Things to Know before Christmas

Today, we stand on the precipice of Christmas, one of the two great feast days on the Christian calendar. And here, on the last Sunday of Advent, the lectionary, like St. Matthew, wants us to understand a few things before we come together to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. So that is what I’d like us to consider this morning, and you can consider this something like a preview of our Christmas Eve celebration or like warm ups before a big football game. The real thing is our celebration of the Incarnation, but right now we’re preparing our minds and our hearts for the birth of our Messiah and Lord.

The first thing Matthew wants us to know before we celebrate the birth of Christ on Saturday evening is that the birth of Jesus does not take place in a vacuum. That is to say that

The birth of Jesus takes place as the climax of the story of Israel.

This is evident from the very first verses of St. Matthew’s Gospel, and if you’ve come to our Story of the Bible then I’ll apologize because you’ve already heard this several times. Starting in verse 1, Matthew says:

Matthew 1:1 ESV

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

After this he begins to list those generations, and this goes on all the way from verse 2 down to 16, after which he says:

Matthew 1:17 ESV

So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations.

From his opening words, St. Matthew wants us to understand that to appropriately celebrate the birth of Jesus and the miracle of the incarnation, we need to understand that event as part of a larger story that’s been going on ever since God said to Abram

Genesis 12:3 (ESV)

... in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

I don’t have time to rehearse that story here, but that’s a big part of what our story of the Bible class was all about. We worship Jesus. We give thanks for his birth, his life, his death, his resurrection, and his ascension, but all of those events, but those events only make sense as part of the larger story of Israel that begins with the call of Abraham to be blessing to the whole world, weaves its way through the promises made to David that from him would come a king who would have an everlasting kingdom, to the exile where all the promises seemed to have failed, to the birth of Jesus Christ, where all the promises of God find their yes in him.

The reason we just spent several weeks trying to tell that story is because without that story we’re going to struggle to understand who Jesus is and the meaning of the things that he said and did. So from the outset, St. Matthew reminds us that Christmas comes to us as the beginning of the climax of the great story of Israel, so it is in that story that Christmas finds it’s meaning.

Fully Human and Fully Divine from Conception

Second, St. Matthew wants us to understand the child born on Christmas Day is not an exclusively human child to whom divinity is later added. This evident from how Matthew tells this story, but I suspect there is something else going on here. When St. Mark told the story of Jesus in his Gospel, he didn’t begin with a birth narrative. He began with John the Baptist, and when Jesus is baptized, Mark says that the Holy Spirit descended on him like a dove.

To be abundantly clear, Mark does not intend this, but some have read this account as if it implies that Jesus was purely human at birth and then divinity was added to him at his baptism. This heresy is known as:

Adoptionism

Again, this is not what Mark is saying, but Mark was the first Gospel to be written and Matthew clearly is using Mark as a source for his own Gospel, so it seems to me fairly evident in our reading this morning that Matthew is trying to make clear that Jesus was not “adopted.” He was not the biological son of Mary and Joseph and later adopted into the godhead, but rather, as Matthew says,

Matthew 1:18 (ESV)

When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.

And then, just incase you missed it, the angel repeats it:

Matthew 1:20 ESV

But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

And then, just in case you still don’t get that Jesus is not the biological son of Joseph, Matthew stresses Mary’s virginity by going back to the Old Testament and saying,

Matthew 1:22–23 ESV

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us).

And then, one last time:

Matthew 1:24–25 ESV

When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.

Matthew wants to leave no doubt that the child whose birth we celebrate at Christmas is not the biological son of Joseph and Mary to whom divinity was later added. Instead, he is the the biological son of Mary, who was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was not added latter to Jesus but has rather been there with him from the moment he was conceived in Mary’s womb. Even more incredibly, Matthew emphasizes that from that moment, it’s not just that the Holy Spirit was with him, but in fact God was with us. When he was in his mother’s womb, he was Immanuel, God with us.

And that leads me to my third point.

Christmas is a celebration of the birth of God.

I know how theologically problematic that language can be, but if Mary is:

Theotokos/Θεοτόκος

If she is the Mother of God as the church affirms, then as impossible as it might sound, we must say that on the first Christmas, God was born. God the one who created the world from nothing and brought order to it’s chaos by the power of his word was born just like all of us. The one who sent the flood and promised never to the destroy the world again, the one who called Abram and promised him to bless the world through his offspring, the one who rescued his people out of Egypt and led them to the Promised Land, the one promised to David that he would build for him a house and that his heir would have an everlasting kingdom, the one who sent his people into exile because of their sin and is not at last calling them back home so that they can be God’s people dwelling with God in God’s land –– that God was born and laid in a manager. That God grew inside the womb of Mary. That God became one of us forever and ever.

Do you understand what that means? It means that we cannot tell the story of God without tell the story of humanity, and we cannot tell the story of humanity without telling the story of God. The two are forever inextricably linked because the child whose birth we celebrate at Christmas, the child who grew in Mary’s womb all those months, that child is:

Immanuel

We aren’t merely waiting for our savior. We’re waiting for our God. We aren’t merely waiting for the Messiah. We’re waiting for Immanuel. The one who is coming is more than a savior, he is more than a king, he is more than a child of Abraham. He is God with us. Forever and ever, and it’s his birth we celebrate this Christmas.