Christmas in the Holy Land

Sermon for Dec. 31, 2023
John 1:1-18

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

Welcome to Christmas according to the Gospel of John.  The poetry is beautiful, but what does it mean?  Well, the best answer is that, ultimately, it means more than we can ever comprehend.  But there are some claims here in this prologue to John’s Gospel that are worth noting … with awe and wonder.

First is the claim that God the Son has always existed with the Father and the Spirit.  The Word was “in the beginning” with God and, in fact, “was God,” John says (1:1).  That’s an astonishing claim, right up there with its spiritual ancestor, the first verse of Genesis: that, “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  These two claims are where we start as Christians.  God doesn’t just watch as creation takes shape; God brings creation into being, the Spirit moving across the waters of chaos to create the beautiful and well-ordered universe that the Webb Space Telescope has shown us this year.  Similarly, God the Son isn’t a son along the lines of the kings of Israel, adopted by God at their coronations.  The Christ, God’s true King, has been there from the start.    

So, the Son has always been and remains the Father’s creative partner, in the power of the Spirit.  And in the fullness of time, that creative Word “became flesh and lived among us,” John’s Gospel says (1:14) – or, as the paraphrase The Message puts it, “the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”  I love that language because it’s so intimate.  You can hold at arm’s length the notion of God living “among us,” imagining it’s some other “us” the Gospel writer has in mind.  But God moving “into the neighborhood” puts a fine point on the tangible nature of Incarnation: God chose a particular neighborhood to inhabit back in the day; but with us as the Body of Christ in the world and the Holy Spirit ever present, God still moves into every neighborhood we can know.  As Fr. Jerry Kolb likes to remind us when he offers the final blessing, “You cannot go where God is not.”

So, “the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”  But what or who is that – “the Word”?  On its surface, it seems familiar.  After all, we talk about the Bible being the Word of God.  So, is John’s Gospel saying Scripture became flesh and lived among us?  If so, the logical conclusion would be that Scripture is the object of our worship, that God is contained in these pages.  That seems like a small box for the sovereign of the universe.

And there you see the limits of trying to read poetry as technical writing.  John’s Gospel isn’t a manual for disassembling the Divine and putting God back together in a way we can understand.  The gospels are mirrors that catch God at different angles, revealing a mystery so deep and so vast, we can only take in a few glances at a time.

So, what is John’s poetry trying to say?  The key word is “Word.”  It meant something very different theologically 2,000 years ago, in the context John was using it.  “Word” didn’t mean printed word, or even spoken word exactly.  Human words could carry divine Word, but not all human words speak the Divine.

In Greek, John’s term is logos, and it meant something well beyond human expression.  For the ancient Greeks, whose thinking helped shape the Good News as it spread beyond its Jewish roots, logos had several meanings: “the eternal principle of order in the universe”; the “intermediary between God and [God’s] creatures” that gave “meaning and plan to the universe”; or the “instrument of God in creation and the pattern of the human soul.”¹  Jewish tradition understood the Word of God similarly, often naming “the word of the Lord” as an active, creative, corrective, saving force in the world, such as when it came to the prophets and impelled them to speak on God’s behalf.² And, of course, Genesis says it’s through God’s word that creation came to be.³

So, once we glimpse what “the Word” meant, we have to think about what it means for the Word to take flesh.  One commentator puts it like this: that as the logos incarnate, “Jesus does not simply speak God’s words and do God’s works; rather he does those things because he is God’s word and work in the world.”⁴  It’s worth noting the verb tense there.  It’s not just that Jesus was the logos incarnate; “he is God’s word and work in the world” – the Word that’s still taking flesh and moving into the neighborhood, meeting us out on the sidewalk day by day.

And, of course, sometimes where that sidewalk runs isn’t exactly Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.  Like you, I saw the news footage last weekend from Bethlehem.  Any other Christmas in any other year, Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity would be packed.  Even in May, when I was there, this church marking Jesus’ birthplace was so crowded that the pilgrims didn’t stand in lines to touch the cave’s holy stone; we moved like a school of fish funneled through a tiny opening. 

Guiding us to this spot, and all through our Holy Land pilgrimage, was a young woman named Ranya.  Ranya is just the kind of person you want leading your pilgrimage visits – not just kind and attentive but also brilliant and faithful.  Ranya certainly knows her history, but even more she lives it through her own specific incarnation in that place.  She and her parents and children are Palestinians, living in the West Bank; and they’re among the 2 percent of Holy Land residents who are Christian.  As we walked through countless churches, she knew the traditions about what Jesus had done in those places; and she knew the history of one force after another seeking to control them – Romans and Byzantines and sultans and Crusaders and Ottomans and Brits and Israelis. 

But beyond telling the history, Ranya also showed us what it’s like to live as a tiny minority in a land controlled by another country.  On a bus ride south along the Jordan River, she described the reality of life in the West Bank and the blame that all sides share.  For example, about the towering concrete division running through cities, villages, and countryside, she carefully called it “the Security Wall, or the Separation Wall.”  What it is depends on who you are and which neighborhood you inhabit.  Does it keep terrorists out of Israel?  Well, when I was there in May, the answer was “yes,” though I’m sure the answer would be different today.  And, does the wall separate Palestinian people from their jobs, and their loved ones, and any sense of freedom?  The answer certainly is “yes” to that, too.

But what really struck me about Ranya was her faith.  Of all people in the Holy Land, a local tour guide would have maybe the most cause to be a cynic.  Week after week, she leads one group after another, enduring travelers who haven’t bothered to learn much about her land.  Over and over, she visits sites like Cana – where, well, maybe Jesus turned water into wine there; we can’t really know for sure whether it’s the spot.  But there’s certainly been a lot blood spilled over it, and plenty of churches built to mark it, and scores of gift shops nearby….  On top of that, as a Palestinian Christian, Ranya has nobody going to bat politically for her family’s interests or well-being. 

And yet, what we heard in her descriptions of one site after another in this broken Holy Land was her trust in the Truth those sites represent.  God has been on the ground there – Ranya knows it in her soul.  The accounts from Scripture roll off her tongue like old family stories, narratives of identity that form us into who we are.  God’s action there through salvation history is simply a given for Ranya, every bit as real and true as the conflicts raging around her.

What I don’t know at this point is how Ranya and her family are.  The people who run the pilgrimage company are going to the Holy Land next week to talk with her and get a sense of the conditions on the ground.  But I’ve been thinking about her and her children a lot in the past two and a half months.  She doesn’t live in Gaza, thank God, but I’m sure she has friends and family there.  And the people of the West Bank are hardly out of harm’s way, never knowing when Israeli settlers will come and take their land … or worse.

In this tragic Christmas in the Holy Land – as pilgrims and the tiny Christian community aren’t filling Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity, as the people living there don’t know what horror might come next – regardless, we remember that the Word of God came among us and comes among us still.  For me, it comes in the person of Ranya; and Fr. Nael, the Anglican priest we met in Nazareth; and the people serving St. George’s Cathedral in East Jerusalem; and the staff at the hospitals and other mission sites run by the Episcopal diocese there. 

John’s Gospel tells us, “To all who received him, who believed in his name, [Jesus] gave power to become children of God” (1:12).  In them, in us, God continues to join humanity with the logos, making us not just born of flesh but reborn of the Spirit.  This is why we must not despair when we witness empty holy sites, and Separation Walls, and daily airstrikes.  Instead, we must join with Ranya in witnessing to the way the Word makes creation new.  We can’t stop the killing and the other injustices in Gaza and Israel and the West Bank.  But we can stand with Ranya, and John the Baptist, and the other lonely voices crying out in the wilderness to say that injustice and death are not God’s answers to human problems.  We must expect better, and we must embody better – because, after all, from that tiny speck of God’s good creation we call the Holy Land, the place where the Word first took flesh and moved into the neighborhood, God’s light shines in the darkness.  And the darkness will not overcome it.

1.     Brown, Raymond E. The Gospel According to John I-XII: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Vol. 29 of The Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1966. 520.

2.     Brown, 520-521.

3.     Brown, 521.

4.     New International Study Bible, 1905 (note).