Suggested Readings: Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98; Hebrews 1:1-12; John 1:1-14
When I consider what Christmas is all about, I confess that creation and judgment are not the first things that come to mind. And yet those are the themes that resound in our readings for today. Consider each in turn:
Creation. The one to whom John the Baptist testifies, he who “became flesh and lived among us” (Jn 1.14), is the very one through whom all things were made (Jn 1.3). This is he who “sustains all things by his powerful word” (Heb 11.3).
Judgment. In scripture, the most basic sense of judgment is “to divide” or “to separate.” We often restrict judgment to mean handing down a sentence in a courtroom setting. True, that’s a one example of “separating”: a courtroom judge separates true from false, innocent from guilty. But judgment in our readings proves at once more expansive and more profound. The Word’s advent separates light from darkness, those who receive him from those who do not, those things that were once born of the flesh from those now born “of God” (Jn 1.13). Through him the entire earth will hear songs of joy at the “salvation” brought by his coming (Isa 52.10).
Our two themes harmonize in one reading, where creation itself delights in the coming judgment:
“Let the floods clap their hands;
let the hills sing together for joy
at the presence of the LORD,
for he is coming to judge the earth.” (Ps 98.8–9a)
In the Incarnation the Word comes to judge in person, as a human being. His advent is judgment, and by judging, the Word creates the world. God the Word comes to judge: to divide true from false, light from darkness—just as he does in the opening chapters of Genesis. How does he divide? How does he judge? Never without dividing himself. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the World!” That’s how John the Baptist describes Jesus a few verses after our reading (Jn 1.29). This Word’s flesh will be divided like a slain lamb’s. Thus the Word offers himself by dividing himself, so that, descending to the very extreme of being separated from God—unto death—he might unite himself with us, we who separate ourselves from God and thus die.
If, during this Christmas season, you find yourself distant, cold, and separated from the Lord, do not despair: since the Word judges by separating himself from the God with whom he’s one, you are never truly separated from God. In your separation, he becomes one with you and thus makes you whole. He arrives, he judges, he creates. His judgment is his self-offering, and his self-offering is the “life and light of all people” (Jn 1.4). The Word arrives even now, even in you.
As Meister Eckhart (13th-century) once preached, “What good is it to me that Christ’s birth happens eternally if it does not happen in me? What matters is that it happens in me.”
Or in the words of St. Maximus the Confessor: “Christ is always born mysteriously and willingly, becoming incarnate through those who are being saved. He causes the soul which begets him to be a Virgin Mother.”
The Christmas message is at once more cosmic and more intimate than we tend to imagine. Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh, and yet he divides that same flesh to meet us wherever we are. Having united himself with us in our various types and degrees of separation, he unites us with him and with ourselves—and thereby creates us and the world. “All things came into being through him” (Jn 1.3).
Christmas is about the Word’s advent—his judgment and creation. Or in a word: it’s about his love. Nothing at all can separate us from such love (Rom 8.39).
Jordan Daniel Wood
Assistant Professor of Theology
