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In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear Saints, Merry Christmas, and God be praised that we are here this day to sing the praises of Jesus and to meditate on this great mystery, His incarnation in the flesh. It’s stunning to imagine that the Lord’s humiliation is still too high for us to contemplate.
Now, I don’t know, as we heard from the Gospel lesson from John chapter 1, I do not know how St. John expects us to get to any of the rest of his Gospel when he starts the first chapter with these words. There is enough in the first sentence for us to spend the rest of our lives meditating on. But look at the glorious truths put before us this day. The Son of God called God’s Word, the Logos, and he says the Word was with God and the Word was God. Jesus is the Son of God, true God, and he is begotten of the Father before all worlds.
He is, verse 9, the true light who enlightens everyone. The world, verse 10, was made through him and yet, and here the tragedy begins in verse 10, the world did not know him. He came to his own, verse 11, but even his own people did not receive him. But to those who did, that’s you and I, this is his Christian family, verse 12, to those who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God.
I don’t know if the devil can ever slap a smile off of your face when we remember that we are the children of God. We were born, it says in verse 13, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or the will of man, but born of God. In other words, this new birth as God’s children was something that He has accomplished for us, that He has done to us and given to us as a gift.
And then, in the stunning verse 14, the word became flesh and dwelt among us, halagos sarxagenata. And the word for dwelt among us is the old Greek word for the tent, for the tabernacle in the Old Testament. Remember how Moses built the tent so that the glory of God would come and be in the middle of his people? So now, instead of living in a tent, he lives in our own flesh and blood so that he might be with us to bless us and not destroy us.
It’s dangerous to see God. In fact, it says that nobody at any time has ever seen God. That’s verse 18, the last verse of the text. And it’s kind of an amazing thing to think about, because when we hear that verse 18, we think about all the times that people did see God in the Old Testament. What about Moses who beheld the burning bush and the people who saw the pillar of fire and the pillar of smoke? And what about Joshua who the Lord came and stood before him? How can John write that no one has ever seen God?
Well, it turns out that the God they were seeing was the Son. No one has ever seen God, but the only God, some manuscripts say, the only begotten God, who is in the Father’s bosom, who’s at the Father’s side, has made him known. In other words, when Moses saw God, he saw Jesus. When Joshua saw God, when Abraham saw God, when Adam and Eve and Noah saw God, they saw Jesus, who is always making God known.
And what’s the point of all of this? Verse 16, from His fullness we have received grace upon grace. Jesus has done this, has taken upon our humanity, our flesh and blood, our human nature, so that He can give us His grace, His favor, His undeserved kindness, his smile, that’s what his grace is. That’s how Luther talks about the grace of God.
In a place in the large catechism, Luther says, the pagans don’t care if God frowns or smiles at them, but we know in Christ that He smiles at us, that the Lord’s face is radiant towards us, and that He delights in us. It’s amazing. And that’s why Jesus has done all these things.
Hebrews 1, our epistle text, in fact, Hebrews 1 and 2 does this. It’s quite wonderful, and this is your homework, by the way. Hebrews 1 and 2 collects all these Old Testament passages where the Father is talking to the Son. It’s an amazing thing to see. It’s like a catalog of the heavenly counsel, the heavenly conversation, where the Father is saying things to the Son.
“You are my Son, today I have begotten you, sit here at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool,” and all of this. And we realize that that’s what the Old Testament is. It’s capturing this conversation between the Father and the Son, Hebrews 1 and 2.
But I want to take us today to Hebrews 10, where it talks about what the Son says to the Father. And I want to meditate on this as we try to wrap our heads as much as possible around the mystery of the Lord’s incarnation. And perhaps with this in mind, one of the advantages of Ross starting his seminary studies is that it reminds me of all of the old theology debates that you have to have at the seminary.
And I’ve talked to the professors about this. It’s really quite funny that every new seminary class has the same debates. There’s the John VI debate. There’s the “Give us this day our daily bread” debate. There’s the Apology versus the Formula of Concord debate, and there’s this debate, which always comes up at the seminary, this question.
If Adam and Eve wouldn’t have sinned, would Jesus still have come in the flesh? If Adam and Eve wouldn’t have taken the fruit and eaten what they were not supposed to eat, would Jesus still have become incarnate in the flesh? Now, it turns out that that’s not just a seminary debate, but that that question goes all the way back in the reflection of the church. And it’s a good question for us to reflect on, albeit slightly dangerous.
In fact, all the old Lutheran theologians bring this question up and they say it’s always dangerous to speculate on theology and to ask, “What if?” Because the Bible doesn’t speak about it; it doesn’t tell us the answer. But a lot of the old theologians said, “Well, surely Jesus would have become a man. That was the purpose all along, so that he would have fellowship with us.” But the Lutherans refused to go that far, and they, in fact, answer the question a different way.
All the old Lutheran theologians say, as far as we can tell, the answer is no. The reason why Jesus became a man is because we sin. Now we should just let that sink in for a little bit. The reason why Jesus humbled himself to be born of the Virgin Mary, the reason why he condescended to the weakness of our flesh, the reason why He lived His perfect, holy, sinless life and suffered the enmity of sinners, the whip and the scourge and the crown of thorns and the nails and the cross and His burial, the reason why He did this is because you desperately needed it.
We sang in the Advent hymn, “Love caused His incarnation, love brought thee down to me, your thirst for my salvation procured your liberty,” or as we just confessed in the Creed, “For us men and for our salvation. He came down from heaven.” Jesus’ incarnation is a rescue mission. That’s why he left the glory of the Father, the adoration of the angels, the perpetual joy of his heavenly state. He did it for you because you desperately needed him.
So here’s how it says it in Hebrews. I’m reading in Hebrews chapter 10, verse 5, which is quoting Psalm 40. It says this: “Therefore when he, Jesus, came into the world he said, ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you, the Father, have prepared for me, the Son. In burnt offerings and sacrifice for sin, you, God the Father, had no pleasure. So I, God the Son, said, Behold, I have come in the volume of the book it is written of me to do your will, O God.'”
Hebrews continues, previously saying, “Sacrifice and offering, burnt offerings and offerings for sin you did not desire or had pleasure in them which are offered according to the law. Then he said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God.’ He takes away the first that he might establish the second. By that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”
Now what does that mean? It’s a bit of a riddle, a bit of a mystery, but here’s what it means. Jesus says to the Father, you don’t delight in offerings. The Old Testament is full of these offerings, bulls and goats and rams and lambs which are sacrificed on the altar of God to forgive sins, but we know that the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin; it’s not enough. It needs to be something more.
And Jesus says to the Father, “I know that you need something more in order to be pleased with humanity. That’s why I have a body prepared.” In other words, Jesus takes upon His body, His flesh and blood, so that He can offer it as the sacrifice for your sins. Jesus has flesh from the womb of the Virgin Mary so that he has something to be nailed to the cross. Jesus has blood so that he has something to spill for your salvation.
I saw an old painting, in fact a couple of paintings that capture this. One of them had Jesus in the manger, and the star was over Jesus, and the light from the star was in the shape of the cross. Or I saw another one where the manger was there and the shadow of the manger was also in the shape of a cross. Martin Luther preached this. He said, “The manger and the cross are cut from the same wood.” That doesn’t mean it’s literally from the same tree. It means it is of the same purpose. His incarnation was for the reason of his death.
I think about this, and this is a little bit of speculation on my part, so you’ll maybe just have to indulge me for just a second. But I think about all the sheep and all the lambs that were surrounding Jesus when he was born. You know, the shepherds that were out watching the flocks at night, and all these flocks that were there in Bethlehem. You know, Bethlehem’s not that far from Jerusalem, six miles away.
And you know that every day, morning and evening, a lamb was sacrificed at the altar in Jerusalem. You know that during the time of atonement and at the time of Passover, there were so many sacrifices in the temple in Jerusalem that the brook that flowed through the Kidron Valley would flow red with blood as the sacrifices would leak out through the gutter of the temple and go down into the valley.
In other words, the temple in Jerusalem needed a constant supply of animals, of lambs. Now, what are the odds then that the lambs that the shepherds were watching on the night when the angels came to them, that those lambs would end up on the altar in Jerusalem, or maybe even more? What are the odds that the animals that were there in the manger when Jesus was born, the ox and the lambs that were there in the manger would end up on the altar in Jerusalem? I think pretty good.
And that’s the point that Jesus is born amongst sacrificial animals because that’s exactly why he came—to be the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world, to take away your sin and rescue and redeem you. So the good news of Christmas keeps going.
It was not enough for Jesus to become your brother in His humanity, taking on Himself your human nature. He was not finished until He had become your Savior, until He had forgiven your sins, until He had done what He purposed to do with His human body, which is to take it to the cross to suffer and then to ascend into heaven so that he might place it on the table for you to eat and drink.
It is that same body that was nailed to the cross, the same body that was wrapped in swaddling clothes, the same body that was placed in the tomb, the same body that walked on water, the same body that ascended into heaven that Jesus now says, “Take and eat. This is my body, which is always and still given for you for the forgiveness of all of your sins.”
God be praised that the purpose of Christmas is your eternal salvation. Amen. And the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.