No un-Christlikeness at all: a homily for the Second Sunday of Christmas

No un-Christlikeness at all: why we confess the Incarnation

At the early Eucharist on the Second Sunday of Christmas, 2021

John 1:10-18

“No one has ever seen God.”

The words of Saint John in our Gospel reading point to fundamental truths about what Christians mean - in common with Jews, Muslims, and indeed with the ancient Greek philosophers who shaped the intellectual world in which John wrote - when we say the word ‘God’.

God is eternal, infinite.  Not restricted or contained by time or space.  God is eternally present in all places. God is the ground of all being, closer to us than we are to ourselves. God is invisible, unseen, not a physical being.

And so, “No one has ever seen God”: because God cannot be limited by space, time, and the physical.

I imagine, however, that after writing this, John - like a good dramatist - then expected a pregnant pause in our reading of his words.

“No one has ever seen God.” Pregnant pause. “It is God the only Son … who has made him known.”

Here is the distinctive belief at the core of Christianity.  Here is the distinctive belief which distinguishes Christianity’s proclamation of God from that of our Jewish and Muslim friends, and which makes the God of Christianity different from the God of the philosophers.

It is what we call the Incarnation: the belief that the eternal, unseen, infinite, invisible God became flesh and dwelt amongst us.  

In the words of the carol we sing at this Christmastide, ‘Word of the Father now in flesh appearing’.  Or as we say of Jesus Christ in the Creed, He is “true God … of one being with the Father”, who “was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man”.

And so, to gaze upon the Christ Child, dwelling amongst us in grace, humility, and love, is to see God present and redeeming.  To behold Jesus of Nazareth healing the lepers, feeding the hungry, giving sight to the blind, embracing the wandering, is to see God present and redeeming.  To gaze upon the Crucified One, forgiving amidst bitter sorrow and the darkness of humanity's sin, is to see God present and redeeming.

This is why the Incarnation is the defining belief of the Christian faith, the belief that makes sense of everything else we say about God, Jesus Christ, the cross, the resurrection, forgiveness, the sacraments. 

It is in Jesus Christ - in the manger, amongst the crowds in Galilee, upon the Cross - that God is present and revealed. We know God draws us into the divine life - with grace, mercy, love, forgiveness - because this is what we see in Jesus.

As a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, said: “God is Christlike and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all”. 

For “no one has ever seen God [pause]. It is God the only Son … who has made him known”.

(The contemporary icon of the Saviour and the Theotokos is by Jerzy Nowosielski.)