Sermon – Sunday 30 December 2018/Rev. Christian M. Wood

“The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

This may be my favorite part of the entire Bible.

In these few sentences John says so much about Jesus, and who He is, it’s like the entirety of the Bible has been squeezed in this one concentrated section. John’s emphasis as he is writing his account is revealed at the end of the Gospel according to John, when he says “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

John’s account has similarities yet is very different from the three synoptic Gospels, and there is a good reason for it. From the very beginning of the Church people within the Church were confusing the truth, with vain inventions from their own minds. The reason John connects the beginning of his account, to Genesis, and makes it abundantly clear that Jesus is indeed the very Word of God who took on human flesh, is because some of the first heresies were beginning to build momentum when John wrote this Gospel. The heresies are called Gnosticism and Docetism. They state that Jesus was not fully human but only appeared to be. They believed that Jesus was God, but it denied the incarnation, it denied that he was a human at all, and believed Jesus never suffered on the cross but tricked those who witnessed the crucifixion into thinking he did! This heresy would be struggled with throughout the years until the council of Nicaea when it was declared a false teaching by the Church. John’s strong language outlining the incarnation helped to defeat those heresies.

Several Saints wrote about the incarnation, one of the first was Saint Athanasius, who argued, Humans corrupted God’s creation and the only way to bring it out of corruption is for the one through whom all was made to turn what is corruptible, incorruptible. Jesus does this in the resurrection, the resurrection cannot happen however, and Jesus cannot show us the immortal resurrected body, the body intended for us in creation, without taking on human flesh. That is why he takes on the flesh of Mary so that he can live, suffer, die, and show mankind the bodily resurrection. According to Athanasius, “The Word, since it was not able to die, for he was immortal took to himself a body able to die, that he might offer it as his own on behalf of all and as himself suffering for all.”

Ambrose in the year 1099, also wrote about the incarnation saying, that only God had the ability to pay the debt caused by Adam’s sin, but since man was the perpetrator of original sin the debt must be paid by a man. Therefore, God the word became man, and in doing so freely offered himself as payment for the insult of sin perpetrated by man from its inception onward.

Neither of these saints would have been able to make such a strong argument securing the truth of our faith for two thousand years, without the work of John’s account. Many theologians speak about incarnational living for all of us today, which means that we can and must live like Jesus lived while he was on earth.

We can strive for that level of sanctification, we can strive to live in an incarnational way, but the truth is, we would all be far better off realizing how lost we are without relying on the grace of God to love, heal, and sustain us through the Church and the sacraments. If human beings through their own will can live as Jesus did then the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection are all not needed. We must always remember that all the good we do, is done by and through the grace of God and His Holy Spirit. Without Jesus becoming man we would all be lost.

I give thanks for the witness Saint John left us in his account, and I pray we all remember that God himself knows all the wonders, and terrors of life on earth, and our job is to rely on His grace to lead us into His Glory.

Sermon preached by the Rev. Christian M. Wood

Church of the Redeemer

Sarasota Florida

1st Sunday after Christmas

30 December 2018