The hieroglyphics of love

Mysteries have always fascinated the human race - and continue, despite our hi-tech modern lifestyles, to fascinate us.  Currently the British Museum is hosting an exhibition called “Hieroglyphics: unlocking Ancient Egypt”.  Crowds of Londoners are queuing to learn about the exotic writing of ancient Egypt, which for centuries completely baffled the world’s scholars and escaped all attempts to translate it.  If you haven’t yet been, it’s a great Christmas entertainment option.  We follow the exploits of two highly talented linguists, one French, one British, on their long quest to uncover the logic of the Pharaohs’ language, until in 1822, thanks partly to the Rosetta Stone, they finally find the correct methodology for understanding the hieroglyphic script, unravelling a mystery hidden in plain sight for one and a half millennia. The exhibition celebrates their incredible achievements.  And for good measure there’s some embalmed mummy parts and shroud-wrappings too.

Today we are celebrating another mystery, one - like the hieroglyphics - also hidden in plain sight; and one also about words, or rather, about one single Word, what St John calls “the Word of God”.  A word is a communication; so God’s word is, therefore, God’s communication.  We have read from the Letter to the Hebrews just now that God in times past spoke to us in various ways.  The story of the Israelites is the story of the human experience of God by that people through the trials and tribulations of their history.  God speaks in a burning bush to Moses; at times he speaks in thunder and lightning; he speaks as a disembodied voice to the prophet Samuel; the prophet Elijah goes through a hurricane, an earthquake and a fire only to experience God speaking to him in the murmur of a gentle whisper, the sound of sheer silence.  God spoke to us in many ways.  But in all of these ways God remained still a hidden God.  His presence was something paranormal, or scary, or confusing - always something “other”. 

What we celebrate today is God’s final and most ambitious attempt ever to communicate with us: God has spoken to us through a Son.  This was the communication no one expected: that the Eternal One, infinite, beyond space and time should not only reach out to speak to humankind; but should do so by becoming one of humankind.  Being someone suddenly propelled by birth into the bitter-sweet mess that is the world in its beauty and ugliness, its joy and its tragedy, its warmth and its coldness. God’s deepest communication, the mystery of his love and presence, is finally revealed in the face of a poor, tiny, powerless baby.  Just like the hieroglyphics - what had been pondered about, not understood, invisible for centuries, finally became, in a sense, viewable.  The Word of God, the communication of God, finally became readable: The Word was made flesh in Jesus Christ.

So today we celebrate God’s birthday as strange as that sounds.  Many of us think, I suspect, of God as extremely OLD.  When you ask the little children in our parish schools to draw a picture of God it’s usually someone with a long beard, someone older even than their grandparents, someone who could certainly travel for free on TfL’s network if he ever came to London.  But today that’s all out the window, because on this day, God came among us not as someone old, but as a someone infinitely young, younger than we ourselves are now.  God comes among us always as one who is young.  In fact, as St Augustine wrote, God is younger than everything.  God is infinite, God cannot change because he already is everything that it’s possible to be: and because he cannot change, he cannot age.  God is always at the beginning.  In the Beginning was the Word.

One of the things we associate most strongly with youthfulness is optimism, hope that we have a future, a good one, a long one. The coming of a child embodies hope. And thank goodness for that, because hope is something we really need right now, when it seems in short supply.  2022, as we know, has witnessed so much that seems to challenge hope: the brutal invasion of Ukraine which has seen refugees arrive in this very church building; the current cost of living crisis; political instability; to say nothing of the ongoing effects of climate change which we still do too little to address. 

And yet to celebrate the birth of Jesus is not to flee from these problems into a fantasy world.  Don’t let the pretty nativity crib fool you: the world Jesus was born into was at least as harsh and unfair as ours: one of brutal violence between nations, intolerance, famine, disease.  Would we want to be transported into that world? I doubt it.  But God did.  To see in the Child born in Bethlehem a sign of hope is not about escaping reality: it is to see that God by becoming part of this messed up world, extends hope even into the situations that appear hopeless. As St John tells us in his beautiful Gospel today, to all those who accepted him he gave power to become children of God.  Being a child of God means more than having God as your Parent. It means sharing in the eternal youthfulness and hope of the Child born today.

 “And our eyes at last shall see him through his own redeeming love,” says the carol.  At Christmas we are invited to see God afresh, as someone who was prepared to go from being untouchable to being vulnerable, from possessing all things to possessing nothing, in other words we see in God someone who takes risks with himself for us.  That’s his redeeming love.  But there is a second part to the mystery of Christmas which the carol does not mention: it is not just that our eyes at last shall see him – at Christmas we are finally able to see ourselves through his own redeeming love.  We can replace the unloving view of ourselves which so many of us build up so convincingly every year as life knocks us around: that we’re a failure, that we’re unlovable; that we’re not good enough; that we’re unforgiveable; and so on; and instead start seeing ourselves as God sees us and ever will see us.  By becoming one of us, God in the Christ Child – without saying a word – tells us all we need to know.  He is saying in deeds beyond words “I want to be with you, I want to share your life, I accept you for who you are, I am prepared to take the terrible risk of being human for you, because I love you”.  And with that message we are empowered to start anew: to see ourselves, imperfect though we are, as loved and accepted.  No ifs, no buts.  Should we respond to that invitation, we will have finally unlocked for ourselves the hieroglyphics of God’s love.