Fear not, for behold I bring you glad tidings of great joy that shall be for all the people. Amen!
Our text for this Christmas Day is from the Gospel reading. It’s one verse from John chapter 1, verse 14.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth…
That’s the Word of our Lord; the title for our sermon is:
The Logos and His Cosmos
“Long lay the world in sin and error pining.” We were singing part of that dear Christmas carol probably while we were getting ready weeks ago in Advent for last night and today, the celebration of the birth of God in Bethlehem, the Savior of the world.
But the sentence doesn’t quite hold true once you get away from the excitement of the season, the holiday. Here’s what we have. Following what we are celebrating today, that birth of God of the Virgin in Bethlehem, the angels, later the wise men coming.
In brief summary, the Word became flesh and tabernacled for a while among us. He healed the sick and the disabled, raised the dead. He preached and taught. He suffered under Pontius Pilate. He was crucified on a cross on Calvary, Jerusalem. He rose from the dead and thus atoned for the sins of the whole world. Being really man and God in one person, He delivered peace between sinful mankind and our Creator.
However, the world, for the most part, continued in its sin and error and repressed its pining for the coming Messiah, Christ, the Savior.
Context
I’m going to walk with you through our single verse, “the Word became flesh and tabernacled for a while among us, and we have seen his glory.” But to do this well, that is, to communicate this and take it to heart and take it along from church out into our daily lives, we also need to pay attention to its setting, its context. So, I’m going to reread the Gospel from today, shortened very slightly, so that we’re hearing all these verses leading to the crescendo of God becoming flesh and tabernacling among us human beings.
I want you to do this as I’m reading. Listen in particular for two terms. One of them is the term Word, and the other is the term world. Here then is our CHRISTmas Day Gospel lesson again:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcome it. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was created through him, and yet the world did not recognize him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born, not of natural descent, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but born of God. The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. Indeed, we have all received grace upon grace from his fullness. No one has ever seen God. The one and only Son, who is himself God, and is at his Father’s side, he has revealed him.
Do you remember those two terms you were listening for? The world and the Word.
The World
We’re going to come back to the Word in a moment, but I’d like to present to you a way to think about this text and to take it along. So we’re going to look first at the term that is translated the world most often in this text.
It’s the word cosmos, which is very familiar to us in English. We sometimes use the term cosmos in science classes. “Cosmos”: we’re talking about the whole world, the whole universe, and we’re reminded that the Greek people, the Greek philosophers, and then also the Greek writers of the New Testament used that as a term for the world. So every time you heard the word world, it’s cosmos. Do you know what cosmos means in the original? It means “orderly and beautiful.”
So it actually is behind our word cosmetic. If you were to track that word in Greek in the New Testament, you would find this, that there are places where we hear that a number of things are cosmos-like: the temple can be decorated to look orderly and beautiful, a grave can be tended to look orderly and properly respected, doctrine can be orderly and beautiful, and more.
Let me put the term cosmos or world this way in relation to the Word. We have to think about these two terms that I’m highlighting for you, or rather that the Holy Ghost is calling out for us. And to do this, I’d like you to think about the cosmos like a Christmas ornament on the tree to begin with. I’m going to talk about that.
Remember, we have the other term from our text in John 1, which is the Word. This is a second Greek word many of us know, which is the Logos, which we still have to talk about. So, we have two very important parts to this text as we’re getting set to take it to heart and mind and to take it on to other people. There is the cosmos as this decoration, this CHRISTmas ornament, and there is Christ Himself looking just like, well, Himself in fact.
So, if you think about this ornament of the universe, this decoration, this beautiful orderly thing, we’re hearing a great deal about its creation in our text. And I need to remind you, I love to remind you, that this is not something that just happened during one week of God’s creative work about 6,000 years ago. Creation is something that is ongoing.
We know this from the Catechism. There we believe and confess that He created and still preserves everything. To put it as a wonderfully instructive philosophical question: Why are there existing things rather than absolutely nothing at all? How do you account for the fact that the things in our world, most importantly we ourselves, God’s human creatures, continue to exist? You are the same person, body and soul, today that fell asleep and went unconscious last night.
Day after day, year after year, creation is maintained. It is cosmos. It’s beautiful, it’s orderly, and it endures.
Now the thing of it is that as we look at this decoration, the world, the cosmos, that was created by God, the Holy Spirit, the Father, and the Son in the beginning, we know that very quickly it went dark. It went dark as soon as Adam and Eve initiated the insurgency (the Fall) against God’s Word. God said, “Do this, be fruitful and multiply, take care of the garden, don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
And on that horrible day for us all, Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and they brought sin into the world. As you and I sit here this morning – as we confessed together in the liturgy – we are by nature sinful and unclean. I do not have to rehearse the individual sins that we have committed. All I have to do is remind you of David’s words which apply to us all. “Surely I am a sinner from birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Palm 51). The darkness is profound. The darkness is within us all.
This darkness after the fall into sin not only meant that now human beings didn’t know about God; in reality, we naturally do not want to know about God. We were, as we say in our Lutheran confessions, to bring the Bible passages all together: blind, dead, and enemies of God. So now look at that decoration of the world, and the once lovely, well-ordered ornament of God’s creation looks horrible. In fact, it has become more crime and chaos than cosmos.
The gospel is not just a matter of information, brothers and sisters. The gospel is the work of God to turn our hearts and minds around from being blind to give us sight, from being dead to bring us to life in holy baptism, and to make us sons and daughters of God. We heard that in today’s CHRISTmas epistle, Titus 3.
The Word
Now, let’s look at the other part of the story here. Remember that phrase from the apostle Paul about looking “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13). “Darkly” is an adverb describing the hearts and minds of all of us in the ruined cosmos. We do not pine for the Lord to come and save us. We revel in our sin and error.
It’s not that the glass is dark; it’s that our vision is dark. We need, we ought to be pining for, this Savior to come and, well, save us! Save us from our insurgency and our rebellion, our natural, personal, inherited sin, and make us fit to be with him again. Please!
He does. So now look at the second of our two terms in the CHRISTmas gospel. Look at Jesus Himself.
You might think that this is a good place to picture our Lord holding up that ornament, His cosmos, and thinking how much He loves us inside there, and that He’s feeling kindly towards us. And that’s a good thing, but that is not what this text is about. This text is about Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, very God of very God, begotten, not made.
It’s about Jesus becoming flesh. This stuff, body and soul – that which is vulnerable to the thousand natural shocks of life – the flesh. This is what the Almighty God takes on Himself. doing something that never would have occurred to us, much less something that we could have arranged. He becomes a vulnerable, mortal, flesh-and-bone human being while continuing to be God in the highest. Somehow, and I’m sure that my words aren’t doing a great job of this, but somehow you have to be able to follow these words to realize that what happens is Jesus, who was there in the beginning – indeed, He was there before the beginning – Jesus through whom everything was created and sustained, the very Word of God became human.
That’s why he’s called the Logos in John chapter 1. It means the Word in English. I can tell you something else. It also means language.
We, as human beings, are made in the image of God. Though we threw away God’s righteousness, a rightness with him that Adam and Eve were given in creation, God maintained that image of God, which is language among us, so that he could talk right after the fall into sin about the woman’s Seed who would crush Satan’s head. And here he comes.
So Jesus remains God, standing right there outside of his world, that spoiled decoration, and he enters into the world, His own cosmos. God takes a human nature on Himself. At that moment and forever after, the person of Christ is both God and man. How best to understand what He does? He shows his glory.
What do you think glory means? If you’re not sure, you want to be certain to look back at our passage for today, because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. By the way, that’s that word tabernacle. He tabernacled or tented among us. Dwell in John’s text means to set up His tent, which is the tabernacle built in the days of Moses, as we heard in our CHRISTmas Old Testament lesson.
“We observed his glory,” says the apostle John. You may be thinking, “Oh, I think I’m feeling crushed after all the happiness of Christmas so far. I haven’t seen Jesus.” Well, you’re not part of this pronoun in this passage. “We” is “we apostles.” This is John the apostle writing. He’s not saying all Christians have seen God this side of heaven. He’s saying, “I am one of the eyewitnesses. Peter, James, John saw the glory of God.” To the rest of us Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen but yet have believed” (John 20).
What then is this glory in our verse? “The glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” The word glory in Old Testament Hebrew means “weight and importance.” I expect that some of us are thinking about the bright glory showing up when the angels declared the birth of God in Bethlehem to the shepherds in the fields, and we think the brightness is the glory. The brightness is only the evidence of the glory. The important thing, the weighty thing, is Jesus Christ in the flesh Himself. That’s the weight of it. Christ the Word in the flesh, this is the weight of the Gospel, the weight of God, the heaviness of CHRISTmas.
Do you see? Even after his ascension into heaven, Jesus did not give up His human nature. Forever and forever and forever, He is united to humanity by having fused a created human nature with His eternally divine nature. This is most certainly true.
Let me see if I can give you another thought as a way of sharing this passage with family and neighbors during the weeks upcoming. I’m borrowing this, I should mention, from an illustration for a sermon that Martin Luther used. In his illustration, the story was about a man in church who was mumbling and refusing to make the sign of the cross toward the Lord’s Table.
I want you to think of us not in the year of our Lord 2025, but back in medieval times, outside a cathedral on CHRISTmas Eve. Look at this mumbling unbeliever who refuses to come into the church. He hates any mention of Christ and the Word of God. This disbeliever is fuming, he is muttering, and he is all riled up about what those stupid, foolish, bothersome believers are doing in that church.
All of a sudden, Satan himself appears. Boom! There he is. He goes over to this man, and he takes him, and he hits him with a roundhouse blow. The man crashes to the earth a quarter mile down the dirty medieval street, farther away from the cathedral than ever. He begins to pick himself up, and in an instant, Satan is on him. Lucifer lifts him up by his collar and sneers at him nose to nose, no doubt reeking of sulphur and malice against the Almighty.
And he says to this murmuring disbeliever, who’s getting set to ask, “What are you doing? You’d think you’d be on my side” – he says to him, “How dare you! How dare you stand out here, making fun of those people in there, singing, Hodie Christus Natus Est (Today Christ is Born) and offering their joyful hallelujahs?”
Listen, if God had done for me and the fallen angels today what he did for you fleshly beings, I’d be in there right now, joining the chorus with all of them. How…dare…you!” The angels were lost as soon as they became lost angels. No Redeemer.
But look. Look with wonder and faith. Look at what the Logos did for all of us human creatures inside his created world, personally and in the flesh. He did not become in-spirited to redeem the fallen angels. He became flesh to redeem you.
You have never met a person for whom Jesus did not take on human flesh, and blood, and soul. I ask you, is there anything that your neighbors, your family, our world needs to hear more urgently than this? The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.
In these Scriptures we have observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. O come, let us adore Him. Amen.
The peace of God, which transcends all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus. Amen.