Over two thousand years ago, a baby boy was born to a poor peasant woman in a village called Bethlehem. At the time of his birth, it had been four hundred years since God had spoken through Malachi, the last of the post-exilic prophets. Now the divine silence had been broken, but in a completely new way. In the infant born in Bethlehem, the eternal God was manifested in a human body and joined to a sinless human nature. Jesus became the perfect expression of both everything God is and everything that a human being was meant to be. In the words of John, he was the Logos, the “Word made flesh.”
Some four hundred years earlier, Plato had expounded on the logos as the principle of order and reason that governed the universe, but his logos was essentially impersonal. In his use of the term, John added a new layer of meaning, joining the Word that had spoken the universe into existence with the Hebrew concept of the Creator as personal, active, holy, and self-existent. He then linked this personal Logos who had spoken in creation with a new creation that had taken place in the womb of a Jewish maiden. The mighty God who had walked with the first man and woman in Eden during the cool of the day at the first creation had now descended in a new way, to live among the human race as a man while remaining wholly God. In his descent is our ascent, that by the sacrifice of himself for our sins—yours and mine—he could raise us up into a new life. He also answered forever the questions of “What is God like?” and “Has God truly spoken?”; all that we need do to know those answers is to look at Jesus and listen to him. As a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, said, "In God there is no unChristlikeness at all."
The Word has become flesh and dwelt among us. Merry Christmas.
Some four hundred years earlier, Plato had expounded on the logos as the principle of order and reason that governed the universe, but his logos was essentially impersonal. In his use of the term, John added a new layer of meaning, joining the Word that had spoken the universe into existence with the Hebrew concept of the Creator as personal, active, holy, and self-existent. He then linked this personal Logos who had spoken in creation with a new creation that had taken place in the womb of a Jewish maiden. The mighty God who had walked with the first man and woman in Eden during the cool of the day at the first creation had now descended in a new way, to live among the human race as a man while remaining wholly God. In his descent is our ascent, that by the sacrifice of himself for our sins—yours and mine—he could raise us up into a new life. He also answered forever the questions of “What is God like?” and “Has God truly spoken?”; all that we need do to know those answers is to look at Jesus and listen to him. As a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, said, "In God there is no unChristlikeness at all."
The Word has become flesh and dwelt among us. Merry Christmas.