How can I keep my heart happy in Christ on Christmas Day?
John 1:14
Now, Christmas is many things to many people. It’s a rich, frantically busy, lavishly apportioned feast that can be sometimes overwhelming. Often it is a time of incredible blessing. Some people just love it. They enjoy this time of year, they love the traditions, and they thank God for time with family and friends. Let’s just be honest, some people love to eat that Christmas dinner and all those special treats. They just love the food.
It takes work to “keep Christ in Christmas” because of the world’s relentless pressure to secularize everything and remove any mention of God.
Other people enjoy the celebration. They love the decorations, the putting up of the tree; they enjoy the lights and the memories that come with all that. Still others genuinely struggle with the secularization of Christmas and how we must keep reminding our culture that Christ is the reason for the season. It takes work to “keep Christ in Christmas” because of the world’s relentless pressure to secularize everything and remove any mention of God.
Some Christians struggle with the gross materialism of Christmas – the gifts, the spending, even feeling guilty that we are so well-loved when many people in the world that don’t have the necessities of life.
Perhaps all of this, for me anyway, is most clearly symbolized in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, as he thrashes around trying to figure out the meaning of Christmas. I’m not sure what his spiritual state was. We see Ebenezer Scrooge being instructed on the true meaning of Christmas is by three ghosts, the ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future.
The Ghost of Christmas Present is a huge giant, who according to Dickens is sitting on a monstrous pile of luscious food, of turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, suckling pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes and seething bowls of punch. All of it’s just steaming, filling the room with aroma and with steam, so that it became kind of misty in the room – and that giant, that Ghost of Christmas Present is there to teach Ebenezer Scrooge what Christmas is all about? To me, he looks little different than Bacchus, the god of wine, sitting on a pile of food ready to eat gluttonously and become drunk.
What lessons does Scrooge learn in the end? What’s the transformation that happens? It’s benevolence to our fellow man. It’s generosity to the poor and needy, but stripped of Christ, of any mention of Jesus, of any regeneration through the gospel and through the Holy Spirit. So that’s the world we live in. This is the culture we have.
Considering all this I’d like to meditate briefly on the mystery of Christmas, the mystery of godliness, with two particular words from John 1: flesh and fullness. These two words get straight to the heart of the mystery of Christmas. Flesh comes from John 1:14, the center of the doctrine of the incarnation, which is the enfleshment of the Son of God. John 1:14 says, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, became flesh. He had muscles and blood vessels and nerves and sinews and ligaments and hair and sweat and all the physical side of life.
The mystery of that word is infinite, because we’re told in many other places in the New Testament that the flesh is our whole problem. We’re battling the flesh all the time. These are the three enemies that we constantly face- the world, the flesh, and the devil. We’re told in 1 John 2:15-17, “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world- the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh and the boastful pride of life – is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world and its pleasures pass away, but the one who does the will of God lives forever.” So, we’re warned against the flesh by John, the same writer.
So then this is a mystery. How could the holy God become flesh? The flesh of John 1:14 must be sufficiently similar to the flesh of 1 John 2, or else he wouldn’t use the exact same word. But clearly the flesh that Jesus took on is different than what we’re warned about in terms of the lust of the flesh, in 1 John 2. We struggle to comprehend how Jesus came to take on a body and live in it, holy and pure. God is light and in him there’s no darkness at all. And yet he’s able to live a life in the flesh without sin. That’s a mystery to us.
The second word is “fullness.” Two verses later in John 1:16, it says, “From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace.” What an incredible Christmas verse that is. From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. Jesus Christ is fullness incarnate. Colossians 2:9, “For in Christ, all the fullness of the deity dwells in bodily form.” That’s the mystery of Christmas. Earlier in Colossians 1:19, “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him.” But this is more than just saying that Christ is fully God. It’s saying that God himself is a full being; there is a fullness and a richness to God. God is full of mercy, full of grace. He’s lavishly full of wisdom and power.
Almighty God has none of the neediness and deficiency we feel every day. No, God is a full, rich, complete being. We cannot add anything to his happiness, and we can’t take anything away from it. Christ came to display that fullness for us in bodily form. Not only that, how sweet it is that he also came to give us that same fullness. As Paul prays in Ephesians 3:19, “That you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
And from that fullness, that rich fullness that God is, that Jesus is, comes John 1:16, “Grace upon grace,” gift upon gift. Grace upon grace is one translation, or grace instead of grace, or grace in the place of grace. As soon as one gift of grace comes to you, the next one is on its way.
And so, as Christians we live a life of grace, a river of grace. His mercies are new every morning. His grace abundantly flows to us, and we need it every day. From his fullness we get gift upon gift, grace upon grace. There is your wealth! These, then, are your true Christmas gifts, not the boxes wrapped under the tree. Certainly, we see God’s love in family relationships and all that that comes with those glittering packages, but ultimately Christmas is grace upon grace.
(adapted from the sermon: Opening Our Christmas Gifts: The Treasure Trove of the Incarnation)
