Text: 1 John 4:9-14
Date: December 24, 2021
Event: Christmas Eve, Year C
1 John 4:9-14 (EHV)
This is how God’s love for us was revealed: God has sent his only-begotten Son into the world so that we may live through him. 10This is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11Dear friends, if God loved us so much, we also should love one another.
12No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and his love has been brought to its goal in us. 13This is how we know that we remain in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. 14We have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.
Love Came Down
What is the true meaning of Christmas? This time of year, you can find an almost unending assortment of commercials, specials, and billboards that try to answer that question for us. Maybe the effort is made to show that materialism is not the goal of Christmas. It’s not about getting; it’s about giving. In our house earlier this week we watched the classic, “A Muppet Christmas Carol.” Whatever incarnation of Charles Dickens’ classic tale you read or watch, the moral is the same: Scrooge needed to learn to not be so cruel and selfish and instead learn to be giving to those around him.
And while that’s certainly the better take on Christmas (or life in general) than always chasing after more, more, more, new, new, new, shiny, shiny, shiny—it still falls far short of what Christmas is truly about. Christmas is not as vapid as to be about our being generous to other people; it’s about God’s generosity to us in Jesus. It’s about God’s love coming to earth and becoming clear for all to see.
In ancient days, when the Julian calendar was the followed in the Roman Empire, the winter solstice was on December 25. Since we don’t actually know the day that Jesus was born, December 25 was chosen for that celebration. Many will make an argument that Christians simply took what was a pagan holiday and “Christianized” it. That’s a bit of a half-truth. The solstice was absolutely a pagan festival celebrated by many different groups.
But the solstice is a turning point in the year. It’s the day in the winter that daylight begins to get longer rather than getting shorter. So December 25 was chosen, not because it was a pagan holiday that Christians wanted to lay claim to; it was chosen as a recognition that at Jesus’ birth the Light of the World, the light of God’s love came into this dark world of sin. The solstice doesn’t make the days very bright—these days in the middle of winter still seem to have more darkness than light. But it is the turning the point, the moment in the year when things start to change, the moment we can look back on in bright spring and summer evenings and say, “Late December is when this all started.”
And so that is what happened on Christmas. The problem of sin’s darkness was not solved that first Christmas. But in Jesus’ birth, the love of God came down to earth. The solution to the problem started to get put into place. The plan that God had long promised began to be put into motion. John put it this way in our reading for this evening: This is how God’s love for us was revealed: God has sent his only-begotten Son into the world so that we may live through him. This is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
This is what we celebrate tonight. Not simply the humble birth of a lowly child to peasant parents. No, this birth is God’s loving coming down. This birth is God’s love incarnate. And this is not empty love or frivolous love; this is love with a purpose.
God’s love, Jesus, comes so that we may live through him; he came to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Our sins are the opposite of life. They mean death. Physical death, but ultimately eternal death in hell. This is what we’ve deserved; this is what we’ve earned. We’ve rebelled against God time and time again in thoughts and words and actions. And even if you or I think we’ve been good enough or tried our best or any other thoughts along those lines, all we are doing is deceiving ourselves. We haven’t been good enough because we haven’t been perfect, and anything short of perfection fails to meet God’s requirements for our lives.
And this is the reason Jesus came, to be what we should have been but could not be, to do what we should have done but could not do. He came to be our substitute, to go in our place both in life and in death. For a festival so focused on light and joy, it can be a bit of a downer to see the gloomy shadow of the cross looms large over our Christmas celebrations. But the reality is that the gloomy cross is what can bring light and joy to Christmas. Ultimately that’s what Jesus came to do: to give his life at the payment for our sins which then would fix the broken relationship we had with God. That’s what an atoning sacrifice does, it puts two adversarial parties back “at one” with each other by covering over what divided them. It would bring peace between God and human beings who were warring against him with our sin. This is what the angels told the shepherds, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward mankind.”
The moral of a Christmas movie might sound a bit like what John said I our reading for tonight: No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and his love has been brought to its goal in us. The morals of a lot of those movies are, like A Christmas Carol, that we should be kind and loving to those around us. What is most often missing is the motive behind showing that love. We don’t love one another for an empty reason like it’s simply the “right” thing to do, or because it makes us feel good, or it endears us to other people. No, we love each other because God has loved us. Jesus is our motivation for loving each other, not just at Christmas, but for the entire year.
You have a Savior who has freed you from sin, rescued you from hell, and will bring you to eternal life with him. You have all of that because of God’s love that clearly came down for the world at Christmas. This love will be your motivation today, and tomorrow, and for the rest of your life to love one another. The love you show to other people is a reflection of that far greater love that God has shown to you. He loved you enough to come down to earth to take your place. He loved you enough to die for you. He loved you enough to forgive you.
This is the true meaning of Christmas that lasts not just for a night, or twelve days, or a year, or even a lifetime. This true meaning of Christmas, that God’s eternal love has come for us, last through eternity. Thanks be to God for his gift of his eternal love now and forever! Amen!
