice to pay for all the sins humans had committed from creation up to the time of Jesus, and no human was adequate enough to do this.

My own belief, and maybe yours as well, is that because of God’s love for what had been created, God tried again and again to bring everything back into that ideal relationship at the beginning of time before it all had gone wrong – using inspiring wise leaders and prophets, good rulers and faithful obedient followers. And when none of that worked, God in that same total love became the only thing that people could recognise and listen to, follow, and help mend our broken-ness, our alienation from the Kingdom of God. God shared the experience of being human. A real person with a body, face and voice, emotions and mind.

Just think for a minute about that incredible, almost arrogant assertion: God became a human being and lived on earth just like any one of us. Oh, come on. To quote one of our more colourful vintage TV personalities, “I don’t belieeeeeeve it!” Can we believe that God could be seen and known as a normal, real person? Someone who laughed and cried, got angry, went to parties, who most definitely loved and was loved. But this is the mystery: that in Jesus, God was now visible, touchable, could be known.

We use the word Incarnation as a fancy theological term to describe that mystery. Jesus is the name we give to the incarnation of the Word. Became enfleshed, but not merely a divine “something” covered up by a human shell. The Word became actual flesh, this stuff, skin and bones and blood and all the rest; so that it could be revealed to the world, personally, intimately. Absurd, isn’t it. Yes…well, God’s like that. Not afraid to appear vulnerable; to want to experience the totality of creation. To walk alongside us, and share it all – the good, the bad, happiness and tragedy, even temptation.

Although we share our origin in Abraham and the one God with both Judaism and Islam, the unique distinctiveness of Christianity relating to them and among other mainstream religions is the belief that God decided to share our life totally so that we in turn might experience something of the divine, even share that divinity. What we as Christians celebrate today is at the heart of that precious glittering gift which God offers to us, the perfect diamond which the church calls the incarnation, showing the unlimited love of the Creator for all creation. In that sharing, God voluntarily takes on becoming – us.

God’s Word becomes flesh in Jesus, who then becomes our bridge and pathway to the otherwise unknowable God. He is where we meet God, the One who before the incarnation could have been thought of as remote, external, incomprehensible. In Jesus, God knows about being tired, isolated, frustrated, sad, joyous, knowing pain and all the other things we live with; so that when we rejoice, God rejoices with us, and when we suffer, God is there in our pain, our loss and our darkness. We can remember that God knows what it’s like because the God in Jesus has been there too. One unexplainable mystery of Christian faith is that Jesus is at the same time both fully human and fully divine. But if we think that Jesus himself was anything less than completely human then he’s not like us and there is no bridge, no personal connection. God stays as that external “other”.

It’s OK that it stays a mystery; not as something to be solved, but as something we’re able to leave outside our ability to know as provable fact. It’s OK to wrestle with the unknowing and doubt. It’s OK to believe it; have faith in what God is doing, without needing to understand intellectually, because we can’t. But we can believe that God is shown to us in the person who was Jesus, the life which was the light of all people, and who still lives for us now. The one who gives us power to become children of God.

We constantly face the darkness in both ourselves and in the world. At this time of extreme national and international anxiety, perhaps personal uncertainty, fear, confusion, mistrust and clouded futures…the light of God, our Light we see in Jesus, shines in the darkness and the darkness will not …will NOT…overcome it. Because ….the Word was made flesh and lived among us. And we have seen his glory. Not only once 2000 years ago, long dead, dusty history. God is with us is now. We’re surrounded with wonder at the divine touching earth. The Lord is here. Amen. ©Leslie Spatt 2024

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