May I Have a Word?
12/25/22
“May I have a word,” a person asks? But we know that they’re going to say more than one word. There will be a multitude of words, but they will all hang together. Our text is one such Word and our Lord is the One who would have it. And the Word He would have is “Adynaton”. This name for a figure of speech in ancient Greek poetry comes from the Greek word translated impossible: ???????? (a-du-na-te-o). Adynaton is defined today as a form of extreme hyperbole so that what is stated is impossible (Homosexuality in Greece and Rome, 297). You know: “Getting blood from a stone”. “Finding a needle in a haystack. And then from our text. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” To make the Holy Spirit’s point clear, you could translate God’s “Speech” became flesh (Weinrich, John 1-,92-3).
Translating that way, we have the most shocking speech ever. But God has this Word with us every Christmas. So much have we heard it that it is expected, it’s not hyperbole but ordinary. We’re like the bee keeper covered in bees. He’s unfazed but others not use to that are freaking out. Freak out here at the most shocking Word ever. Go to what the verses before 14 say about the Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This Word here is not about God, but God Himself. The beginning being talked about is: the beginning where God made heaven and earth. The fact that “was” precedes the beginning means no matter when the beginning is, the Word was already there (Cyril of Alexandria, NT IV, 3). This is the Word that man lives on rather than bread alone (Deut. 8:3). This is the Word that is a refuge and shield (Ps. 119:114). This is the Word that is our hope (Ps. 130:5); that heals us and rescues us from the grave (Ps. 107:20). The Word that cleanses us (Jn 15:3), forgives us (Jn. 20:23), and brings us into God’s kingdom (Jn. 3:3).
Shocking, just shocking. “The Word was God” and “The Word was made flesh.” Better translated ‘became’ flesh. The Word, the Speech that is eternal took on flesh and blood in time. We’re not shocked by this but Luther said the Devil is: “the words ‘God became man’ knock all his thoughts to pieces”. And again, “There is nothing more vexing to the devil than speaking about dear Jesus and His incarnation. Therefore, I like it that in church people sing loudly ‘And the Word was made flesh’ or ‘And was made Man.’ The devil cannot stand to hear this, and he has to retreat several miles’” (LW, 22, 106). Non-Christian religions, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism are more shocked at God becoming flesh than we are. A rabbi of Luther’s day asked, “’Since he was in the womb of his mother from his head to his feet how could he have been God’” (LW, 8, 241)?
Thinking along these lines, led to a curious backhanded testimony to our text. The rabbi’s were leery of speaking of God Himself actually being in the world; that was too human. So they took to substituting the shechinah - the cloudy presence of God’s glory - for the name of God. In Gen. 28:16 Jacob says, "Surely the Lord is in this place." The rabbis changed it to, "The shechinah is in this place." The Hebrew word for ‘dwelling’. Now the Greek for ‘dwell’ is skenoun from sk?nos which means ‘tent.’ So the word Skenoun always turned the Jews thought to shechinah (Barclay, Revelation, 2, 40-1). And this intersects with our text: “And dwelled among us.” The Greek is ?????? from sk?nos. The Word “tabernacled or pitched a tent “in” us. In the OT, the tabernacle in the wilderness became the Temple in Jerusalem. This is the Temple that Solomon said if a man looked to, prayed towards, remembered he would be rescued, delivered, forgiven and more. Jesus revealed Himself to be that Temple, that Shechinah of God made flesh.
You know how some people will only stay in 5 star hotels? Well, our flesh and blood in this fallen world hounded by Sin, Death, and Devil ain’t no 5 stars. What science fiction plot has superior beings anything but pure energy or thought? To dwell in flesh and blood is a step down. Offensive to them. We’ve all experience food that is off-putting in taste or smell to us but delicious to some ethnic group. God of God, Light of Light, Begotten not Made, was not put off by our creature-ness, or the darkness of this life in this fallen world. Moreover, He wasn’t content to just dwell with us but wanted to dwell in us. Augustine said, “Though His incarnation showed us nothing else, these two wholesome facts were enough, that true divinity cannot be polluted by the flesh, and that demons are not to be considered better than ourselves because they have not flesh” (City of God, IX, 17).
The Word became Speech, and some respond, “You can’t speak to me that way.” The response of fallen reason is it’s impossible for flesh and blood to take on divinity. It’s impossible for a human being to take on the attributes, the characteristics of God. So, Jesus according to His divine nature can be omnipotent, omnipresence, omniscient, but not according to His human nature. God the Son can be present everywhere but Mary’s Son can’t be. Since Ascension, His flesh and blood are confined to the space He occupies in heaven. So for Protestants of every stripe, the Body and Blood of Christ can’t be on our altar. They can’t be in our ears in Absolution, or on our skin in Baptism either. You just can’t talk to the Reformed, the Evangelicals, the Nondenoms this way. The Man born of Mary can’t know everything, be all powerful, or be present everywhere. Why? The finite is not capable of the infinite. That’s true isn’t it? You can’t pour a 5 gallon bucket of water into a 3 gallon one without losing 2 gallons.
They can believe that before the Big Bang the whole universe was contained in a space the size of a body (www.forbes.com › startswithabang › 2021/08/25), but they can’t believe what Col. 2:9 says: “all the fullness of the godhead dwells bodily in Christ.” They can believe Satan in the Great Temptation can show Christ all the kingdoms of the world in “an instant”. But God can’t enflesh His fullness inside a Virgin’s womb. For them, "the infinite is uncomfortable with the finite" (Scaer, Law and Gospel, 211). Go home; read Ezekiel 8. There a fiery figure shows the prophet increasingly more shocking abominations being done by the OT church leaders. Here I want to increasingly shock you with the simple truth that “God’s Speech became flesh and pitched a tent in us.”
You’re shocked that all the Deity dwells bodily in the Man Jesus because of the laws of physics, human reason, etc.? What’s more shocking still is that Holiness could be incarnate in a fallen, human womb. Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit through the power of the Most High overshadowing Mary, but she was a fallen sinner. How come she doesn’t burn up? “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate Deity, pleased with us in flesh to dwell, Jesus, our Immanuel..” That verse is the one most often left off. Why because it confesses the unreasonable truth that it was no less of a miracle for the holy God to be pleased to dwell among/in us sinners than for the infinite God to dwell in our finite flesh.
But that’s what God did. We can say this because we are only going by what God says not what we can reason, think, or discover by science. So when the Bible says the “Eternal Word took on flesh and blood in time to tent among us”, that’s what we confess. The Bible says, Communion is the Body and Blood of Jesus; babies can believe, God created everything in 6 days and we confess these things too. We don’t claim we can explain the how, or get our head around them. We would not say these things except for God Himself saying them. But more shocking than these miracles is that God became Man so He could forgive our sins, save our souls, and resurrect this flesh and blood as a new creation for a new heaven and a new earth.
From the Fall on our Lord promised us, “I will put hostility between the Devil and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed. He will crush your head, and you will bruise his heel.” Natural born men were seed of men. Only Jesus is called Seed of the Woman, and He would be more than even a perfect man this text says. How so? Because perfect Adam and Eve we’re no match for the Devil. So it needed to be God Himself who entered our flesh to crush the serpent’s head. To crush a head and have a heel to bruise, you need feet. Jesus, the God with feet, walked the dusty, dirty, muddy, manure-spoiled roads of Palestine and never sinned, got dirty, or strayed from God. This is Him keeping the Law in our place. Think of all the ways you not only stray but break God’s holy, unyielding laws, and then remember Jesus never did that once in deed, or word, or even thought.
God is no liar; even though Jesus kept all His laws for us, in our place, God still had to punish the untold, unimagined, unable to be counted broken laws. He did that in the Person, on the Person, to the Person of Jesus. He handed Himself over to God’s Justice in our place. And He passively suffered what God in all His wrath had against sins and sinners. We use the expression, “mad as hell” and think we know what that means. The Man who is God really knows what that means, and in Gethsemane He asked if there was another way of saving you without His drinking the Cup of Hell. There wasn’t, so He drank it all. Now there’s none left not for you, for me, not for anyone in Christ.
This was all done by grace without any merit, worthiness, or faith in us or anyone else. Our text says not only did grace come by the God-Man but truth too. And it’s “The Grace” and “The Truth”. The definite articles mean Grace comes to you only in the Man who is God, and Truth is whatever He says. So when He speaks earthly things: creation, Flood, crossing the Red Sea, we believe Him though reason, unbelief, and science say otherwise. Likewise, though we believe we’ve sinned more than sands upon the ocean floor, we believe Jesus who says, “I forgive you. You’re free. You’re going to live forever.” We even believe the unreasonable and unscientific thing that our dead body will rise and live forever. We believe that Water rebirths to eternal life; that Absolution separates us from our sins; and this Bread is Jesus’ Body and this Wine is His Blood. This is the Word He would have with you. Not for His benefit but yours. Amen
Rev. Paul R. Harris
Trinity Lutheran Church, Austin, Texas
Festival of the Incarnation (20221225); John 1:1-18
