Christmas is a great season of worship and memories. Carols sung, children's plays with actors dressed in fake beards and parents' bathrobes. Readings from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke in decorated sanctuaries with candles lit on the windowsills. It's warm, comfortable and sentimental. But somehow, it's all too easy to celebrate Christmas and never come to grips with the full impact of who this Child was and is - born on Christmas day.
That's why we need to read John's Gospel, too. "Before anything else existed, there was Christ, with God. He has always been alive and is Himself God. He created everything there is - nothing exists that He didn't make ... and Christ became a human being and lived here on earth among us full of grace and truth. And some of us have seen His glory - the glory of the only Son of the heavenly Father" (John 1:1-3;14 LB).
You can't neatly package John's account of Jesus' birth. It alarms and grabs our attention. The creator of the universe has wrapped himself in human flesh and entered our world - the very world he created. And that little infant, so often portrayed by a store-bought doll, is God Himself. Immanuel - God with us.
That's not easy to walk away from unchanged to keep living the same way. To know that Jesus, God in the flesh, walked in our shoes and felt what we feel, faced the same struggles and temptations that we all face, who knew the heartache of loneliness, despair and life's pain. We can't look away when we are confronted by the true living God of the universe. He looks at us and says, "I came for your sake!"
A child was having trouble sleeping and called for her mom to come and stay with her. "Honey," her mom said, "You don't need me here with you - God is watching over you." And her daughter silently looked around the room, and then pleaded, "If it's all the same to you, I would like someone with a face I can see!"
John tells us that on that first Christmas, God put on a human face. God became flesh. The same God who, before Jesus' birth, remained faceless and unseen. The apostle Paul would write later in the book of Colossians that Jesus "is the image of the invisible God."
We have to stop and wonder in awe at such a mystery, and such a wonder. John also instructs us how humanity should respond upon seeing the face of God: "To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God."
Our first response at Christmas should be to believe and receive Jesus Christ - God come in the flesh - who not only taught us how to live our lives, but died in our place so that we might forever be a member of God's family.
Sing the carols, enjoy the beautiful pageants and live Nativities - and ponder upon what John reveals to us: God has come in Jesus Christ, so welcome him into your heart and life. This is why he came!
