CHRISTMAS CAROL SERVICE 2011

CHRISTMAS CAROL SERVICE 2011

I wonder if, like me, you enjoy a really good mystery story – you know, one that keeps you in suspense right up until the last page. Well for those of you who do, you would have every right to call St. John a bit of a spoil sport. 

Why? 

Well because instead of keeping us in suspense for as long as possible, here, right at the very beginning of his Gospel, he spoils things by telling us precisely who this amazing figure Jesus actually is. He gives us the answer to the mystery, to the great question posed by the Gospels – who was this Jesus?  

These verses which, once again we have read at our annual Christmas Carol service, tell us where Jesus came from, why he came, and who he was. We don’t have to wait until the end of John’s Gospel to find out: we aren’t even allowed time - as I like to do with mystery stories - to try and guess. So when we come to the truly incredible teaching, and miracles, and claims of Jesus which we find in the Gospels, we already know who it is is presenting or performing or making them: it is God himself, the Creator and Sustainer of all that exists, choosing to become one of us, offering to us a light by which you and I and everyone may see clearly why we are here, what our purpose in life is, how we ought to live and to act, and what the Creator and Sustainer of all that exists requires of us - his creation.  

 St. John, then, ’unfolds’ the mystery of the incarnation right here at the beginning of his Gospel. He does not even try to explain how God, in one of his ways of being God, is able to take on human form – certainly not in a way that would satisfy the likes of Professor Richard Dawkins (yes, in the news once again having a go at Christian belief) and other atheist scientists who refuse to believe unless, that is, they can examine God and subject him to their experiments. I’m not being unpleasant or unfair to Professor Dawkins: it is simply what he himself has said; that he cannot believe in God because God has not provided him with sufficient evidence of the kind he requires in order to believe that he exists. Now quite apart from the fact that many scientists are Christians and that some of the leading people in science today believe in God quite unashamedly, realising, from experience, that not everything in this world of ours is capable of explanation by science alone, it seems that for Professor Dawkins his scientific enquiring has become for him a kind of, to use St. John’s word here, ‘darkness’; that is to say that it is actually preventing him from seeing the light, the truth, the knowledge that Jesus brings and which can be found in him alone.

There are many forms of such ‘darkness’, but the ‘darkness’ St. John speaks of is basically anything that prevents us – because of its power over us – from seeing Jesus for whom he really is ‘the light of the world’, that is to say ‘the essential reality by which all attempts to explain the world and ourselves must be assessed or measured.’ Of course, a great deal of how God has chosen to order this world which he brought into being, as well as the way he chooses to allow it to evolve under his care, will remain a mystery to us: we will never be able to explain everything or find all the answers: God is mysterious, I’m afraid; and we just have to get used to it!     

 But the one and most important answer he has very clearly given us is that he loves us; enough to come to this world he made, to become one of us, and to show the depth of his love by dying for us. Indeed, when you come to think of it, wouldn’t we rather expect him to act somewhat mysteriously – just like Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia – still, if you don’t mind my saying, the best Christmas present adults could ever buy their children, if only because you will so much enjoy reading them yourselves, not to mention learn so much from them!

John’s Gospel gives us lots of facts about Jesus, just like the other three gospels of Matthew,Mark, and Luke, as well as passing on to us much of what he taught; but John also attempts to explain  the universal meaning and significance of it all – Jesus’ life, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension -  what Aslan would have referred to as the ‘deep magic’ which our human minds could never work out for ourselves unless someone came to reveal it to us...which of course is exactly what Jesus did and is exactly why  St. John wrote it down in his Gospel, his book of ‘Good News.’ As John himself says in chapter 20 ‘these things are written in order that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that in believing you may have life in his name.’

What I find so striking about all the Gospels is the incredibly matter-of-fact way in which the writers give their accounts of Jesus and what happened. The Gospels weren’t science books or even biographies in the way we have come to understand biographies; rather, they are records of what reliable witnesses saw and heard about this amazing person Jesus. The Gospels were written by ordinary people for ordinary people in order to communicate a series of extraordinary events involving this extraordinary person, Jesus.

Even the method of his coming into the world that first Christmas was a mystery: exactly how God did it I cannot tell you. But what I can tell you, mysterious and miraculous though it most certainly was, is that it was God’s Holy Spirit and not Joseph who was involved: quite simply it makes most sense of the physical evidence and could not be otherwise once we realise that Jesus, the human baby, was also God incarnate. 

This coming of Jesus into the world is nothing less than the turning point of history. It must be. The question each one of us must ask ourselves is this. If I now know who exactly this Jesus was, will it be a turning point in my personal history, or will I simply carry on not paying him the attention and respect and loyalty and commitment he deserves from me?

It is all too easy to leave Jesus in the manger, so to speak, and to forget that he grew up to be a man. It’s easy to avoid his challenge – to make excuses, to avoid the obvious because it’s, well, inconvenient, pretending that we don’t have the time to consider the claims of Jesus, believing that we’re good enough without God and all those other lame excuses for dismissing him from our thinking and our lives.   Christmas can be a wake-up call! We may continue to walk in darkness – whatever is the darkness we have chosen or pushes our buttons - or we can face up to reality, a reality beyond the present understanding of science but not in conflict with it: the miraculous doesn’t contradict nature, it simply perfects it. It certainly does very much more than even the brightest minds can grasp at present, so we really should not be surprised that God’s entry into the world that first Christmas was somewhat mysterious. The key thing is to understand why he came, and then to take a good honest look at ourselves, and to do so by his standards, not our own. This is the first step to new life, to ‘life in his name’, as St. John tells us.

Today is the 4th Sunday in the season of Advent when we look forward not just to Christmas but to Jesus’ ‘Second Coming’. Next time it will be to judge us all. Will you take that risk or will you take him at his word, ask his forgiveness, and be reconciled to him?  Will you mean it when you sing that Carol ‘’ O holy child of Bethlehem be born in us today’?  By all means look at the crib scene, sing the carols; but do listen to their words and to the words of our readings; meditate on them and ask God to reveal himself to you this Christmas. He’s been doing it for over 2000 years now and ‘where meek hearts will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.’