Well here we are again on Christmas Eve hearing the same old story once again. I wonder do you feel like it’s a bit like television in December - just another repeat? Nothing new in it. No new insights to get you going?
Or do you approach the retelling of the Christmas story with excitement as you’re reminded once again of just how amazing these events really are?
Do you stop and think again how incredible it is that God could become one of us?
Let’s do that now as we think about what we’ve just read from Matthew’s Gospel.
Joseph has heard the news from Mary that she’s pregnant and reacts as you’d expect him to: he decides a quiet divorce will solve the problem. He doesn’t want to disgrace her publicly so he decides to keep the details private. People will probably think that they just didn’t get on so he divorced her.
But then an angel appears to him in a dream to reassure him that Mary has remained faithful to him; that the baby is a miraculous child, brought into existence by the work of the Holy Spirit. So Joseph changes his mind and quickly marries her. Nothing new there is there? We’ve heard it all before countless times.
But let me ask you, do you think Joseph was too quick to believe what he heard in that dream? Would you have changed your mind that easily? I mean it might just have been a bit too much goat’s cheese that he’d had for dinner that had him dreaming a weird thing like that.
It was a big ask wasn’t it? To believe that Mary’s baby hadn’t been conceived the conventional way? To accept that this was a miracle of huge proportions.
I wonder how many of us today actually believe that this was a literal virgin birth? I was at a clergy lunch recently and the topic of the virgin birth came up; and one of the ministers said “Oh, you don’t have to believe that.” It was almost as though it required an irrational leap to believe that such a thing could happen. For some it’s so far outside their experience that they’d rather dismiss it than grapple with the possibility that our rational scientific worldview may have some holes in it. And in any case they were suggesting that it didn’t actually change our theology to any significant degree.
Well, what do you think? Do we need to believe in the virgin birth? Would we lose anything if we took it out of the creed?
Well let me suggest that in fact we would lose an enormous amount if we dismissed this birth as just a normal conception. And it’s all here in this short passage from Matthew’s Gospel if you think about it.
We find the answer to our question in the names Jesus is given. Let’s look at them in reverse order.
Jesus is called Immanuel, which means God is with us. Of course we know that God is always with us. It’s in his nature to be at all places at all times. Some religions would even suggest that God is actually part of us, that if we search within ourselves we’ll find him. But that isn’t what this name is saying. No, this is something totally different.
This is a statement of God coming to dwell with us as equals. God takes on human flesh in a real, literal sense. Hebrews 4 tells us: “15For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.” God willingly accepts the limitations of a human body, a human mind even, in order to live as one of us. The point of the Hebrews passage is that when we come to God for forgiveness we don’t want an intermediary who is so perfect that they can’t understand where we’re coming from. We don’t want someone who’ll look down on us because we’re such imperfect human beings.
If you’ve ever suffered some great loss in your life, you’ll know that there were people who were very good at expressing their understanding of your loss, even though they’d never experienced it themselves. They were very good at empathising with you. But the people who really understood you were those who’d experienced the same sort of loss. Those were probably the ones you paid a bit more attention to, took a bit more comfort from.
It’s one of the first things you learn when you study counselling. Learn to empathise with the person you’re talking to. Put yourself in their shoes so you can understand what they’re going through. Even if you haven’t experienced exactly what they’re experiencing there will have been moments in your life when you experienced something like it and you can use that to help you understand something of what they’re going through.
That’s what Jesus, our high priest, is able to do. When we come before God asking for forgiveness our high priest can look at us and say, “Yes I know just how hard it is to live with a finite human mind, with a weak human body. Yes, let me speak on your behalf.”
So this child comes as Immanuel, God with us. Not just God on our side, but God sharing our human frailty.
But he’s also given the name Jesus, meaning Saviour. Why? Because he’ll save his people from their sins. He comes to bring us salvation, to bring us redemption from our slavery to sin. But how could he do that? If Jesus was just a human being, if he was actually Joseph’s, or some other man’s, son, how could he save the rest of us from sin? He’d have had just as big a problem as we have. He himself would have been in need of redemption. He would have been part of the problem, not the solution.
So if Jesus was to save us he had to be different from us in some essential way. He needed to have the sinless nature of God. He needed to be truly born in the image of God.
But at the same time he still needed to be truly human. If he was to correct the mistake made by Adam and Eve, he had to be one of us. If he was to bear the punishment that we deserve he had to be one of us. If he was to restore the image of God to humanity, he had to be bearing that image as one who was truly human.
If I may change the metaphor a little, he had to be in some way connected to both God and us in order to be the one to reconcile us with God.
Imagine you have 2 people who are in a close relationship, but for some reason that relationship breaks down. They have a falling out that’s so bad that they’re no longer talking to each other. How can that situation be resolved? How can they ever get back together again if they won’t speak to each other? What’s needed is a mediator. But who’s going to be able to act as a mediator for those 2 people? Well it could be anyone with the necessary skills, but clearly, the best solution would be for someone who knows both of them well, who’s connected to both of them, to act as a go-between. This person would then be able to understand both of them well. They’d be close enough to each of them to be able to represent each of them well. They’d be able to empathise with both of them without being unduly identified with one side or the other.
Now can you see that this is exactly what applies to the situation between us and God? We’re separated from God by our sinful natures. There’s a huge gulf fixed that means we can never get to God, and he can’t let us into his presence without first dealing with our sinful nature.
But here’s the solution. 1 Tim 2:5 tells us: “There is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human.” We have Jesus Christ born of a woman but conceived by the Holy Spirit. At the same time both human and divine. Able to represent both humanity and God. As human he’s able to take our humanity and raise it once more to where God intended us to be, to bring us back into a personal relationship with God. As God, he’s able to deal with sin and its effects once and for all. His perfect life means that when he dies he’s able to take our sin upon himself, to die in our place rather than in his own.
That’s why that Hebrews passage concludes: “16Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” We can find mercy & grace because Jesus as both God and human being has paid the price for our sin.
Finally there’s a third element to the incarnation story. Not only does Jesus come to live among us as one of us; not only does he take our place in dying on the cross; not only does he pay the ransom on our behalf; he also ascends to the Father. He’s seated right now at the right hand of God interceding on our behalf - as one of us! He ascends as a human being, as the first fruits of God’s redemption plan. The fact that he’s ascended into heaven gives us the assurance that we too will be raised to life after death. Paul puts it like this in Romans 6: “4Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
So does it matter whether the virgin birth is a literal truth or just a metaphor for how special Jesus was? My answer is yes, it matters enormously. If Jesus is truly God in human form, both Human and Divine, it solves all the problems we have in our relationship with God. Jesus comes to bring peace on earth, goodwill towards a humanity in whom he is now pleased.
I hope everyone here tonight understands the significance of these events for your life and has taken the opportunity to ask Jesus to give you that peace with God that he came to make possible.
This is why we celebrate his birth year after year: because every year we need to be reminded again of God’s incredible love and grace towards us in sending his only son to be born, truly, as one of us.
