Reflections on the Season of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany

Monday, Christmas Day

John 1:1-14

By Rev. Keatan A. King Chair, Board of Trustees

Associate Pastor of St. Philip Presbyterian, Houston

Who among us dares to invite John the Baptist into our homes on Christmas Day? His animal hides clash with our matching pajamas. His message of repentance is out of tune with holly, jolly songs about St. Nick. One imagines him unwilling to accept a cup of coquito or eggnog and a place by the fire. If he who testified to the light of Christ came into our homes, we know what he would witness in us. John would find many Christians retreating from the world God so loves and into this day we’ve filled with food, gifts, and leisure.

The presence of John on Christmas Day prevents us from merely relishing the exquisite poetry of these verses separate from their radical theological consequences regarding the Incarnation. For in the event through which “the Word became flesh and dwelled among us,” Jesus assumed human pain and poverty, our mortality and our limitations. Adoring Jesus in the manger means engaging the messy world he came to save. Christ’s indwelling in all people and circumstances demands that we vacate convenience if we are to know him and turn toward Christ’s mission to serve the least and the lost.

Invited or not, John crashes our celebrations today, much as God enters flesh in Jesus, such that we cannot be the same. God enters flesh today at tables of plenty and want, in families of nurture and strife, and amid nations of safety and violence. John’s witness keeps us honest and ensures that, in the words of Howard Thurman, “the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among [kindred], to make music in the heart.”