CHRISTMAS DAY REFLECTIONS

25.12.2019

Readings: Is 52:7-10; Heb 1:1-6; Jn 1:1-18 or 1:1-5, 9 (L-19)

Anecdotes:
1) A vision test: Once there was a Rabbi who asked his disciples the following
question: "How do you know when the darkness has been overcome, when
the dawn has arrived?" One of the disciples answered, "When you can look
into the distance and tell the difference between a cow and a deer, then you
know dawn has arrived.” “Close," the Rabbi responded, "but not quite."
Another disciple ventured a response, "When you can look into the distance
and distinguish a peach blossom from an apple blossom, then you know that
the darkness has been overcome." "Not bad," the Rabbi said, “not bad! But
the correct answer is slightly different. When you can look on the face of any
man or any woman and know immediately that this is God’s child and your
brother or sister, then you know that the darkness has been overcome, that
the Daystar has appeared." This Christmas morning when we celebrate the
victory of Light over darkness, the Gospel of John introduces Jesus as the true
Light Who came from Heaven into our world of darkness to give us clear
vision. (http://frtonyshomilies.com/ ).

2) God is Light and in him is no darkness at all: Eight-year-old Benny died of

AIDS in 1987. CBS made a movie drama about the trauma called Moving
Toward the Light. As Benny lies dying in his mother's arms, he asks, "What
will it be like?" His mother whispers softly in his ear, "You will see a light,
Benny, far away -- a beautiful, shining light at the end of a long tunnel. And
your spirit will lift you out of your body and start to travel toward the light.
And as you go, a veil will be lifted from your eyes, and suddenly, you will see
everything ... but most of all, you will feel a tremendous sense of love." "Will
it take long?" Benny asks. "No," his mother answers, "not long at all. Like the
twinkling of an eye." Many families have been devastated by AIDS. Amid the
darkness and despair an eight-year-old boy and his mother witnessed to the
sustaining power of the light of God's presence. They have touched the lives
of a multitude of people. This is the message we have heard from him and
proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. -- 1 John
1:5 (http://frtonyshomilies.com/ ).

3) Jesus pitched his tent among us: The custom of placing lighted candles in
the windows at Christmas was brought to America by the Irish. When
religion was suppressed throughout Ireland during the English persecution,
the people had no Churches. Priests hid in the forests and caves and secretly
visited the farms and homes to say Mass there during the night. It was the
dearest wish of every Irish family that at least once in their lifetime a priest
would arrive at Christmas to celebrate Mass. For this grace they hoped and
prayed all through the year. When Christmas came, they left their doors
unlocked and placed burning candles in the windows, so that any priest who
happened to be in the vicinity could be welcomed and guided to their home
through the dark night. Silently the priest would enter through the unlatched
door and be received by the devout inhabitants with fervent prayers of
gratitude and tears of happiness that their home was to become a Church for
Christmas. To justify this practice in the eyes of the English soldiers, the Irish
people explained that they burned the candles and kept the doors unlocked
so that Mary and Joseph, looking for a place to stay, would find their way to
their home and be welcomed with open hearts. The candles in the windows
have always remained a cherished practice of the Irish, although many of
them have long since forgotten the earlier meaning. (William Barker in
Tarbell's Teacher's Guide; quoted by Fr. Botelho).
(http://frtonyshomilies.com/ ).

Introduction:
While Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus goes back to Abraham, the father of
God's people, and Luke's genealogy of Jesus' ancestry goes all the way back
to Adam, thus embracing the whole human race, John’s goes back to God
Himself. John is the only Gospel writer who does not stop at Bethlehem to
explain the “reason for the season.” John is more concerned with the WHY
and WHO of Christmas than with the WHERE of Christmas. So he travels to
eternity to reveal the Person of Jesus Christ. This is a great passage because
it gives us the theology of Christmas. While the Gospel selections for the Vigil,
Midnight and Dawn Masses describe the history of Christmas, the selection
from John’s Gospel for this Daytime Mass lifts us out of history into the realm
of mystery—His wonderful name is the Word. The reading tells us that the
Baby in the manger is the Word of God, the very Self-expression of God. He
was present at creation; He is actually the One through Whom all things were
made. The Prologue to the Gospel of John and the prologue to the Letter to
the Hebrews in the second reading are superb affirmations of the Person of
Jesus Christ, expressed in beautiful theological words and metaphors. The
first reading gives us the assurance that just as Yahweh restored His chosen
people to their homeland after the Babylonian exile, Jesus the Savior will
restore mankind to the kingdom of God. In the second reading, St. Paul tells
us how God Who conveyed His words to us in the past through His prophets
has sent His own Son so that He might demonstrate to us humans, by His
life, death and Resurrection, the real nature of our God. John's Gospel gives a
profoundly theological vision of Christ, the result of John’s years of preaching
and of meditating on this wondrous mystery of God's love. While stressing
the Divinity of Christ, he leaves no doubt as to the reality of Christ's human
nature. In the Prologue of his Gospel, John introduces the birth of Jesus as
the dawning of the Light Who will remove the darkness of evil from the
world. He records later in his Gospel why light is the perfect symbol of
Christmas: Jesus said “I am the Light of the world,” (Jn 8:12) and “You are the
light of the world” (Mt 5:14-16).

First reading, Isaiah 52:7-10:

This prophetic passage dates from the return of the Jews to their homeland
at the end of the Babylonian Captivity. The setting is the desolate city,
Jerusalem, awaiting the return of the exiles from Babylon. The city is
personified; rhetorically, it is called "Zion," after the hill in its midst where
the Temple stood. Isaiah first imagines that the city can hear, even at a
distance, the footsteps of her returning children. The returnees are pictured
as singing exultantly, "Your God is King!" Then Jerusalem's sentinels raise
the cry of recognition and join in the praise of God. Finally, the joyful people
declare that all the earth will recognize the hand of God at work in their
restoration. This return to Jerusalem, like the Exodus from Egypt centuries
earlier, was a type or a foreshadowing of the greater redemption that was to
come through Jesus the Messiah. The re-possession of the land of Canaan for
a few years and the restoring of Jerusalem and Judah were but pale shadows
of the great restoration and the possession of our eternal promised land
which were to be given by the Messiah in the days to come, not only to Israel
but to all nations. “Today’s feast celebrates the Christ-event. In fact, the glad
tidings of the Deutero-Isaiahan messenger were only fully actualized, only
fully heard and made comprehensible in the event of Jesus Christ. In the
event of the Incarnation, Yahweh truly returns and restores Jerusalem; in the
event of the Nativity, Yahweh draws near to comfort and console his people.
In the event of Christ-made-flesh, God’s message of salvation achieves its
utmost clarity.” (Celebration).

Second Reading, Hebrews 1:1-6:

The addressees of the Letter to the Hebrews were Christian Jews who were
beginning to feel the pain of separation from their fellow-Jews who had
refused to see Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah. The Christian Jews needed
to be reminded that their relationship with Jesus more than filled the gaps in
their religious lives caused by the loss of Temple ritual and the like,
particularly as they were suffering the temptation to change back to the old
Law and the Jewish religion because of persecution from Judaizers. In the
Letter to the Hebrews, St. Paul explains to them how superior the New
Covenant is to the old. The letter begins with a comparison of how God
formerly spoke to their ancestors and how God has now definitively spoken
to them through Jesus. These six verses from the Letter’s first chapter were
chosen for today's reading because of the clear, definite and emphatic
declaration of the Divinity of Christ and His equality with God, which they
contain. Paul asserts that the Baby who was born in a stable in Bethlehem,
lived and died in Palestine, rose on the third day from the grave and
ascended to Heaven forty days later, was also God, equal to the Father in all
things. This is a mystery beyond our human comprehension, yet it is a fact,
stated by Christ Himself, believed and preached by the Apostles, and
accepted by the Church for two thousand years. The whole reading is about
the superiority of Jesus to everything and everyone else and God’s final Self-
Revelation through Jesus as superior to the Old Testament Revelation of God.
Specifically, the reading declares that Jesus is superior to angels. That Jesus
is also, necessarily, superior to the institutions of Judaism, from which the
Hebrew Christians were cut off and for which they were feeling nostalgic, is
implied in the passage.

Exegesis:
The prologue of John’s Gospel: From the time of the earliest lectionaries, the
Prologue to John’s Gospel (Chapter 1) was the traditional assigned Gospel
for Christmas Day because it is one of the most magnificent (and
theologically profound) passages in the entire New Testament. For several
centuries, this passage was familiar to Catholic parishioners as the “Last
Gospel,” since it was directed to be read at the conclusion of each Mass, as
the final thought that would accompany God’s people as they left the Church
and returned to their homes and daily occupations. It has been taken as the
litmus test of theological orthodoxy regarding the reality of Christ’s
Incarnation, and lies behind some of the wording of the Nicene Creed. “John’s
Gospel highlights the deity of Jesus Christ, without minimizing His
humanity.” (Rev. Bob Deffinbaugh; online at www.bible.org). Many scholars
believe that the Prologue is an insistent rebuttal of certain Gnostic ideas,
which denied the reality (or the possibility) of a Divine Incarnation. This
Gnostic idea was later condemned as a heresy, called Docetism, which taught
that the physical reality of Jesus was merely an “appearance” or a “façade,”
and not inherent in who and what Jesus was.

The paradox of the Incarnation: Against later theories that Christ was
somehow merely a “super-creature,” or an exemplary human being who had
simply been subsequently “adopted” by God, John wants to make clear that
the Son—unlike every creature born in time—pre-existed all things, and
was, in fact, an active part of the Divine creative process. John the Evangelist
proclaims the Incarnation of God, the most fundamental truth of Christianity,
in the immortal words of his Prologue, making the connection between Jesus
Christ and the Logos of God. Unlike most Jewish genealogies, this one traces
Jesus’ origins to the Eternal Divinity. Between the beautiful Nativity stories
of Matthew and Luke and the Gospel of John, there lies the great paradox of
the Christian Faith, the paradox of the Incarnation, the entering of God into
the human story, in human form. The Prologue of John's Gospel (1:1-18), can
be divided into three sections: a) the Word's relationship to the Creator and
Creation (1:1-5), b) the Word's relationship to John the Baptist (1:6-9) and
c) the Word's relationship to the world (1:10-18).

The theology of the Word made flesh: “And the Word became flesh and lived
among us.” According to almost all interpreters, this is the climax of John’s
poetic Prologue—the culmination of his gradual theological “crescendo,”
and the “key” to everything else in the Gospel. It is such a simple phrase, and
yet is contains within it the promise, hope and challenge of Christianity in a
nutshell! Within thirty years of Jesus' death, the Christian Faith had traveled
all over Asia Minor and Greece and had arrived in Rome. By AD 60, there
must have been a hundred thousand Greeks in the Church for every Jew who
had become a Christian. But Jewish ideas like the Messiah, the center of
Jewish expectation, were completely strange to the Greeks. Hence, the very
category in which the Jewish Christians conceived and presented Jesus
meant nothing to the Greek Christians. The problem which John faced was
how to present Christianity to the Greek world around him in the Greek city
of Ephesus where he lived. He found that, in both Greek and Jewish thought,
there existed the concept of the “word.” For the Eastern peoples, words had
an independent, power-filled existence. The Greek term for word is Logos
which not only means word, but also reason. Hence, whenever the Greeks
used Logos, the twin ideas of the Word of God and the Reason of God were
in their minds. That is why John introduces Jesus to the Greeks as the eternal,
light-giving and creative power of God, or the Mind of God in poetical prose,
in the very beginning of his Gospel. In his Prologue, John deals with the
major themes like the pre-existence of the Word, God/Word and Father/Son
as distinct Persons but, at the same time, one God; of Jesus as God, Life and
Light; of the struggle between Light and darkness; of the power of the Light
over darkness. According to John, the Word of God, Jesus, gives Life and
Light. Thus, the Prologue of John’s Gospel summarizes how the Son of God
was sent into the world to become the Jesus of history, so that the glory and
grace of God might be uniquely and perfectly disclosed. One of the Fathers
of the Church (St. Irenaeus) once said, “Gloria Dei, homo vivens,” ("the glory
of God is a person fully alive"). If that can be said of any of us, how much
more must it be true of the Word made Flesh? Here in this prologue, the
evangelist enunciates Christ’s superiority not only to everyone else as the
One mediator between God and humanity but also to the Law.

John the Baptizer’s role: John the Baptizer’s coming renewed Israel’s
prophetic tradition after four hundred years of silence. Since John’s ministry
was so powerful, some people thought of him as the Messiah. Hence, John’s
Gospel makes a number of references to John the Baptizer, always clearly
establishing that he was subordinate to Jesus. He was not the Light, but came
to bear witness to the Light (vv. 7-8). John's mission was to bear testimony
to the Light (Jesus) -- to serve as a witness to the Light (v. 7). John died as a
martyr because he showed the courage of his prophetic convictions by
correcting Herod the king for his immoral life.

The Messiah rejected by his own people: “He came to what was His own, and
His own people did not accept Him” (1:11). Jesus “came home” to Israel,
where the people should have known Him. And it was the homefolk, "His
own," the Israelites, the Chosen People, who did not receive Him. God had
prepared them for centuries to receive the Messiah into their midst, but they
rejected him. This rejection of the Word by Jesus' own people is restricted
neither to the time of Jesus nor to that of the Fourth Gospel. Much of the
world today is still in rebellion, “preferring darkness to Light, because its
deeds are evil” (3:19-20). That is true of all of us at certain points in our
lives, but we are not imprisoned in those moments. We can, as long as we are
alive, turn to Him, repentant and believing, and become His own again. "But
to all who received Him, who believed in His Name, He gave power to become
children of God" (v. 12).

"The Word became Flesh and lived among us" (v. 14): The Word becoming
flesh is the zenith of God's Self-revelation. God Who spoke earlier through
the prophets now speaks through His Son (Heb. 1:1-2), and lives among us.
The Word Who dwelt with God now dwells with “us,” becoming a human
being like us and thus bridging the great chasm between God’s world and
our world. Verse 14 declares that the God Who once dwelt among them in
the Tabernacle and the Temple, now chooses to dwell among them in the
Person of Jesus. In the Old Testament, Moses was not allowed to see the face
of God. Now, however, we are allowed to see Jesus' glory -- and His face.
Thus, the Father is fully revealed to us, because, "Whoever has seen (the Son)
has seen the Father" (Jn 14:9). The other Gospels depict the glory of God
coming upon Jesus at the Transfiguration. John does not relate this incident,
both because he sees the glory of God in all Jesus says and does, and because
the hour for Jesus to be glorified is the crucifixion.

"We have all received, grace upon grace.” (v. 16): The Word is full of grace
and truth – attributes of God – attributes that the Word shares with God as
the "Father's only Son" (v. 15). It is from this One Who is “full of grace and
truth” that we receive “grace upon grace.” In other words, we draw grace
from the total resources of God, an inexhaustible storehouse. Regardless of
our need for grace, the supply is greater. Let us imagine ourselves standing
on the seashore, watching the waves roll in. They come every few seconds,
and the supply never fails. That is how God’s grace comes to us. Let us at this
Christmas time try to count just some of those "graces showered on us."
Verse 17 identifies the Word as Jesus: "The Law indeed was given through
Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” The gift that is the Truth
surpasses and perfects the former gift of the Law given through Moses. Note
the contrasts between Moses and Jesus: We received the law through Moses,
but we receive grace and truth through Jesus Christ (v. 17). John’s Prologue
begins by declaring that that the Word was God (v. 1), and concludes (v.18),
by proclaiming that the Son is God.

Life messages:
1) A day to remember and a day to wait for: Today, while we remember and
celebrate God’s first coming into our world in human form, we also look
forward because the liturgy we celebrate reminds us that the Lord is going
to return in his Second Coming. However, Christ is not going to return as a
Child but as a Warrior, a Judge, a mighty Savior. The liturgy calls on us to
prepare His way, to be ready to be judged by Him. So we are looking back
and remembering the past coming of Jesus as our Savior, and looking
forward and preparing for His future coming in glory as Judge to reward and
punish. In addition to these two “comings,” the Church teaches us that Christ
is here now, Christ is present, Christ comes to us today, and Christ comes to
us every day. Christmas is actually a celebration intended to heighten our
awareness of the fact that Christ has been born, Christ lives, and Christ is
present now in our lives. Christmas reminds us, through the lives of the
people in the Christmas narrative, of the importance of helping to bring the
presence of Christ to the world around us and of being sensitive to that
presence when the Lord comes to us in the least expected people, and in
unexpected places and situations. We are asked to welcome Christ’s
Kingdom into our lives by allowing Him to be born in us, by recognizing Him
in others and by courageously going forth with His grace to build His
kingdom of love, justice, peace and holiness in our world.
2) We need to remember that there is no room in the manger except for Jesus
and us: There isn't room in the manger for all the baggage we carry around
with us. There's no room for our pious pride and self-righteousness. There’s
no room for our human power and prestige. There's no room for the baggage
of past failure and unforgiven sin. There's no room for our prejudice, bigotry
and jingoistic national pride. There's no room for bitterness and greed.
There is no room in the manger for anything other than the absolute reality
of who and what we really are: very human, very real, very fragile, very
vulnerable beings who desperately need the gift of love and grace which God
so powerfully desires to give.

JOKE OF THE WEEK

1) It was Christmas Eve in a supermarket and a woman was anxiously
picking over the last few remaining turkeys in the hope of finding a large one.
In desperation she called over a shop assistant and said "Excuse me. Do these
turkeys get any bigger?" "No" he replied, "They're all dead".

2) Just before Christmas, an honest politician, a generous lawyer and Santa

Claus were riding in the elevator of a very posh hotel. Just before the doors
opened they all noticed a $20 bill lying on the floor. Which one picked it up?
Santa of course, because the other two - an honest politician, a generous
lawyer - don't exist!

3) To avoid offending anybody, the school dropped religion altogether and

started singing about the weather. At my son's school, they now hold the
winter program in February and sing increasingly non-memorable songs
such as "Winter Wonderland," "Frosty the Snowman" and--this is a real
song--"Suzy Snowflake," all of which is pretty funny because we live in
Miami. A visitor from another planet would assume that the children
belonged to the Church of Meteorology. (Chicago Tribune Magazine, July 28,
1991). L/19
“Scriptural Homilies” no.6-e by Fr. Tony (akadavil@gmail.com)
The crib, the hangings and the carols ringing in our ears, remind us of what
a special time this is. In Bethlehem was born a child who revealed God to the
world in the endearing weakness of a baby; surrounded not by the important
and powerful, but by shepherds, by men and women accustomed to respond
to nature in simple, ordinary ways. The Gospel reveals this light, shattering
the darkness of the night sky, as the glory of God shines on the face of a tiny
infant. God offers this gift of light to each of us here today and to all those we
love.
The magnificent passage you have just heard is from the opening of St John’s
Gospel. There is no mention of Bethlehem, of Mary, of shepherds, or the
stable and the manger, so why do we read this Gospel for Christmas Day?

The Bethlehem story, of course, was told during last night’s Mass. But today
we are, as it were, going behind the scenes, and looking at the deeper
meaning of that story.
As the letter to the Hebrews (Second Reading) tells us today, God in the past
spoke to us through many prophets and other spokespersons. But now “he
has spoken to us through his Son” – because the Son is the Word of God. This
Son is the “radiant light of God’s glory” and “the perfect copy of his nature”.
In seeing all that Jesus says and does, we are being put in touch with the very
nature of God. Born in utter simplicity without many of the conveniences of
life that we would take for granted and regard as essential; Mary and Joseph
welcome Jesus into this world, away from home, rejected by every place of
shelter in the town and first visited by ‘shepherds’.

It is important to be aware that this scene is not just for pious contemplation.
It contains a message. God has become a human person like us; he has come
to live and work among us. He has entered our world to bless it and to
liberate all those enslaved by oppression, by hunger and homelessness,
enslaved by addictive habits and substances, enslaved by fear, anger,
resentment, hatred, loneliness…
Then too, some of us are so caught up in the cares and occupations of life that
we normally do not find time to worship God and enjoy the intimate
communion with Jesus that is central to the life of the Christian community.

There can be other reasons as well: reasons of hurt, rejection, confusion. Yet,
such is the attraction of this day when God embraced humanity in all its
life-­­giving goodness and in all its destructive wickedness, that we want
to be here to celebrate Christmas. I hope everyone feels welcome because
this church is for you, this community is for you, and Jesus truly present here
in the Eucharist longs to give himself to you. Thank you all for coming, like
the shepherds, to be here with him.
Know that the open arms of the baby in the crib are open for us and for all
those we love – open to forgive us, open to comfort us, open to embrace us
in the simplest and most beautiful way. For God is love. God created each one
of us for love and will never cease inviting us. Of all the journeys we will ever
make, the most important journey is the journey to the heart. As the Christ-
­­child comes into our hearts in communion this Christmas, let us allow our
weary souls to experience his love.
https://www.sandhurst.catholic.org.au/

Bromodosis, Onychomycosis, Hyperkeratosis, and Onychocrytosis – all

scary sounding terms. In case you’re not familiar with the language: that is
stinky feet, fungal nails, corns, and ingrown toenails. Yuck! ‘How beautiful
upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,’
says Isaiah, but not many of us are blessed with beautiful feet! But that’s
where the good news starts – with the sweaty, tired, bruised feet of a
messenger who has run perhaps many miles to bring to an anxious people
the word ‘Peace.’

The poetry is so lovely; the words so familiar; and so we easily miss the
bodily references – the feet that run, the voice that announces, the ears that
listens, the eyes that see. This is flesh and blood that carries and receives the
message.
The return of the Lord is felt and heard and voiced and seen. No rarefied,
abstract, conceptual account of the divine, but a tangible, bodily reassurance.
There is something remarkable and different here. Later in Isaiah (64.4) we
read, ‘From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen
...,’ yet now the ineffable, mysterious, all glorious God is present in ways that
the human body feels and knows and senses. God it is that has done this, as
St Paul puts it (1 Cor 2.10), God makes God tangible. On that action we rely.

Those few verses from Hebrews takes up the theme: God has spoken to us
by a Son. And that’s just what is meant – a son, a baby born; an infant
squawking its life; a burping, gurgling, messing bundle of humanity
demanding food and warmth and comfort. No angel this, and the author is
being very careful in the words used, this is not an all-spiritual being, an
entity of another realm of existence; no, this is a person, a human being.
Indeed all things are sustained by ‘his powerful word’ but that does not mean
that he is not human as we are human – we have been ‘spoken to’ – and that
comes in the things of conversation, chat, discussion, and gossip that we
know as keeping company with each other. In these last days God keeps
company with us. The Word is not abstract Reason – with a capital R – but
rather God’s bodily self-revelation and self-communication.

A student came to a rabbi and said, ‘In the olden days there were people who
saw the face of God. Why don’t they anymore?’ The rabbi replied, ‘Because
nowadays no one can stoop that low.’ God keeps company with us.
‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us.’ (Jn 1.14) Again we hear
and yet don’t hear what’s said in these familiar words. Sure enough we are
meant to hear in John’s famous words a reworking of the very beginning of
the Bible: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the
earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s spirit
hovered over the water. God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. ...’
(Genesis 1.1-3 JB). So John has, ‘In the beginning was the Word ...’ and later
we heard, ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not
overcome it.’
Whatever else this passage is about it is clearly about a new creation in the
coming of Jesus; a new way of understanding and experiencing the link
between the eternal and the temporary, what is heavenly and what is
earthly.

In Genesis God is described as delighting in creation and humanity as part of

it, ‘God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good’
(1.31). And when Wisdom is described as part of God’s character a similar
thought is repeated. Wisdom is described as ‘rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.’ (Proverbs 8.31) John recognises that
divine pleasure – ‘the life was the light of all people’ – but he takes it further
and it's captured in that little word ‘flesh’ (Jn 1.14).
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that ‘Word,’ with a capital W, and ‘flesh,’
undoubtedly with a small F, were the polar opposites in the way John’s
hearers thought. Word related to God’s eternal purposes; it was an aspect of
that divine wisdom that goes way beyond human experience. It has about it
qualities of the infinite, the immutable and the perpetual that are entirely
different from the decaying and limited thing we call ordinary life. Flesh, on
the other hand, referred to the all too obvious limitations of living –
corruption, earth-boundedness, and degenerating. And so the contrast is
made plain in Isaiah 40.6f, ‘All flesh is grass, and its beauty like the wild
flowers ... The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God
remains for ever.’ (JB).

And the same usage is there in our Christmas Gospel when John speaks of
‘the will of the flesh’ meaning humanity’s perverse and mixed motives born
of bodily limitations and urges. And yet it is this same term that John links
with the Word: ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us.’ WORD and
flesh; DIVINE and human; ETERNAL and earthy; HOLY and humdrum; the
SUBLIME with stinky feet! As that great humanitarian and priest Jean Vanier
puts it, this is ‘the heart, the centre, the beginning and the end of the Gospel.’

Years before (1928) his anti-Nazi activities led the theologian Dietrich
Bonhoeffer to imprisonment and then death, he said this in a sermon:
‘Jesus Christ, God himself, speaks to us from every human being; the other
person, this enigmatic, impenetrable You, is God’s claim on us; indeed, it is
the holy God in person whom we encounter. God’s claim is made on us in the
wanderer on the street, the beggar at the door, the sick person at the door
of the church, though certainly no less in every person near to us, in every
person with whom we are together daily.’

And later the same year, he said:

‘Christ walks the earth as long as there are people, as your neighbour, as the
person through whom Christ summons you, addresses you, makes claims on
you. ... Christ is at the door; he lives in the form of those around us. Will you
close the door or open it for him?’
‘The Word became flesh’ – the sublime with stinky feet.
https://www.preacherrhetorica.com/