The Tragedy of Christmas

Introduction

Consider this question: what is good about these verses? Where’s the good news, the gospel, here? We get to a pair of verses like this and it’s easy to think: this is just bad news. You’ve gotta keep reading to get to the good news. V. 12, v. 13, v. 14: The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us! But before that is today’s passage: The world did not know Him, His own people did not receive Him, Jesus was rejected. He continues to be rejected by so many in the world. Part of the story of Christmas, inherent to the narrative of Christmas is that Jesus begins his life in humble circumstances when there was no room for him in town. As a child he faces the threat of being killed by an evil leader. And by the end of his life, he will be rejected to the point of death on the cross.

Christmas is the story of an arrival, but it’s also the beginning of a story of rejection. And I thought this was supposed to be the JOY candle week? We will get to that joy, but…

Our main idea today is this: The tragedy of Christmas is that though Jesus is a fitting and perfect savior for the world, humanity has rejected Him.

We’ll unpack this tragedy by looking at the nature of the world’s rejection, why we have such a propensity to reject Jesus. But that’s not where we’ll end, for, as you may have guessed, there is good news in this passage and we’ll talk about the joy of the gospel even in this tragedy of rejection.

I. Jesus was rejected by the irreligious world.

We start with v. 10, Jesus rejected by the world. I should say too that it’s sometimes easy to read passages like this and gloss over some of the nuance. It’s easy to say, sure, he was rejected by the world, and then v. 11 just repeats that but in a different way, his people did not receive him. No, John is talking about two different groups of people. We start with the world.

The World did not know Him. This world that is lost in darkness, steeped in sin and disbelief, that world could not see him, recognize him for the light that is, and could not accept Him. And there’s an irony and a sadness to this statement, right? It’s that Jesus is the one in whom the whole world was made. We’ve already seen this in this chapter of John.

English Standard Version (Chapter 1)

3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.

For the Word, that is Jesus, came into the world he had made and yet the people of the world did not know him. They could not recognize their creator, their maker, their savior. We ask why? Why the inability to know him? Jesus answers this Himself in John chapter 3.

John 3:19-20, right after that famous statement in John 3:16 that God so loved the…what? the world! So we’re talking about the world that does not know Him. He says this: 19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.

Why did they not know Him? It’s not ignorance, it’s that they loved the darkness. It’s a hardness of their hearts, as Paul might say, or as it might be described in the book of Mark which we’ve been studying: spiritual blindness! And that sounds very harsh: they love the darkness! But think about it in these terms, because I imagine many of us have a propensity at times to this same sort of thinking: the light—Jesus—has come as an authority over us, as one who calls us to repentance and obedience. It’s the hearts of this world that resist with everything in them surrendering to anyone, let alone a savior or God.

It’s licentiousness—which feels, again, like such a negative word, but it’s the desire for license, for freedom in whatever I want to do, to live my life as I please and to never worry about obedience. And maybe that’s you, maybe that was you. You like the Christian message of the Gospel, the good news of salvation from Christ, but your heart resists the idea that He is Lord, that there is a call to obedience in following him and these things keep you from fully embracing Christ.

And don’t we see this all around us: the rugged individualism of Western society that says “I am my own sovereign self,” we as individuals are the ultimate arbiters between right and wrong, what is true and false, what is good and evil. But as soon as we do that, we put ourselves in the place of creator, rather than created. The world was made through Him; He made us and then we reject the way he has called us to live. The creator probably knows better than the created what its purpose is and how it should live.

The apostle Paul talks about in the first chapter of the book of Romans, and Paul makes clear that it is not ignorance that keeps the world away from Christ, but the desires of their heart.

English Standard Version (Chapter 1)

19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him…

You see, what Paul is making clear is that God has revealed Himself, his attributes are all around us, “they knew God,” he says. Yet we reject him and pursue the desires of our hearts. The image that comes to mind is a teenager rejecting the authority and wisdom of their parents. Parents who provide for, love, support, encourage, all of the things—and the child says, no, I’m my own self, I am not going to be governed by a parent any longer. Not that any of you did that or relate to that!

Yet, don’t worry, there is hope for the world! We’ll get there. For this group, they reject his authority; there is another group that reject that authority in a different way entirely.

II. Jesus is rejected by the religious people who were His own.

One scholar referred to V. 11 as one of the saddest verses in all of scripture, the sad irony of v. 10—that the creator came into the world he created and was not known—is deepened by v. 11. Here is is rejected by His own people, here that’s referring to specifically the ancient Jewish people. Not only was Jesus creator of all things, but he was born a Judean, an Israelite in the line of King David. He came to His own people, a people of the religion of the one true God, the people with the Hebrew bible, that scripture that prepared for and pointed them to a coming messiah.

And when he arrived: they rejected him. And what we see especially in the gospels is that it was the religious authorities, the pharisees that rejected him. You see, their sin was not a resistance to authority or to submitting to God, their sin was the opposite: legalism, a holiness of their own making, a salvation that they could earn.

Of course they rejected him, for to receive him would be to admit that their law-keeping, their perfection, their holiness was not enough. The gift of the messiah at Christmas is a gift that says: you really need some help, you have not figured this out even though you think you have. It be like getting a book from your spouse on Christmas morning with the title: “5 Steps to be Less Selfish.” It might be the gift you need, but it says something about your current way of doing things.

Legalism says: I need to earn it, I’ll make sure I deserve it. Ultimately though, legalism will only lead to shame, for when we inevitably mess up, when we surely fall short, what will there be but despair?

It makes me think of a movie I just honestly happened to watch last week: Dunkirk. The 2017 WWII drama about the evacuation of Dunkirk. At that time, early in the war, the allied forces, mostly British and French soldiers were surrounded and stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk just 45 miles from the safety of the United Kingdom. The film depicts the week-long evacuation effort; hundreds of thousands of soldiers standing on the beaches, waiting to be saved. In the end nearly 340,000 soldiers were saved. And there’s a scene at the end of the film that moves me so much. The soldiers are arriving home by boat, unloading at the docks. Their countrymen have come to welcome them home with blankets and tea and one older man says, “well done, lads. Well done.” A soldier looks at him and shamefully says, “All we did is survive.” As if they had not lived up to the expectations of their country, of their home, family and friends. They thought they were failures, having done nothing but escaped. In response though, the older man says: “that’s enough.”

I think of coming into the presence of God in heaven and he says: “well done my good and faithful servant.” What if we said: “but we weren’t very good, all we did was trust in Jesus.” He would say: “that’s enough.”

The film is a beautiful picture of a sacrificial rescue, but it depicts the way a certain kind of legalism, a desire to earn our own righteousness can lead to shame. The soldiers thought: we didn’t do anything, we didn’t earn this salvation. We failed!

Legalism will shame you, Jesus Christ will not. Let us not be burdened by legalism, trying to make sure we’ve done enough to earn that which we already have in Christ. There is no earning it, Christ came, receive Him! That is enough.

A danger of legalism for us today is that it leads to the temptation to look down on those we perceive as more sinful than ourselves. We live in this false worldview that says, at least I’m better than so-and-so. This is a rejection of the grace of Christ because there is no earning it, there’s not being better than someone else, on our own we are all equal at rejecting Jesus.

This is a core tenet of the gospel, that we’re all sinners, there are no good people and bad people, there is “all people having fallen short of the glory of God.”

I love the way Paul articulates this idea in Ephesians 2:17 “And he [Jesus] came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.”

Jesus knew it was necessary to preach the same gospel of peace to those who were far (the gentiles, the world) and those who were near (the legalists, the religious folks). They all needed it! Just as we all need it today. We all need Christmas. Christmas is as much for the unrepentant world as it’s for religious folks who think they’ve got it all figured out. Christmas is for all of us, the near and the far, that we might know the light of the world and receive Him.

I think of the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, they knew of all the prophecies about the messiah, and yet when this one came and fulfilled prophecy after prophecy, they rejected him. They could not overcome their spiritual blindness even though they were experts in God’s word and models of religious practice. Their attendance at the synagogue apparently did not protect them from drifting away from God toward a righteousness of their own. We must return, again and again, each day to the grace of God, to throw ourselves at the Gospel of Christ and trust fully His work for us. Not because we’re better than others or we earned it, but because we need it just as much as they next. We need the good news.

III. The Joy of the Gospel in tragedy.

And that’s where we started today, by considering: what’s the good news in these verses. When we read these verses we see the tragedy of Christmas, that Jesus was rejected by this world, both those near and far. The good news is this: He came anyway. He entered into this world, stepped into creation, was born a baby, took on flesh, and he did this knowing that rejection was coming.

It’s not as though the Son of God was sitting in heaven waiting for the perfect moment in human history when everyone would accept Him. No he entered in anyway, knowing that he’d be rejected. He came despite our rejection precisely because we are unable to come to Him. Our rejection didn’t surprise Him but it does demonstrate why we so desperately need him. Jesus didn’t wait for us to have figured things out well enough on our own: he stepped in as a solution to our problem. Romans 5:8 “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” While the world was still in rebellion against God, while we were still pushing Him away; while we still walked in the darkness of spiritual blindness, Christ came into this world and then died for us. That is scandalous good news.

He knew suffering awaited him, he knew death and sacrifice on the cross was in store, yet he came to this world anyway. And so great is his desire to see us saved that this can be said about Jesus in Hebrews 12:2 “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.” The cross was not joy, but the salvation of his people, securing the forgiveness of sins for all who would believe: that is the joy of the Lord Jesus. We often think about the Joy Week at Advent in terms of our joy, the joy we get in Christ; but this is the joy of Christ that many would be saved through Him. And through the cross he secures our salvation and in this new relationship with Jesus, He gives us His Spirit, the Spirit of God that changes our hearts, giving us eyes to see and ears to hear, hearts to receive and not to reject.

By God’s grace there is hope for healing and sight for the spiritually blind. How can we respond to these verses? Let them be a warning for ourselves, let us guard against drifting from the Gospel; but let us also pray for those who are hard toward the Lord. Pray for their spiritual sight.

And this rejection of Christ that we see in these two verses, it’s only part of the story. The rest of the book of John will see people, both the near and the far put their faith in Christ, believe in Him. The near, people like Nicodemus, Himself a pharisee; the far, people like the Samaritan woman at the well who evangelizes her whole community.

And what started with a handful of followers, a small group of people that had received him well has grown and persisted for nearly two thousand years. We stand in that today. The joy of Advent is twofold: Jesus came, he saved us, and now we know the joy of His salvation and the joy of be called his sons and daughters, being a part of His church. And our joy is in knowing that He is coming again!

Our hope is knowing that a day is when what we see in Revelation would come to pass; Revelation 5:13 “And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying, “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!””

Though he would be rejected, he came to the world anyway. That we might know Him, and that one day all of creation would know Him as the blessed lamb of God. Amen.