The Word became Flesh
Sunday 4 January 2026, Second Sunday of Christmas
Revd Maggie Guillebaud
John 1:1-18, Jeremiah 31:7-14
The darkness was intense, the early morning cold, when, as a new curate nearly 20 years ago, I walked up the steps to the West door, which stood wide open, and proclaimed into the empty Close: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’
It was Christmas morning at the end of the Midnight Mass, and the privilege of announcing to the world that God was among us is one that I have never forgotten. Suddenly any doubts I may have had as I floundered about in those first 6 months of my curacy here were resolved: this was what mattered, this proclamation was at the core of all priestly callings, this was what we as priests are sent to do – to proclaim that Immanuel, God with us, is with us for now and eternity.
In what is often referred to as the Prologue to John’s gospel, those first 18 verses we have heard today, ideas tumble over each other as John sets out what his gospel intends to prove: that Jesus was God himself in the form of his Son, come to earth to live among us, the promised Messiah.
It is a proclamation which enfolds us each Christmas familiar, comforting, resonant. But what exactly does it mean? I hope this morning to make this a bit clearer, as it is a fundamental touchstone to Christian belief, and therefore deserves our attention.
A Jewish reader at the end of the first century, when this gospel was written, would have found the Prologue much easier to understand than we do. It is steeped in Hebrew Biblical references, demonstrating for example in the first five verses a conscious and close relationship to Genesis.
The opening – ‘In the beginning was the Word’ not only offers us a vista of eternity but also has unmistakable echoes of the first chapter of Genesis: ‘In the beginning when God created the heavens and earth…’ , as is the idea that ‘All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being,’ as John puts it, resonates precisely with the creation story.
And interestingly God speaks creation into life. He doesn’t just have a lovely idea but genesis tells us ‘God said, ‘let there be light.’ By speaking he makes it happen. His words make it happen. And in his ministry, as described in John in particular through the ‘I am sayings’, Jesus speaks, he tells his disciples who he is. Words are important.But who or what then, is this Word, with a capital W, or Logos in Greek ? Who is this person who ‘was in the beginning with God’ and ‘ through whom all things came into being?’ This Word, we are told, ‘who was God’?
The answer comes in verse 18: ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.’
In other words, it is that elision between the words ‘God-the-only-Son’ which finally opens up the reading of the Prologue. These two persons of the Godhead are incontrovertibly one.
Now the entire Prologue makes sense as we consider what is being said about the Word up to this point: ‘..the Word was God…’, ‘He – the Word – was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.’; ‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us.’ Jesus and God as one and the same.
There is another second and important idea in the Prologue, that of covenant, where the new covenant God makes with humanity is proclaimed: ‘the law indeed was given by Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.’ In other words Moses gave the law from God, the law by which faithful Jews had live until then, but Jesus – who always said he came to fulfil the law – takes us to a new place. Grace and truth, grace upon grace – this was what Jesus personified and brought to us from God.
In other words, the old covenant between God and Israel is now superseded, not replaced, by Jesus, who is God himself. That idea must have raised many eyebrows in synagogues across the land when it was first proposed after Jesus’ death and resurrection. And indeed we remember at the beginning of his ministry Jesus was thrown out of the synagogue when he announced, after reading Isaiah from the scroll, that he was the one the prophet had foretold would come to save his people. And observant Jews would have known that in Genesis chapter 6 God said: ‘My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh’ The very idea of God being human was literally unthinkable to practising Jews.
No other religion that I am aware of has ever made such a claim, that God became a man and lived among us. Messengers have been sent, prophets proclaimed, wise and holy teachers shown us how to approach the Divine, but God becoming man? An astounding idea.
So how did we come from this astonishing fact to the Christmas of today, with its exhaustion, commercialisation, over-indulgence, and unrealistic expectations of perfection? There are many answers to that question, but here’s the thing: underneath all the flummery, buried beneath the presents and tinsel, Christians rejoice. We rejoice because 2000 years ago God himself came to live with us, to experience all that life has to offer, the good and the awful.
He came from the Father, and through his triumph over death gave us hope and promised us eternal life. He returned to the Father, leaving that frightened group of his early disciples comforted, after he had returned to them for a brief spell following his death and resurrection, strengthening and fortifying them to proclaim the Gospel to every corner of the known world.
And that theme of rejoicing is echoed by Jeremiah, not always the most cheerful of the prophets, when he speaks of unconfined joy and hope in our reading today. For once the compilers of our lectionary have got it spot on.
Written against the background of the political turbulence of the C6th BC, when Judah fell and its inhabitants went into captivity in Babylon, here a joyful return is envisioned. God promises that the lives of the returnees to Zion will be ‘radiant over the goodness of the Lord… their life shall become like a watered garden… I will turn their mourning into joy, and give them gladness for their sorrow.’
And isn’t that precisely how we ought to celebrate the birth of Christ, if not distracted by Christmas anxiety? At root, the joy of knowing that Christ is with us for all eternity. That God became man and shared a human life with us. That however bad things are, we still have hope for the future.
I think you may agree that 2025 was a pretty dreadful year for humanity, and you will be relieved that I am not going list the disasters and uncertainties which befell the world last year. No, I prefer to travel back in my mind’s eye to that first Christmas of mine at the Cathedral, reading out the message of hope and love to a dark and silent Close.
And we still have Christian hope, because the message of the Prologue has not changed and is as relevant today as it was then: God is still with us. God is still made known to us through Jesus Christ. God comes to us in the breaking of bread in the Eucharist. Through him we receive a life which will never be overcome by darkness. However uncertain, we still have hope for the future, hope for 2026.
I wish you all a very happy and a hope-filled New Year.