Dear Friends in Christ, Christmas is winding down. Tomorrow is Epiphany and it is the culmination of the twelve days of Christmas. The Gospel for Epiphany is the story of the Magi travelling from the East who followed a star to find the place of Jesus’ birth. Once they arrived, they offered their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the infant Jesus in adoration, honor, and worship because in this infant child, the magi beheld more than a new king for Israel. They beheld the very glory of God.
The Magi beheld the glory of God. And so have we.
The Gospel of John is missing a Christmas story. In John there is no narrative of the Jesus’ birth, but John reflects on the birth. John, in his prologue to the entire Gospel, speaks poetically of the mystery: “The Word became flesh and lived among us full of grace and truth and we have beheld his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
John describes something of the mystery, that the eternal Word of God, present with God at creation, became human. In Jesus, God wore human flesh. In beholding Jesus, seeing Jesus, we have seen God. In Jesus, we have beheld the glory of God.
It is an unfathomable mystery that can best be described in story and poetry. God taking on human flesh. How is that possible? I don’t know but the important thing is this: this mystery is real and it is located here in this world.
The Word is made flesh. God has become one of us. In Jesus we have seen God and in Jesus birth, life, death, and resurrection, the mystery of God is made known to us. Jesus is God in the flesh and in beholding him, we behold the glory of God.
We have beheld his glory and this embodied word is full of grace and truth.
Beholding God’s glory can happen in a million ways. I’m still awed at the miracles of every day when I pause to see a sunrise (if I’m ever up that early) or a sunset, or a full moon at night, or the crashing waters of the sea.
Of course these are glorious. So is the wonder of life itself – the birth of a child, the gift of friendship and human community, and the gift of forgiveness and the wonder of reconciliation to heal breaches.
Still, to behold the glory of God in this child Jesus is strange. It strikes us as strange because all the glory of creation and life have been compromised. We have misused this glory and we have subscribed to other notions of glory that have little or nothing to do with the grace of God.
So, the glory of God in Jesus is a strange kind of glory because we behold Jesus in places and among people where we would normally not look for God.
When we strip away all the sentimentality of this holiday season and see the story of Jesus’ birth just as it is, we discover that God’s glory is made known through people and places on the margins: Mary and Joseph were denied a place to stay. They were homeless. Jesus was literally born in a barn. He was born in poverty. Instead of being attended to by the servants of the court or the temple, we discover that it is ox and ass, sheep and shepherds who watch over him. And Jesus was born in peril.
These are not the places we look for glory.
The Epiphany Gospel that we will hear tomorrow evening tells us that King Herod was threatened by the prospect of this new king of Israel. Herod wanted to destroy the infant Jesus. Joseph, warned in a dream to get of town because of this imminent danger, fled with Mary and the child to Egypt and didn’t return to Israel until it was safe. In the meantime, tragically, Herod ordered all the children, two years or younger, to be killed in and around Bethlehem. You see, from the beginning of Jesus’ life there is danger and there is real suffering that will continue throughout Jesus’ ministry and finally, he will be a victim of the empire, nailed to a tree.
Beneath these wonderful stories of Christmas lies the real world, real people, real danger, real sin, real relationships and conditions of humanity. And into this world, just as it is, with all its complexities, struggles, joy, sadness that the Savior is born. We beheld and we behold God here. The Christmas story isn’t so neat. God’s word become flesh amidst real trouble and in real life. The wonder of it is that Jesus was born here and the scandal is that Jesus was born here.
We are practically giddy because Jesus is born among us but with God in the flesh among us, it isn’t long before the king of glory threatens us.
Beholding God’s glory in Jesus is strange glory because we tend to seek glory elsewhere, not here. We want to get away, understandably, from the headaches and heartaches of life, but there’s more to our antipathy to God’s glory. We want to invariably seek glory that is outside of our normal experience, outside of the day to day realities and inevitably, the glory of God can quickly dissolve into a quest for personal glory.
Maybe we seek glory in fame or fortune. Perhaps we seek glory in making everything about us. We want to seek glory in the impossible pursuit of perfection. Glory to God can quickly dwindle into glory to us.
Sometimes we try to be perfect OR we try to dominate others. What’s the result? More stress, more conflict, holding the bar so high for ourselves that there is no room for grace and so we find ourselves on the never ending treadmill of trying to justify ourselves. On the other end, glory may be a pursuit of dominating others, having all the riches or power in the world without any sense of integrity. Either way – a religious or moralistic quest for perfection or a dishonest quest to have everything and to lord over others – are a kind of glory seeking that has no room for others. It’s a different kind of Trinity than the name of God we invoke here – it is the Trinity of me, myself, and I.
The second century Christian teacher, St. Iranaeus, said “the glory of God is the human person fully alive.” The glory of God is the human person fully alive.
By fully alive, I believe Iraneaus was speaking of our lives being centered in God and God’s love and dedicated to the things of love. When we are alive in God’s glory, our agenda is only love and with that, being right of being perfect or being greedy are no longer values to strive for but become fruitless and futile endeavors.
How is it that the human person fully alive gives glory to God?
Some context: St. Iraneaus spoke against Gnosticism, a popular form of spirituality that wanted nothing less than to escape the flesh. Gnostics taught that matter was evil and that spiritual enlightenment was only possible by learning how to escape into some other worldly realm. For Gnostics, the word of God did not become flesh but only seemed to become flesh. In other words, Jesus was a kind of a hologram. Gnostics valued spirit over flesh, but our Christian forebears made no neat distinction. Matter mattered and matter matters. The spiritual is intertwined with the physical. To be fully alive is to be alive in this world, in all of its materiality, its fleshiness, its earthiness, its real life adventures of sorrow and joy. So, when we see Jesus born in the rough and tumble of everyday life and loving us and all the world within the world, we behold God’s glory.
Oh, how quickly we make glory about us.
To behold Jesus is to behold the glory of God and it does not stop at the cradle in Bethlehem. It continues in Jesus’ ministry of casting out demons, forgiving sins, breathing new life into people who knew nothing but hatred, challenging the systems and structures that dehumanize, and bringing everyone into God’s great circle of love.
Might being truly alive be a mirroring of what we beheld in Jesus of Nazareth? It is no flee from the world but it is the opportunity to practice love and that isn’t easy and it often requires great risk because to love as Jesus loves will inevitably find objection or rejection. To practice this love for one another and the neighbor requires getting outside of ourselves.
Now, to ensure that this isn’t just a fine new year’s resolution, we are called to go to the source and center of it all. Jesus crucified and risen. For it is into this mystery that we are baptized and in Christ we may place all our trust. As we look to the end of our Christmas days, let this be the best gift of all. While the Christian life is often costly, the greatest gift of beholding the glory of Christ is that it costs us nothing.
Jesus was born for you and for all the world. Behold this glory. The wood of the crib and cradle in the Bethlehem stall became the wood of the Cross. Today we gather in worship to behold this glory.
So, along with the magi we come here today offering frankincense, gold, and myrrh.
We offer prayer rising up as incense, the gold of gratitude and joy, and the myrrh of our suffering selves with our real tears and fears and pain. We offer them all and in the offering we behold the very glory of God in Christ Jesus.
All glory to God and may God continue to make us fully alive in him. Amen.