“Silent Night” and John 1:1-18

If you had to pick “the best” of all the Christmas carols, “Silent Night” would certainly be at or near the top of the list.

This week—Christmas is this Friday! —we wrap up The Weary World Rejoices sermon series by listening to this beloved carol and “the Christmas story according to John,” found in the first eighteen verses of this fourth and final New Testament gospel.

The New Testament begins with four “gospels,” four reports of the life of Jesus, what our Bibles now list as “The Gospel According to” Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  Matthew tells the story of Jesus’ birth primarily by focusing on Joseph’s role.  Mark gives us no “Christmas story,” but jumps right into the ministry of Jesus.  To Luke we owe most of the most familiar parts of “the Christmas story”: Mary, angels, shepherds, the baby swaddled and lying in an animal feeding trough.

And then John.  John doesn’t focus on the birth of Jesus; John focuses on the birth of everything, by and through Jesus.  John names Jesus, not using the titles of Savior or King, but of “the Word”.  In Jesus, the Word that “was in the beginning, with God,” the Word that “was God”; “through him everything was made,” John tells us; “without him nothing was made that has been made.”

The eternal God, John tells us, enters our human sphere, enters as light, as life, and offers to all “the power to become children of God, born not of human descent, decision or will, but born of God.”

How does this happen, how is this accomplished?  “The Word became flesh and ‘moved into the neighborhood’” is the way one Bible translator put it.  Christmas celebrates the moving of Heaven into the neighborhood of humanity in the person of Jesus.

Does God require us to make the journey to God?  No, God makes the journey to us.  God does not command us to ascend to him, but rather chooses to descend to us.  And not just come down in all the glory of Heaven, for a brief social call.

No, “the Word became flesh,” John tells us, Deity taking up our humanity, God in Christ becoming what we are.  In Jesus, God and humanity meet: Jesus is fully who God is, and fully what we are.  Jesus is the God that God is; Jesus is the human that each of us is created and called to be, and redeemed to become.

“Silent Night” does what all good Christmas carols do: it keeps us in the whole story of our redemption.  In this carol, we sing of “the dawn of redeeming grace.”  Into the common wood of a manger was laid “the Son of God, Love’s pure light”.  Our redemption dawned that night, but was accomplished, fulfilled and finished, as the same Son of God was affixed to a wooden cross.

At Christmas, we celebrate the dawn of redeeming grace, the arriving of the promised “Dayspring from on high.”  On Good Friday, we will celebrate how God responded to the darkest night we humans have ever created.  At Easter, we celebrate the dawning of a Day that has no end.

The eternal Word made flesh takes upon himself the fullness of Sin’s penalty, enters fully the Domain of Death, and undoes Sin, conquers Death.

This is why we sing, each and every year, “Alleluia to our King!  Christ the Savior is born, Christ the Savior is born!”

What might be a good song for you to sing, this Monday before Christmas?