Some years ago, a celebrity was asked this fatuous question by a TV interviewer:
“Have you always been a comedian?”
To which he made the instant and withering reply:
“No. I used to be a baby.”
Today’s Gospel has, at its heart, the truth that we are celebrating today. The truth that God in Jesus Christ used to be a baby. The Council of Nicaea expressed it in these words, 1700 years ago this year:
“For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven;
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary...”
And that involved being a baby.
Charles Wesley, whose Christmas hymns are well-loved, tried many times to express this idea in words and even he had to acknowledge their inadequacy:
“Our God contracted to a span,
Incomprehensibly made man.”
Incomprehensibly. We are here to celebrate a wonderful mystery and whatever words and metaphors we use, they won’t be up to the job. But here goes…
It is often said of boy babies that “He’s the image of his father” and that is profoundly true of the baby whose birth we celebrate today, God in Jesus Christ visible, touchable, audible and therefore imaginable.
We all make images of God, even those of us who never pick up a chisel or a paintbrush. We make them in our heads. They can be unhelpful, even toxic. They might make us think of God as a demanding disciplinarian who must be obeyed, an almighty version of Mr Clark, the PE teacher who, sixty years ago, frequently said “Warnes, you’re not trying hard enough.” Authoritarian images of God can drive people to acts of cruelty and violence because they believe that God’s approval must be earned by their actions and efforts.
God desires to be in a loving relationship with all of us. God desires us to be in loving relationships one with another. God well understands our human tendency to foul up and the ways in which we separate ourselves from the love of God and separate ourselves from other people. Christmas is all about how God seeks to end those separations.
At the heart of the Christmas Gospel is a baby and that flesh-and-blood image of God is challenging because it is so very different from many man-made images of God. We might prefer a God who would instantly solve our problems and make everything right, Superman on steroids. Instead, we get a baby, obscurely born, temporarily homeless and soon to become a refugee, seeking asylum in Egypt. The Word made flesh and yet, for a while, unable to utter a word. The baby grows up to be a very challenging adult, bearing love and forgiveness into the darkest places, and inviting us to love Him and one another. The Christmas good news is that God desires us so profoundly as to come among us, lovingly, approachably, vulnerably; comes among us to share our experiences of joy and pain, celebration and bereavement, even death.
At Christmas, we begin to see the true image of God’s nature, an image to replace those confused and dangerous human fantasies about what God might be like. As we follow the Church year in the coming months, we will see that image develop and enlarge. And every development will be evidence of God’s nature and God’s love. And the whole story is a reminder that even in our darkest times, and Christmas is not an easy or an unclouded time for many, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.
I mentioned Mr Clark a few moments ago. It was another of my teachers who pointed me in the direction of another understanding of Christmas which you might find helpful. Mr Greeves was an inspirational teacher of English Literature and directed school plays. It was from him that I learned that Shakespeare was an actor as well as a playwright. There must have been times when Shakespeare the writer was watching a rehearsal of one of his plays and things weren’t going well. Easy to imagine him jumping on the stage and saying to whichever colleague was making a hash of Hamlet or King Lear
“No, this is what I intended. This is how you can and should act.” And then giving the performance for which he was hoping. That’s a helpful word picture of another important part of what God is doing by coming among us in a human life, coming among us as the loving creator who says.
“…this is what I intended. This is how you humans can be.”
One of the many treasures that Christians share with our Jewish brothers and sisters is the belief that all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. That was true of the shepherds is today’s Gospel, though they were poor, marginalized and widely regarded as disreputable. They took up the angel’s suggestion and went to Bethlehem. They saw the baby lying in a manger and they recognised the truth of what the angels had told them. We are called to live lives of recognition, to see the perfect image and likeness of God in Jesus Christ and, to see the image and likeness of God in one another, despite all our failings and shortcomings.
A moving example of that springs to mind. Hannah Routledge was the wife of a sheep farmer in the South Tyne valley, a few miles north of Alston. Back in the 1940s there was a prisoner-of-war camp close to the farm, full of German officers. Once the war was over, they were allowed out for walks and local people were permitted to have contact with them. One day a prisoner of war knocked on the farmhouse door and asked for a drink of water. When she told me about this, decades later, Hannah said that she wasn’t sure how to respond. He was a stranger and had so recently been an enemy. She asked her husband what she should do. “It’s your kitchen” he said. “It’s up to you.” Hannah reflected briefly and then had a moment of recognition. She said to herself : “He’s some mother’s son” and invited him in for tea and home bakes.
“He’s some mother’s son.”
Or, to put it another way,
“He’s made in the image and likeness of God.”
And also
“He used to be a baby”.
As did Jesus Christ who came among us to bridge the man-made gulf of sinfulness between humanity and God.
Who came among us to show us what God is like.
Who came among us to show us how to live.
Who came among us to invite our loving response to God.
Who came among us to inspire our loving response to one another.
Now that’s cause for the kind of celebration the shepherds had, as they went home
“…glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.”