The Second Sunday after Christmas – The Fullness of God

2 Corinthians 8:9       St John 1:14-18

No one has ever seen God;
the only begotten Son,
who is in the bosom of the Father,
he has made him known.

Our souls have been made with the desire to see God and to be united with God.

The highest aspect of souls, of our rational nature, had this ability in the beginning.  And whether a person believes in God or not, that desire to see God still shows itself in various ways.

In the ancient world, it was shown in the confused idea that we could make a statue to represent the God who has power and somehow worship the image.  In the Middle East all societies had their gods and their particular way of imaging them.

What creature is stronger than an ox?  So if physical strength is what you think is the ideal, you worship that attribute.  What is more constant and steady than a star?  So if constancy is what you think is ideal, you worship that attribute.

But all of these aspects of who God is, if valued exclusively, limit our understanding of God.  We are blinded to the fuller picture in our minds of who God is, and it is also a confusion about worshipping the creature rather than the Creator.

But the fuller picture, the fullness itself, is found in Jesus Christ.

The Greeks portrayed their gods in human likeness, which was a step up – recognizing in human nature something higher than in any other creature.  And yet their gods were fickle, like we are; they could be immoral, like we are.  And the later Greek philosophers saw that this could not be the case with God – they saw that God must be all Good and that God must be One.  They came to conclude by reason what Israel already knew by revelation.  And yet the Greeks failed to see how we could come to know the life of God – there was distance, a coolness in their philosophical accounts, however sophisticated, and however clearer to the Truth than the primitive ideas of the gods in other nations.

The God of Israel was unique in the Ancient world in forbidding the making of images to portray him.  In the second of the Ten Commandments God says:

You shall not make to yourself any graven image, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth.  You shall not bow down to them, nor worship them.

God is who God is, not what we project onto Him.  God told Moses, I am who I am. [Ex 3:14]  And in forbidding images, God forbids us to limit our minds to imperfect understandings of who He is.  Because God wants to be known by us in all his fullness.  It doesn’t hurt God if we think less of him, but it does hurt us.  If we have a debased understanding of God, we debase ourselves, we close ourselves off from growing into the likeness of God.

The fuller picture, the fullness itself, is found in Jesus Christ – he is full of grace and truth.

Many give up trying to understand God and turn that eternal longing for God into satisfying it with what is closer at hand – the good things of things of this created world.  And if we sin in particular ways, our minds are continually focused on those particular ways of satisfying our longing.  And instead of searching out with our minds for the God who is beyond these creaturely things, we don’t even look anymore for the One who is beyond it and behind it all.

Because humanity was only looking at the things of this world, or thought that the life of heaven was simply too high for man (Aristotle) – God chose to enter into the Creation in the most intimate of ways – God became one of us.  As St Paul says, in our very short Epistle today,

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich. [2 Cor 8:9]

God wants us to become rich, to open up to us the life of heaven – to see it and to be able to participate in it.

With the Law given to Moses, we catch a glimpse of that life, but that glimpse does not enable us to enter into it, as is revealed to us by Israel’s own account of its history, its noble attempts but repeated failure to fulfil the Law.  And Israel also recorded for all humanity the promises by God of a Messiah to make all things new.

St John proclaims this morning that this history has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory…No one has ever seen God; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.

And nowhere before or since will we see the Truth more clearly than when we look at Jesus Christ, who said of himself, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

When Philip asked Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

Jesus is not speaking about his physical body – but of knowing God with our mind – this is how we see God – not with the eyes of our body, but the eyes of our mind.

No one has ever seen God; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.

We can learn much about who God is and the glory of God from looking at nature – the power of the sea, the majesty of mountains, the beauty of a sunrise and sunset, the vast expanse of the starry skies, the beauty of a fresh snowfall, the imaginative beauty and diversity of nature’s creatures, and the intricacy of its inner workings at the microscopic or even at subatomic level.  But nowhere in the created order can we see God as clearly as we see him revealed in his Son Jesus Christ.  In Jesus we come to know God’s Wisdom, His Justice, His kindness, His forbearance, His power and majesty.  In Jesus we see God’s love at its highest and revealed in a human life – in his life, in his death, and in his rising again and ascending in glory.

Jesus can speak to every soul, no matter how much we may have debased ourselves, to rekindle in us a desire for heaven.  God comes to us in poverty, in the flesh – to meet us in our poverty, and he captures our imaginations and our hearts that are looking only into this world.  And he lifts our minds and hearts to capture a glimpse of the life of heaven – and when we see it, we want that Life.  Jesus makes us desire God.

And even more importantly than seeing God in the flesh is that, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

We are not simply left with an eternal unfulfilled longing… Jesus makes us rich again, by helping us move beyond our failures.  Beginning with the full and perfect forgiveness he offers us – grace.  And then Jesus purifies our vision, as we are made able to follow the Law of Moses, His high commandments to love – that is the grace upon grace.  And so He is restoring our souls.  Now we see Him in a mirror dimly, but then we will see Him face to face!

This morning our eyes are being lifted by Jesus.  We will soon present His death for us on the Cross and then partake of humble bread and wine that becomes by grace His exalted Body and Blood.  It a very visible way Jesus has left us – we see with our physical eyes something that leads us to see with our minds the God of love who is unseen and to be united in body and soul with Him.

And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.  For the law was given by Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Let us pray [a Collect for the Second Sunday after Christmas]:

Almighty God who did wonderfully create man in your own image, and did yet more wonderfully restore him: Grant, we beseech you, that as your Son our Lord Jesus Christ was made in the likeness of men, so we may be made partakers of the divine nature; through the same your Son, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, world without end. 

Amen +