The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory… John 1:14
The best Christmas blessing by far is our freedom to share the gospel from the Word of God. He was made flesh and lived among us to extend grace and salvation so that we might live with Him in glory. Peter Greig’s unique telling of God’s story:
“God’s story from beginning to end describes glory getting dirty and dirt getting blessed. The Creator made humanity out of the dust, and if on that day we left a little dirt behind in the creases of his hands, it was surely a sign of things to come.
When God made us again, he came first to a teenage girl, and then to unwashed shepherds and later to pagan astrologers. God spoke the gospel as a dirty word into a religious culture. “The Word,” we are told by John at the start of his Gospel, became “flesh.” God became a lump of meat, a street circus, a man like every man.
John is messing with our minds. He knew perfectly well that this opening salvo was a shocking, seemingly blasphemous way to start his Gospel. “In the beginning,” he says, echoing the opening line of the Bible, lulling us all into a false sense of religious security. At this point, I imagine John pausing mischievously; just long enough for every son of Abraham to fill in the blank incorrectly.
“In the beginning,” he continues, “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It’s the familiar creation narrative outrageously remixed, featuring a mysterious new aspect of the divinity named, like some kind of superhero in a Marvel comic, The Word.
And yet for John’s Greek readers – the vast majority of Christians by the time the Gospel was written – the Word was not a new concept at all. The bewildering thing for their ears would have been John’s emphatic conflation of this pagan Greek notion of divinity with the Creator God of Jewish monotheism: “The Word,” he says unambiguously, “was God.”
And so, in just these first thirty words of his Gospel, John has effectively both affirmed and alienated his entire audience, Greek and Jew alike. And then, like a prizefighter in the ring, while we are all still reeling from this first theological onslaught, John lands his body blow: “The Word,” he says, “became flesh.” It’s a breathtaking statement, equally appalling for the Jews, who had an elaborate set of 613 rules to help segregate holiness from worldliness, and for the Greeks, who despised the flesh with its malodorous suppurations and embarrassing, base instincts.
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us and we have seen his glory.” One scholar says that this is “possibly the greatest single verse in the New Testament and certainly the sentence for which John wrote his gospel.” God’s infinite glory has moved, as Eugene Peterson says, “into the neighborhood” (John 1:14 MSG).
“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us,” explains the apostle Paul. The Word didn’t just pretend to become flesh. He wasn’t fraternizing with humanity from a morally superior plane. Jesus became sin for us, “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). This is the staggering message of Christ’s incarnation: God’s glory became dirt so that we – the scum of the earth – might become the very glory of God.
This then is our creed. We believe in the blasphemous glory of Immanuel: “infinity dwindled to infancy,” as the poet once said. We believe in omnipotence surrendering to incontinence, the name above every other name rumored to be illegitimate. We believe that God’s eternal Word once squealed like a baby and, when eventually he learned to speak, it was with a regional accent. The Creator of the cosmos made tables, and presumably he made them badly at first. The Holy One of Israel got dirt in the creases of his hands…
And so, with angels, archangels, and that great company of gnarly old saints, we believe that someday soon this whole dirty world will finally be filled with the knowledge of God’s glory. He will breathe once more into the dust of the earth. An on that day, every knee will bow. Every blaspheming tongue will cry, “Oh my God!” Every hand will be raised in surrender. And he will choose the ones with dirt in the creases of their hands, just as he always did. Flesh will become Word, and dwell with him in Glory.” *
*Greig, P. Dirty Glory: Go Where Your Best Prayers Take You (NavPress, 2016)