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Sermon: Second Sunday after Christmas (C) - 3rd January 2010
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping
Readings: Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 147; Ephesians 1:3-14; John 1:10-18
“THE GOD YOU CAN SEE”
“No one has ever seen God.” That’s the problem, isn’t it?
John is right when he writes those words just before closing the introduction to his Gospel.
“No one has ever seen God.” Moses had his eyes shielded from the fullness of God’s glory. Elijah only got a breath of God’s greatness. Isaiah had an overwhelming experience in the temple, but even the angelic beings shielded their eyes. Perhaps Adam and Eve saw God. But it wasn’t too long before they wanted to hide from him.
If we could see God in all his glory, how would we respond? I suspect we would be overwhelmed, terrified, because he is great beyond our understanding. It is beyond us to see God as he is. And he seems unwilling to do some great dramatic act to prove to the world that he is there.
No wonder there are so many ideas about God in the world. Different religions. Atheism. Agnosticism. And even amongst those of us who are Christian believers, we know our doubt, our uncertainty, our confusion. We’d love to be able to prove the existence of God to ourselves, not just others. But no one has ever seen God.
Of course that negative statement is not the final thing John says. The final sentence of this passage is the real point. “It is God, the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” In other words, if we want to see God, if we want to know whether he is there or what he is like, we must look at Jesus. Jesus is God the Son, who reveals God to us who cannot see God on our own.
We can’t see God in all his glory. But many people did see Jesus. In Jesus, God took on human existence. In Jesus, we see the goodness of God, the power of God, the wisdom of God, the love of God in human form.
The message of the incarnation is that God has not stayed at a distance, but that God has come amongst us as one of us. God has not merely disguised himself as a human, as some ancient gods were said to do for their own purposes, but God has become one of us. The Creator has entered his creation, and he has done it for us.
While Sarah and I were in Jordan a couple of months ago, our driver was talking about his Moslem faith, and his understanding of Christianity. He pointed out that both Islam and Christianity honoured the prophets like Adam, Moses, David and Elijah. Moslems also honoured Jesus as a prophet. Of course, he said, it wasn’t Jesus who died on the cross: the New Testament had been distorted.
He had some questionable ideas about Christianity, but I decided that it would be most helpful to come back to Jesus. I told him that Christians don’t just believe that Jesus was a prophet or teacher. They believe that he is the Son of God, and not just in a general sense. Christians believe that Jesus shares God’s very nature. In fact, we say that Jesus is God, coming into the world. Our driver found the idea ridiculous, laughable. Why would God do that? God wouldn’t do that! He is too great to do that.
Of course, that is what the New Testament teaches us that God has done. We know that God is infinite, that he is beyond human understanding. We might describe the being of God as a mystery. Indeed the New Testament writers use that term to describe the purposes of God. But when they talk about a mystery, they add a vital element. To them a mystery is something we would never work out for ourselves: it is something that needs to be revealed and explained, it is something we need to be told.
And the incarnation is something we would not work out for ourselves. It is a mystery we needed to be told: otherwise we would never understand about Jesus. As John puts it in our Gospel: “The Word” – the divine word, the one who is the truth of God in person, the One who is with God and who is God – “The Word became flesh” – became a human being. The one who is God became a human being.
We get indications of the purpose from the Gospel reading. The Light of God came into the world to bring the light of God’s truth and God’s goodness into our world gone wrong. Because we find it so hard to come to God, God in his love, indeed in his humility, came to us.
He came to restore our relationship with him, that we might be brought back into fellowship with him. This was God’s plan, as Paul writes to the Ephesians. We humans have lost touch with God, and in the process we have lost fellowship with each other. This was no surprise to God, and even before creation, Paul tells us that God was forming his plan to bring people back into fellowship with each other and with him. Through Christ he would bring redemption and forgiveness to people. He would share his riches with them. Indeed he would make his home in their being, in the person of the Holy Spirit. He revealed himself to Israel through the prophets. But through Christ, his purpose is to make himself known to the whole of creation, that creation itself might find its true shape, its ultimate fulfilment in relationship with him.
In Christ, God has come amongst us. The tragedy, as John points out, is that the world did not recognize him; indeed his own people, the Jews, did not receive him. People did not accept him then, and today that is still the case. Belief is Christ is far from fashionable these days!
We can understand that. God is still not to be seen or inspected by enquirers. People still ask us to prove that God exists, and we cannot provide the sort of proof they seek. People still ask for evidence, for reasons: some will respond to the reasons we give, but many will not be satisfied. Yes, I believe that faith makes sense: but my reasons and my convictions will not convince everyone.
But there are many who have received Jesus, the Word made flesh: those who have put their faith in him. And John says that through faith in Christ, we too become God’s children, members of his family, heirs of the eternal blessings he offers. We are forgiven and accepted as members of God’s eternal kingdom.
By faith we have seen God’s glory in Christ. Our faith has its doubts, its questions, its uncertainties. We haven’t arrived yet! And our lives fall short too. We don’t follow Christ as closely as we ought.
And that is not surprising, because our view of Christ is indirect too. We know him from the scriptures, from the stories and the message of his followers over the ages, from the quiet witness of the Holy Spirit, perhaps from our own personal experiences.
But we don’t see him face to face, we don’t see him with the clarity and certainty we would like. Indeed we may well be suspicious of those who make great claims about their personal knowledge of God, their personal knowledge of Jesus. We wonder about their honesty, the reality of their great claims of spiritual experience.
We are not in the dark, and through Christ we are no longer strangers to God. But our sight is still partial, and our relationship seems incomplete. But God’s love for us does not depend on the quality of our faith or the quality of our obedience. We believe, but in this world doubts will be part of life for many of us, because we have not seen the infinite God for ourselves. But there is an even bigger plan being carried out, and through Christ God has called us to be part of that eternal plan.
Through the Son of God we become children of God. Through the Word made flesh we are shown the truth of God. Through the incarnate God we discover the fullness of the love of God, and we receive the promise that in God’s time we shall indeed see and rejoice with him in all his glory.
Right now, we acknowledge our doubts, but don’t allow them to get in the way of trusting and following Christ. Grace and truth have come to us through him: let us live as those who have received that grace and truth, and seek to demonstrate God’s grace and truth in what we say and do.
No one has ever seen God. But in Christ he has come to us. Can people see a hint of the God of love, of the love of Christ, in our lives?
Paul Weaver