December 28, 2025 First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA
John 1:1-18 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it. 6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.,* 10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. 14 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. 15 (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”) 16 From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.,* 17 The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
1May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
On Christmas Eve, a service of Lessons and Carols, like the one we had this year, always ends with the reading of this Gospel lesson from John. I decided to return to it for today’s service, because – over and above its beauty, it really can be hard to understand… and what it has to say about Jesus is too important to be buried under gorgeous prose.
So, let’s turn to this lesson. The first thing to remember whenever you hear this, or read it, is that the word WORD always means Jesus here. So it says “in the beginning was the Word” what it means is that Jesus has existed since the beginning of time. It’s a kinda hidden way of referring to the idea that Jesus is not only a man born physically in Bethlehem, but also God, and so has always existed. The belief that Jesus is both God and man is both terribly confusing and our way of explaining how important Jesus is.
The scripture goes on to say that Jesus was there at the making of everything. It doesn’t want us to look at this as if we’re talking about making pots out of clay, like they do over at Sturbridge Village, but more so that we would understand that the basic essence of Jesus’ message and the creative power of God has been a part of our world since before the first fish crawled out of the primeval waters and figured out how to walk. There has never been a time when God the Father and Jesus (God the Son) have not been a part of our world.
It’s important to remember, hold on to, notice, the words that John uses to describe what Jesus does, what the Word does… for John says that Jesus has created life, and light, grace, and truth. Think about this for a minute… what’s not there? John doesn’t say that God created rules or shame or hatred; God thru Jesus didn’t create demands or anger. He created life. Light. Grace. Truth.
Moreover, John says those things have been created for all of us. From his fulness (that is, from his generosity), we have all received grace upon grace.
In verse 6, John the author starts talking about another John (actually, it’s John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin). Our author wants us to see that the highly respected John the Baptist came to point us toward Jesus… that it’s Jesus who is God, who brings what’s real … light that never fails, love that never ends. He doesn’t want us to get confused about which of the two is the leader. The folks who spend their lives studying this gospel tell us that this is the tag end of a disagreement – that some of the followers of John the Baptist continued to insist that he was the “one”, not Jesus. That said, here it mostly helps us focus on that Truth that Jesus brings, by pointing out that others recognized that Truth as well.
Around verse 10, there are some clues that tell us when this was written… because it starts saying that some people didn’t accept Jesus. Because it says things like “his own didn’t receive him”, we know it’s far enough along in the separation from being entirely Jewish that hostility has grown between Jews who follow Jesus, and Jews who don’t follow Jesus. It sounds like the Jews who follow Jesus have begun to give up converting their families and friends with whom they disagree and have proceeded to the anger stage. The scholars tell us that John was written maybe sixty to seventy-fire years after the Resurrection – which means that pretty much anyone who had known Jesus in the flesh had now died, and many of their children have died. It also means that the church is now becoming primarily focused on, and located in, places where there are more non-Jews than Jews. More and more, those people, Gentiles, will be the leaders of the church. They don’t have the old family connections, and the separation between followers of Jesus, Jews and Gentiles – and the followers of the Torah, is beginning to harden. Disappointment changes to anger, anger hardens into hatred. We still struggle today to remember the many connections, the many similarities between us and our Jewish cousins.
Verse 14 is the beginning of the end, the line that summarizes everything John wants us to know: God has become a man and lived among us. If God, Jesus was a man, then – like us – he knew pain and sorrow, hunger and fear. He knew how hard it was to do the right thing; he knew how easy it is to disappoint folks. He knew what it is to know you’re going to die; he knew what it was to actually die. He knew temptation. When we say God knows our pain, we’re not thinking that God has watched us hurt; we’re thinking that God has hurt right along with us.
John ends by making it clear that the rules of Moses didn’t do the job, because we are incapable of living all those laws, even the most important ones, all the time in every circumstance. And so Jesus came to show us what God looks like, what living in a Godly way was is like – and to give us the absolute assurance that we are always loved, always accepted, always welcomed in God’s love.
You know, usually we say that the stories of Jesus being born in a stable are the “real” stories, and John’s way of telling it is a metaphor… but really it’s the other way round. The stable stories are attempts to show us what acceptance of everyone looks like, while John is all about just stating that we are accepted.
No matter which way you prefer the story – or you like a little bit of each – the important thing to remember is that this is God’s absolute promise to us – we are loved and accepted, in the midst of our struggles. Keep that in your heart, today and always, and you will always carry a little bit of Christmas wherever you go.
Amen.
© 2025, Virginia H. Child
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 