Christmas Day

Isaiah 52:7-10: We are standing with the sentinels that still guard the ruined city of Jerusalem. A generation before the Babylonian armies had broken down the walls and stormed into the Holy City of David. They burned its houses, they destroyed its buildings of government, they devastated its temple. The houses have not been rebuilt, rubble still fills the streets, the wall still has huge holes in it, the house of God lies in ruins. But sentinels still stand on the broken walls. Somehow the city must be guarded.

Then, in the distance, the sentinels see a messenger coming toward them. He runs, he does not walk. That must mean good news; a messenger with bad news would not run so quickly or so well. They can imagine what he will say. The enemy has been defeated. Soon over the mountains you will see the victor come.

When he is within earshot, the messenger sings out his message. It is a message of peace, shalom, well-being for the people. It announces salvation, the enemy is destroyed and will no longer harm you. Finally he blurts out, "Your God reigns!" God has brought victory to the people, God reigns over us. How beautiful upon the mountain are the feet of the messenger that brings such news. The sentinels sing out for joy. Beyond the feet of the messenger and their own returning armies, they visualize the return of the Lord to Zion.

Who is this God? This God is the comforter. "Comfort" has been the special message of the prophet, Isaiah of Babylon. The word carries multiple meanings. It is "to have compassion on," it is consoling, it is pitying, it is grieving, it is feeling great guilt for one's sins and repenting of them. It is God changing the circumstances of their lives.

God is the redeemer. A redeemer is one who buys back what has been lost either by accident or by fault of one's own. Israel, on account of its sins and wretched condition, had been sold to a creditor. Now God has gone to the pawn shop and bought Israel back again as God's own possession. God will restore Israel to the place she had with God before she had to pay the penalty for her sins.

God is the strong one. God rolls up his sleeves, so to speak, that Israel may see the strength of his arm, the muscles rippling, the fingers closed into a fist. Israel sees this. So do the nations. Who can stand before the strength of Israel's God, what nation is more powerful than they for whom God enters the battle. Not only the nations see the power of God, either. All the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of God.

Indeed, they shall. But the "salvation of God" is different than Israel had always supposed. Just a few verses after these, Isaiah of Babylon draws his strongest picture: of a servant of God so marred that his appearance was beyond all human semblance, from whom other men hid their faces. He was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering, acquainted with grief. But surely he has borne our sins and carried our diseases. He was wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. But by his stripes we are healed. When the power of God comes in its fulness, and the arm of God is bared before the nations, what stands before us is not an army in full regalia but a man whose broken body is nailed to a cross. The power of God to save is the power of God to suffer in our behalf and take our sins upon himself. Which is what Jesus did when he moved on from Christmas to Good Friday!

Psalm 98: The first few verses of this psalm seem to come direct from Isaiah of Babylon himself. "The Lord has done marvelous things. His right hand and his holy arm have gotten him victory. . . . He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God." Isaiah himself could not have said it better.

But there is more to the psalm than reminiscences of Isaiah. "Sing to the Lord a new song." All the old songs are insufficient to praise God for what God has done. The exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt was a mighty act; but the return of Judah from Babylon is a mighty act also. "Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!"

The praises to God are to be sung accompanied with the usual instruments: the lyre, the harp, trumpets, the horn. But this is not enough. Beyond the human instruments, all nature breaks forth into a joyful noise before the Lord. The sea roars, the floods clap their hands, the hills sing for joy.

But note who this God is. He is not only the mighty warrior who was the victor in the battle with Babylon. He is not only the deliverer of the people from the slavery in Egypt. He is a judge who comes to judge the whole earth. "Righteousness" is one standard of his judgement, requiring all the peoples, not Judah alone, to stand in right relationship with one another, with all the world, and with Judah's God. "Equity" is God's other standard, justice tempered with the mercy that renders no judgement too harsh. The establishment of God's rule brings great rejoicing. God's new kingship will turn the world into an entirely new direction.

Psalm 98 has been regularly used on Christmas Day, and the New Interpreters Bible tells us why. "Such use affirms the Christian conviction that the birth of Jesus Christ belongs with exodus and return from exile in the sequence of God's marvelous doings (v. 1). . . . To sing Psalm 98 to greet the birth of Jesus affirms that this event had and has cosmic significance; it changed and changes the world. . . . It seems strange," the author writes, "that the birth of a humble baby should signal God's cosmic rule, but the strangeness is a hint of things to come. This baby would finally enact from a cross God's sovereign claim upon the world. . . . This rhythm of liturgical use is a reminder that the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection together proclaim the good news that God so loves the world and that together they portray a divine sovereignty manifest, not as sheer force, but as sheer love."

Hebrews 1:1-12: Just as 1:1-18 above is the prologue to the Gospel of John, the verses in front of us, 1:1-4 and 1:5-12, compose the prologue of the Letter to the Hebrews. 1:1-4 is one long sentence (broken up into three or four sentences in our translations) and a very carefully constructed sentence at that. Five of the first twelve words in the sentence begin with the letter "p." There is contrast and repetition. It has a temporal sequence of Christ's pre-existence, his incarnation, and his exaltation. Alexander Purdy commented (IB11:596), "It is important to realize that the rhetorical style of Hebrews is a clue to the kind of man our author was. He was not writing down to the man in the street; he was writing up to the highest literary standards he knew. . . . Our author was a conscious stylist writing for cultured readers. His message is earnest and simple, but it derives from a closely reasoned argument and is expressed in the best Greek in the NT."

The message centers in the Son whom God sent into the world. The Son is described in many powerful phrases.

- This son is heir of all things; he is the one through whom God created the worlds. This is the only text in the New Testament in which Christ appears as heir. As such he is in the line of Abraham, who in Gen 17:5 is invested as heir of God. But Christ is heir of all creation, not just all the nations as was Abraham.

- He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being. This latter claim is made in one word, charactor in Greek, which means both "the impression that a stamp leaves""the engraved steel itself, the stamp itself" which can create the impression. Christ is not only the bearer of the impression of God but the one who can create the impression of God. "Reflection" carries much the same idea. According to ancient physics, light streams from its source without affecting the source. Thus it is an appropriate symbol for the forth-going of God into creation, since it does not imperil the idea of a changeless and absolute Being. (Purdy IB11:601)

- He is the one who sustains all things by his powerful word. This is a strange statement. We tend to think that God is the one who sustains all things by his word. But by the time of the writing of Hebrews, all the attributes that the Old Testament ascribes to God are transferred by the Christians to Jesus Christ. So they have no compunction in making this claim in his behalf. As God in the Old Testament "sustains all things by his powerful word," in the post-gospel world of the New Testament, what only god did formerly, Christ now does, too, as the one sent forth from God.

- Christ is the one who has made purification for our sins. This is the basic understanding of Christ in the Letter to the Hebrews. He is the great high priest at God's altar who makes the sacrifice that purifies us.

- Christ has been elevated to sit down at the right hand of God. The one "at the right hand of majesty" is the prime minister in a kingdom. He holds the privileged position in all the realm. He is close enough to Majesty to hear what the king has to say to him. Then he goes forth from the throne room to carry out the king's commands. Christ has this role in the kingdom of God. He sits at the most privileged place. God can speak the divine wisdom and the divine commands into his ear. He can go forth to carry them out. Christ is the Son who is heir to all things; Christ is the high priest who makes purification for our sins; Christ is the prime minister in God's kingdom who carries out the wishes of God's Majesty.

The prologue closes with a series of seven quotations from the Old Testament. Five are from the psalms, one is from Deuteronomy, and one from 2 Samuel. All citations are from the Septuagint, the official Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. These quotations concern the place of angels in God's scheme of things. The author of Hebrews is clear on the point he wants to make. Angels may be important to the Old Testament. They may have even brought the Law from God to Moses. But they are clearly inferior to Jesus Christ. Did God ever say to the angels the same things God said to Christ? Of course not. The Son is superior to the angels in every respect. And the self-respecting Jewish Christians to whom this letter is addressed ought spend no time thinking about angels. They need to think only about Jesus Christ, Son, Priest, and Ruler, who has come to them from God and who is central in all their deliberations of God. 12-25-99

John 1:1-14: This passage is called "The Prologue" to the Gospel of John. It contains in miniature the message of the whole gospel. More than likely, the passage is poetry rather than prose, although to my knowledge it was never printed that way in any extant copy of the gospel. Some scholars have suggested that the passage was originally a "Hymn to Wisdom,: to which the references to Jesus were later added. Personally, I consider it a profound construct written by the author of the Gospel of John, a moving frontispiece to the most thoughtful of the gospels. As it stands, it serves many purposes for the Gospel of John.

- It is John's Christmas story. Instead of the shepherds and wise men of Luke and Matthew, the story says, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."

- It introduces the main themes of John's gospel. It puts Jesus in cosmic perspective; "in the beginning was the word." It portrays Jesus as the revealer of the Father. It affirms that Jesus is an historical figure. It proclaims that through Jesus salvation comes to the people.

- It brings to our attention some of the main concepts of the gospel: light, life, grace, truth, witness, glory, world, only son of the father.

- It serves as John's story of the transfiguration. In the other gospels, the glory of God shines upon Jesus at a particular moment, and he is transfigured before his disciples. In John's gospel "the glory" is upon him from the moment "the word becomes flesh and dwells among us."

- The discussion unfolds according to the following outline: the relationship between God and the Word [the Logos] (1:1-5), John as witness to the light (1:6-8), the coming of the light into the world (1:9-13), and the Word become flesh (1:14-18).

"In the beginning." This immediately brings us to the opening words in the Book of Genesis. "In the beginning God." The Word is "The Word of the Lord" by which heaven and earth were made and which came to the prophets. But the same Greek word for "beginning" also means "in principle," and so the word is related to Greek thought as well as to Hebrew. It is the rational principle, long sought by the Greeks, which gives unity and significance to all exiting things. The expression means therefore "in the beginning of history" and "at the root of the universe." The congregations to which the Gospel was originally addressed was composed of both Hebrew-speaking people and Greek-speaking people, and they each had their own thoughts as they read these words. John is saying that "The Word" is the fulfillment of both Jewish history and Greek philosophy. Apart from "The Word," neither of these have ultimate meaning.

This first sentence tell us still more about the relationship between "God" and "Word." The Word which God speaks is not to be separated from God. It is not another God beside God. The Word is "in the presence of God." But it is not subordinate to God. The Word belongs to God; it is God's way of revealing himself to us. Whenever as Christians we say the name "God, we are to think of this Logos, the Word become flesh, Jesus Christ. Christ is not a God beside God. Nor is Christ subordinate to God. Jesus Christ is God in his action toward us. The great Christian thinker Augustine summed it up for us (Faith and the Creed ii3 p 355): "As by our words, when we speak truly, our mind lets him who hears them know something, and by signs of that kind brings to the knowledge of another what we hold secretly in our hearts, so wisdom whom God the Father begat is most appropriately called his Word, because through Him the Father who dwells in utmost secrecy becomes known to worthy minds."

In verse two the Greek article can be translated either "This" or "He." I prefer to translate it as "this." "This (the logos) was in the beginning with God, and what has been made has been made in no way without him." I do not want to get to the climax of the piece faster than John's Gospel does. As far as John is concerned, the great climax comes at verse 14: "The word becomes flesh and dwelt among us."

1:4 "In him was life." C. H. Dodd in his commentary on John's Gospel (144-151) pointed out that in Jewish usage the word "life" has three meanings:

1) "life" as contrasted with death.

2) "life of the age" as contrasted with life of time, an indefinitely long rather than strictly an infinite period.

3) "life of the age to come" as contrasted with the

life of this age.

John means by life "life perfect and absolute, timeless in quality and therefore exempt from death. John conceives it as possible for us here and now, but it will be realized in its fulness only beyond the grave."

The second of the great concepts introduced in this verse is that of "light." He who has "life" also brings "light." The difference between light and darkness is primarily the difference between security and danger. To the Hebrew, "darkness" was a time of danger, distress, dread, and terror. Night is the time when wild beasts, evil doers, demons and all mischievous things are at work. "Light" is the time when people go about their lawful business in peace and safety. This was the quality about Jesus Christ that made him attractive to others. Life was in him, authentic life, and this life had an ambience that lighted up the lives of other people.

The amazing thing about "light" is that the darkness cannot overcome it. The word translated "overcome" had a myriad of meanings. Charles Moffatt's translation of this passage reads, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not master it." Another scholar translated this, "The darkness does not appreciate it." Rudolph Bultmann wrote, "The darkness does not grasp it." John was a writer who delighted in the double and triple meanings of words. More than likely, by using this word he meant to express all these things.

In verse six John's Gospel introduces John the Baptist. In this gospel there is nothing of John the prophet of judgement or the preacher of righteousness. Here the Baptist serves two purposes. He is the herald of the coming of Christ, and he is the witness to that coming, "a man sent forth as a testimony to the light that was coming into the world."