The First Sunday after Christmas

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A very merry Christmas to you all! Though we celebrated the nativity of Jesus Christ a few days ago, it is technically still Christmastide so stay holly and jolly and continue celebrate the birth of Christ!

It’s only been three days since I preached on Christmas morning. And the Gospel today is almost identical to the one we read on Christmas. And as I’m frantically praying over and pondering what to preach, some new angles on the Gospel bubbled up.

They have to do with the word know. Saint John writes in the Gospel:

“He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.” (John 1:10)

“It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” (John 1:18)

What does it mean to know Christ?

What does it mean to know Christ as God incarnate, born of Blessed Mary? How do we come to know our God, the uncreated, uncontainable, eternal, immortal, independent and holy One who becomes creation, contained within the womb of a Mary, finite, mortal, and totally and wholly dependent in the form of a helpless child?

I think the Gospel of John’s marvellous introduction begins to open these questions for us.

First we get a glimpse of how humanity understands the incarnation: The eternal second person of the trinity, the Son, the Logos, the Word, “was in the world, and the world came into being” through this Person. Yet, St. John writes, “the world did not know him.”

Christ comes to his own people - his own creation, and specifically, to the people of Israel and they “did not accept him.”

Here we encounter a profound and heartbreaking statement.

That God’s own creation failed to witness, failed to see, failed to understand the profound wonder and majesty and glory of the incarnate deity in Jesus Christ. It is the cycle of the Hebrew scriptures played out over and over again: God comes to Israel, Israel accepts God, rapidly forgets God, and God then acts to bring them back into relationship with God’s self.

And then, St. John writes, “But to all who received him who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”

Aha! All is not lost after all - there are yet some who received Christ.

And here we learn something about what it means to know Christ.

Knowing Christ is tied to “receiving” and “accepting” Christ. The act of knowing Jesus entails receptivity, a receptivity which is transformational and experiential.

How do we receive Christ in our hearts? Through prayer. Through the reception of the Eucharist, which is the very body and blood of our Lord instituted the night before his death. We come to know Christ in reading the Holy Scriptures. And of course, we come to know Christ in feeding the hungry and performing acts of Mercy. Jesus, after all tells us quite clearly, “‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” (Matthew 25:40)

To know Christ is to both act, and to receive. Mysteriously, we come to know Jesus more and more fully through this way of living.

A second aspect of knowing Christ (and knowing God for that matter) comes from v. 18, that Christ as “God the only Son” has made God the Father “known.”

This is a provocative and profoundly wondrous and mysterious statement, complex in its Trinitarian implications. Functionally, Jesus reveals and makes known the internal life of the Trinitarian God who we worship.

Knowledge here is relational, that we come to know the fullness of God more completely through God incarnate in Jesus Christ. By having relationship with Jesus Christ, we come to know the Father - and the Holy Spirit of course - more completely. We enter into the divine life of God through the knowledge which bears fruit only in relationality.

This is a wondrous thing, and it is wrought by what we celebrate at Christmas: The uncontainable creator being contained in the womb of Merry (again, from the instagram page Swordandpencil, highly recommend).

In the incarnation of Christ, we come to know God more fully. John gives us some information on what that entails - namely, we come to know Christ through receiving Christ in experience, and through relationship.

These are buttressed by additional ways of knowing God. God is the creator of the universe, it is God who blasted forth all that is out of nothing, who set the complex laws which govern the universe, who hung the stars in the sky. Creation is a testament to the wonder of God.

God has also made Godself known by theophany - that is, divine appearings to the peoples of the world, most prominently Israel, recorded to us in the Holy Scriptures. This is the gift of divine revelation in the inspired word of God, the Bible. But the Scriptures are much more than a record - they are a living word - out of which God continues to speak to humanity to this day.

And, of course, God is made known to us in Christ. In the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.

All of these “knowings” come about through experience - experiencing the marvels of creation, the depth of Holy Scripture, and Jesus Christ Himself.

To know Christ means to experience Christ, and one way to experience Christ is to contemplate the deep wonder, the profound marvel, the utter and resplendent shock which is God being knit together as a child in the womb of Mary, and being born to the world, just over two-thousand years ago.

For the remaining time in Christmas, we are invited to ponder, to contemplate, the incarnation of God in Christ Jesus. To know our incarnate God as a fragile baby, swaddled in his loving mother’s arms.

Amen.