Transcript
The Word Made Flesh
First Baptist Richmond, December 21, 2025
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
John 1:1-18
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Well, here we are, on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, only seven days after we last got together for worship. But biblically speaking we have made a quantum leap from last Sunday to this one. Last Sunday we were in the Book of Isaiah; this Sunday we’re in the Gospel of John. Last Sunday God’s people were still in exile. This Sunday we’re talking about the birth of Jesus. You have to ask yourself:
What happened?
Briefly, Cyrus became the king of Persia. He conquered Babylon and added it to his empire. He gave the exiles permission to go home again and most of them did. You can read all about it in the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah. It took them a while to rebuild the walls of the city and to rebuild the temple, but even when they finished it wasn’t much to look at. I’m always moved by the description from Ezra 3 that says when they dedicated the foundations of the new temple, “Many of the priests and Levites and heads of families, old people who had seen the first house on its foundations, wept with a loud voice when they saw this house, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping…”
It’s like that sometimes, isn’t it? You’ve got some people looking forward, dreaming of the future, while others are looking back, longing for the past. It’s not
deliberate; it’s just the way it is. But the ones who were looking forward must have been disappointed. They lived for years under governors appointed by the Persian Empire. Then Alexander the Great came through and conquered everything and everyone. After his death his empire was divided among four of his generals and Israel was stuck between the Ptolemies to the south in Egypt and the Seleucids to the north in Syria. Antiochus IV of Syria conquered Israel and tried to Hellenize the Jews but a hero named Judas Maccabeus rose up against him and led a successful revolt. In 164 BC he rededicated the temple that Antiochus had defiled and even though there was only enough oil for one night the lamp in the temple burned for eight nights in a row, a miracle the Jews still celebrate as Hanukah.
For the next hundred years the Hasmoneans ruled Israel. They were a priestly class who acted like kings. They expanded Israel’s territory, sometimes forced conversions to Judaism, mixed politics and the priesthood, and created serious tensions within Judaism. But in 63 BC the Roman general Pompey conquered Jerusalem and marched into the temple in his muddy combat boots.
The people were horrified.
Judea became a client kingdom of the Roman Empire and Herod the Great (who was not a Jew) was appointed as king. He improved and expanded the temple, making it one of the wonders of the ancient world. But he also ruled the people ruthlessly, making life miserable for many of the Jews. They began to dream of a Messiah, someone who would run the Romans out of Israel and sit on the throne of his ancestor David. As a result the tension between Roman power and Jewish hope escalated. This is the world into which both John the Baptist and Jesus were born.
You remember John, right? He was the one who told people to repent and get ready for the new thing God was about to do. And for many of those people this was the
first time they had had something to look forward to. They came, they repented, they got baptized, and John began to tell them about the one who was to come. In Matthew’s Gospel he says, “I baptize you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Oh, the people loved talk like that! They knew that when the Messiah came the Romans were going to catch it right in the teeth.
But then along came Jesus, and he was not at all what they were expecting. He talked about a Kingdom, but not the kind you establish by force. As it says in the old hymn, “For not with swords’ loud clashing or roll of stirring drums, with deeds of love and mercy the heavenly kingdom comes.” Many of the Jews who were expecting a Messiah were disappointed in Jesus. Even though he was a great prophet and a miraculous healer, when Pilate asked them whether they wanted him or Barabbas they said Barabbas. And when he asked them what he should do with Jesus, the one who was called the King of the Jews, they shouted “Crucify him!” And that’s what Pilate did. Jesus died and was buried in a borrowed tomb. A few days later some of his followers began to claim that he had come back to life.
And that changed everything.
I’m convinced that if Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead we wouldn’t still be talking about him. We are, but it didn’t happen all at once. The Apostle Paul didn’t start talking about Jesus until fifteen or twenty years after his death. The first Gospel, Mark, wasn’t written until fifteen or twenty years after that. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke were written fifteen or twenty years after that, and John’s Gospel, the last of the four, probably wasn’t written until another fifteen or twenty years after that. So, here’s John,
who’s heard all this talk about Jesus, looking back from a distance of nearly a hundred years, giving us his perspective, and it’s unlike any of the others.
I once wondered what it would be like to get Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the Apostle Paul together and ask them when Jesus became the Son of God, because they would have different answers. Paul would say it was when Jesus rose from the dead. In fact, that’s what he does say in Romans 1. He talks about being set apart by God “to preach the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David (according to the flesh) and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead.” Mark would say Jesus was adopted by God at his baptism. He doesn’t tell the story of how Jesus was born but at his baptism there is that voice from heaven that says, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Matthew and Luke would say Jesus was the Son of God at his birth. They take great pains in their nativity stories (although they are very different from each other) to make that point. In Matthew, an angel tells Joseph, “Don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” And then Matthew quotes the prophecy from Isaiah about a virgin conceiving and giving birth to a son whose name will be Emmanuel, meaning “God with us.” In Luke, when Mary wonders how she, a virgin, can have a child, the Angel Gabriel explains: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.”
So, if you asked those four the question, “When did Jesus become the Son of God?” Paul would say, “At his resurrection.” Mark would say, “At his baptism.” Matthew and Luke would say, “At his birth.” But John would say, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” A few verses later he would say, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us,” meaning that it wasn’t at his
resurrection, or at his baptism, or at his birth, but from the very beginning that Jesus was the Son of God. He was the pre-existent Word that became flesh. And when John says that, he taps into a whole world of belief.
You have to understand: John was living in a time when the philosophers were trying on a lot of new ideas. You may remember that moment in the Book of Acts when Paul is on Mars Hill in Athens and Luke explains that “all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17:21). The Stoics understood the logos—“the word”—as the rational principle that ordered the entire universe. In Jewish thought the Word of God creates the universe, reveals God’s truth, and accomplishes God’s purpose. In the Book of Proverbs it is Wisdom that is present in creation, which may simply be another name for the Holy Spirit. But it’s in the teaching of the Jewish philosopher Philo that we find the closest parallels. Philo (who lived during the time of Jesus) spoke of the logos as God’s agent in creation, as one who mediated between God and the world, and one who revealed God’s will. So, when John talks about Jesus as the logos—“the Word”—he stands squarely within Jewish tradition even as he reaches out to the Greek-speaking world. But then he goes further than Philo ever did. John says, “The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
And that would have shocked everyone.
It would have shocked the Gnostics, or those who were beginning to think along those lines in those early days. They perceived flesh as evil and spirit as good. To suggest that the Word that was with God and was God could become flesh would have been repugnant to them. But John pushes back hard. He says, “No, creation is good! God made it and Jesus helped him make it. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him was nothing made that was made. In him was life,”
John says, “and this life was the light of all people.” He makes it clear that the light of God enters the darkness not to condemn it, but to redeem it. The Word becomes flesh not only in appearance (as some people argued), but in reality. Salvation is not limited to those who know the secret (as the Gnostics believed), but is available to anyone who receives the Word made flesh and believes in his name.
And what is that name? It’s Jesus. John doesn’t try to keep it a secret. He says, “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth…. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. The Law indeed came through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Who? “Jesus Christ,” John says. “That’s who I’m talking about. That’s the one who was the Son of God even before the world began. So, if you want to know God, get to know Jesus. No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, the one who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”
Okay, that’s a lot of history, theology, and philosophy, but we’ve been talking about the doctrine of the Incarnation. It’s complicated. Let me see if I can wrap things up in a way that feels a little more “accessible.” On December 11, 2016, at the end of the morning worship service, Tamara Witte and Greg Walczak came down the aisle of this church and asked to be married. They did it because they were in love and couldn’t wait any longer, but they also did it because Tamara heard a sermon I had preached a few years earlier, and remembered that I had said this:
One of my regular daydreams is to do a wedding as part of a Sunday morning worship service, and I keep trying to convince young couples to give it a try. “Think of it,” I say: “You’d already have a good crowd of people there. The choir would be robed and ready to sing. You could just come forward at the end of the service, stand in front of me, and express your vows. It would be simple, beautiful, appropriate. And if you got
married at Christmas—the season of Incarnation—I could preach a sermon on the incarnation of Love. Doesn’t that sound great?”
In that sermon I said, “No one has taken me up on it yet, but I keep hoping, and I keep thinking about that sermon topic: the incarnation of Love. It happens to every couple I’ve ever talked to about a wedding: what was once for them only an abstract idea—Love—has taken on human flesh, human form, in that person they are planning to marry. From the moment they fall hopelessly and forever into it, Love has a face, and a name. On that day they express their vows to one another they will look on a particular face, and pronounce a particular name. “I, John, take you, Mary.” “I, Mary, take you, John.” It is the incarnation of Love, and really, very much like that other incarnation, the one we celebrate at Christmas.
For so many of us God, like Love, begins as an idea. We hear people talking about God in church, we sing hymns of praise to the Deity, but in the beginning God is just an idea, and a very vague one at that. God is “out there,” or “up there,” somewhere. And—like Love—God often seems far, far away. But what the writers of the New Testament all seem to agree upon is that the abstract became concrete in a man with a particular face and a particular name: Jesus of Nazareth.”
Tamara remembered that sermon, and took me up on that offer. She asked for my permission in advance but on the day itself she and Greg came skipping down the aisle at the end of the service and I segued smoothly into the wedding ceremony. Some of you were here that day. You didn’t know it was coming but you got into the spirit of it right away, and when I pronounced them husband and wife you cheered. Because you had seen it happen right in front of you. You had seen how an abstract idea like love can take on human flesh in the form of a couple getting married. That’s the miracle of incarnation. And what the author of John’s Gospel wants us to know is that the logos,
the one who was with God and was God in the beginning, the Word that means Light and Life and Love all at the same time—that Word took on human flesh in the person of Jesus.
And that is something we’ve been celebrating ever since.
—Jim Somerville © 2025
