Christmas Sermonette
It is a tradition in our home that Christmas Day include the singing of a hymn or two, and an informal 'sermonette' before any gifts are opened. The following is the sermonette I prepared last year for Christmas, 2005. While the opening illustration is now dated, it's fresh enough to set the mood for what follows...
THE NECESSITY OF THE INCARNATION
Jason Foster
12/25/05
As much as any year I can remember, 2005 has been the year in which America has obsessed about what the 'true' meaning of Christmas is. Books have been written documenting what some believe to be a 'war on Christmas'. Others, on the other hand, have asserted that throughout the 20th century, Christmas has been an often comfortable blending of the sacred and the secular, and that to exclusively define Christmas by either camp's ideas of meaning cheapens the season and robs it of something essential. As Christians, we are certainly a long way from the manger of 2,000 years ago. As just one example, the humility and poverty of the stable have been replaced with indulgence and materialism, and this replacement certainly exists in the church. This raises the uncomfortable question of whether it's even possible to recover the 'true' meaning of Christmas, given the disconnect that clearly exists between our culture and the time of our Lord.
Fortunately, the unchanging Scriptures of our faith have left us a historical record and the interpretation of it by the apostles. Today, on Christmas day, it is right and proper for us to celebrate the actual event that took place in the manger – the Incarnation. The Incarnation is something we profess to be true as a great article of our faith. But it is rarely contemplated, rarely thought about, and rarely relevant to our lives. But in reality, the Incarnation, as confusing and wondrous as it is, was absolutely necessary when it happened, and it is vitally relevant to us today. Let's look at Philippians 2:6-11.
There are two main things I'd like to point out. First, verse 7 demonstrates an incredible initiative on the part of Christ to take on human flesh. He is still God, but in the taking on of human likeness, Christ voluntarily surrendered his sovereign abode. He did not surrender his deity, but he did surrender his position. More specifically, John 17:5 tells us that in the Incarnation, Christ gave up his divine glory for the sake of men during his time on earth. He did this voluntarily and proactively on our behalf. The Incarnation is thoroughly God-initiated.
This leads to the second point in verse 8. In becoming the God-man, Christ was perfectly obedient to the will of the Father, including his death on the Cross. In doing this, we begin to see the purpose of the Incarnation, and why it was so necessary. But in order to complete the story, we need to look at Hebrews 2:10ff.
What is Hebrews saying? The amazing thing about the Incarnation is that God the Son purposed to take on human likeness in solidarity with us. Through Christ, God enters into the mud of sin and death and saves us right there. But why was the Incarnation necessary to do this? Couldn't the salvation of the human race come some other way? What's so special about the Incarnation event of Christmas?
Look at verses 14 and 17 of Hebrews 2. In taking on human flesh, Jesus became the great and final High Priest. Why? Because in order for Christ to offer himself as a sacrificial substitute to pay for the sins of the human race, he had to be both God and man. Jesus had to be God in order to offer a perfect sacrifice without blemish and unstained by sin in order for his sacrifice to be once for all and acceptable to the Father. But Jesus also had to be man in order to be a truly legitimate representative of the human race on the Cross. Unlike the human priest of the OT who had to include his own sins in the act of yearly atonement for the people, and unlike the animals who imperfectly represented men as the sacrificial instruments, the Incarnation allowed Christ to be the perfect sacrifice because he was the perfect priestly representative of the people before God. The Incarnation was absolutely necessary for the salvation of the world.
So in becoming the God-man, Jesus joined us in solidarity with us as a proactive act of love and mercy. He identified himself with us, so that he could legitimately die on our behalf as our representative. But in addition, by identifying himself with us in every way except sin, the God-man tasted our sufferings and afflictions, became a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, and experienced what it was like to be human. When we pray to God, we are not praying to an ivory tower God who knows nothing about our sufferings and grief. Through the Incarnation, Jesus Christ's role as Savior was perfected as a result of becoming like us. And as he makes intercession for us as our great High Priest today, he does so as the God-man who loved us enough to unite with us in his flesh. Christ didn't have to do this. God didn't have to save anyone. But because God purposed to have a relationship with sinners and save them from darkness, Christ had to become Incarnate in order to share in our miseries so completely that he could be our perfect priestly spokesman before God in both his death and his continuing role as intercessory Priest.
So when we contemplate exactly what we're celebrating this Christmas, take heed of the wondrous love shown to us in the Incarnation. The God-man became one of us of his own volition in that manger so long ago. In doing so, He extended the highest form of hospitality to a completely inhospitable world that wanted nothing to do with him. He gave up his divine glory by identifying himself with us and our poverty. He was tempted like no other individual. He suffered more than any one of us ever will. And he has delivered us from slavery and death. Rejoice O Christian! Your sins have been forgiven because Jesus met you in your poverty and joined you there, and has lifted you out of the muck so that you will one day ascend to God just as he did. Look at the baby in your nativity scene, and think on these things. Merry Christmas indeed! Amen.
Merry Christmas in Christ our Incarnate Lord.
posted by Jason Foster @ 6:27 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I agree that it's important to focus on the birth of Jesus for the holiday season and the miraculous sacrifice he performed by coming, living, dying for us and then being resurrected. You mentioned that shared in our miseries and while this is true, I'm wondering if I can get your thoughts on something. A significant portion of the human experience is shame and guilt. Whether it should be or not is a point of debate, but they are nonetheless emotions that pervade the human experience. If one were to make a reasonable supposition that for a Christian shame & guilt occur when we behave in sinful ways, then Christ would not know how shame & guilt effect a person and what behaviors can spring from it because he lived a sinless life. I have struggled to bridge the gap between how Christ could live sinlessly and still know (from a first-hand perspective) how shame & guilt arising out of sin can drive a person. I would love your thoughts.
Thoughtful question. I'm not sure that feelings of shame and guilt are always the result of sin, even for a Christian. People often feel shame and guilt as a result of having low self-esteem which may not necessarily have anything to do with sin. As an example, if someone feels inadequate in some area of their life, shame and even guilt can often be the result, even though there may not necessarily be a sinful basis for either the feeling of inadequacy or the shame that may result from it.
Now I certainly agree that guilt and sin often intersect and are often interdependent. It's not just that sin leads to guilt, but it can also be that guilt leads to sin. So for example, I often struggle with feelings of inadequacy, since I have longed struggled with an inferiority complex. These feelings could be sinful in their own right, but not necessarily so (they might actually be based in some truth). These feelings of inadequacy sometimes lead me to feel shameful and even guilty, and this can very easily result in committing sinful acts to try and appease these feelings. Happens all too often in my case. And while it's true that this whole cycle might have started with some sin I committed, I don't think it necessarily has to be the case. One can feel shame and guilt simply as a result of feeling sorry for oneself. Whether this is sinful gets into a deeper question of whether having a distorted view of oneself is inherently sinful. Like many theological questions, I think the answer is yes and no.
Because of this, I think it's reasonable to believe that Christ is in some way personally acquainted with feelings of shame and guilt, not through sin, but through the reality of the human condition that he took on. The other thing, of course, is that while Christ knows nothing firsthand through personal sin, he knows everything by virtue of his omniscience. He knows the road of sin not because he himself has ever sinned, but because as Lord of the universe, he is constantly engaged with sin and its consequences. And because he took on our infirmities, he personally knows all of our weaknesses and frailties, so he knows all the points of intersection between the various things we're talking about better than we do. Part of why we struggle with connecting the dots is because we are fallen creatures and our reasoning faculties are impaired as a result. Christ doesn't have this problem, so he understands perfectly precisely because his understanding isn't polluted by sin the way ours is.
It may seem a little paradoxical that Christ could perfectly understand feelings resulting from sin even though he never sinned. But in reality, we need to recognize that sin itself is the enemy of properly and comprehensively understanding reality, including our own feelings. The sinless Christ has defeated this enemy, so that his understanding is proper and comprehensive, not because this understanding comes through exhaustive empirical experience, but because he is unaffected by the very things that limit and distort our understanding. Personal experience is not the only path to knowledge, or always even the best path to knowledge because we sometimes lose the forest for the trees and our perspective gets too truncated.
Anyway, this is becoming an epistemology post and is way off topic. Good theological questions usually don't lend themselves to quick and easy answers, so bravo for grappling with this. I'm not sure I've said anything helpful, but I do think the issues you raise can be flushed out a bit in ways that are healthy.
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