Only Human: Sermon Preached on 24th December 2025 (Midnight Mass)

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Readings – Isaiah 9. 2, 6-7; John 1. 1-14

“the Word became flesh and lived among us”      

“I’m only human.” It’s a phrase we usually offer by way of an apology—as if being human was something inadequate or second rate. Humans aren’t perfect. What torments us is that somehow we think we’re supposed be perfect, so when we can’t manage to be the perfect people we think we should be, we think we’ve failed.

We’re supposed to be good at our jobs, to run a perfect home, to be a cheerful friend and companion while also being capable of giving frank and realistic advice if needed, a wonderful spouse or partner, an absolutely perfect parent, to give regularly to charity, to feel deeply for a range of worthy causes and always say the right things about them, to never hit the credit card too heavily, never drink more than 14 units of alcohol per week, never smoke, and have a clean driving licence and a Body Mass Index below 25 – or, if we’re Black or Asian, a Body Mass Index below 23.

Of course we don’t manage to achieve all that. We’re only human. Although there are always Instagram influencers and people in the lifestyle magazines who claim to manage it all, and tell us we all could too if only we tried hard enough. Maybe they’re not human—better than human?—superhuman?

We’re so negative about the idea of being human – but being human was good enough for God. That’s what that strange mystical passage from St John’s Gospel that I read a moment ago is saying. I freely admit that it is strange stuff, and I don’t see that as a problem. After all, if God is real, then any human attempt to describe God must strain the limits of human language. The passage writes of two beings, the Word, and God who created the universe. The Word, it says, was God, every bit as much as the creator of the universe—somehow these two beings while being distinct, were one. The Word was with God before time began. And then the Word became flesh—God became human. That is the unique and distinctive point of the Christian faith

Now, we have much in common with Jews, something I think we all know, and we also have quite a lot in common with Muslims, something that is quite difficult to say with being latched on to as a Culture War point by one side or another. But it is a simple statement of fact. Like Muslims and Jews, we believe that there is a God, one God, who created the universe. This is very different from what atheists believe about the universe, or Buddhists, or Hindus. And like Muslims and Jews we believe that God will judge us at the end of our lives for what we have done on this Earth: which is a pretty scary prospect; we’d better hope that God judges us with more mercy than the lifestyle magazines and the folks on social media.

But one belief that separates Christians dramatically from Jews and Muslims is that we believe God actually became human. He did so in the person of Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ was truly God, then God got the cold and blew His nose, went to the toilet, told jokes, ate breakfast, and was so fond of eating and drinking with the wrong company that his enemies called him a glutton and a drunkard. If this festival we celebrate tonight is true, then God got so exhausted by the crowds who mobbed Him like a modern celebrity that He fled to the hills for peace, and God was perceived as such a threat by powerful men that they had Him executed. That’s very different from what Jews believe, and very different from what Muslims believe.

At this point in our history, if Christians are right and Jesus Christ was God made human, then it is a particularly wonderful idea for the times we find ourselves living in. For we find ourselves at a moment when we are in danger of losing touch with our humanity. Our machines entertain us, organise us, and think for us. We spend less time in one another’s company, and more time in our own homes, with our screens convincing us that we’re really in touch with the rest of the world. We have fewer friends than we used to, and many fewer children.

The irony is that, despite the general air of negativity about the state of this country, we live at a time of genuine wonder in one of the richest places that has ever existed. In the late 1940s, not exactly the Stone Age, one child in thirty in this country died in infancy. Now it’s fewer one in two hundred and fifty. Many of us will make high quality video calls over Christmas to family in distant parts of the world at essentially no cost. The variety of food and drink in our shops, and how much it costs in relation to our hourly wages, would stagger the people of a hundred years ago. And yet, we’re often deeply unhappy. Many people feel profoundly alienated from those around them, and from their own true nature.

Our machines will continue to get rapidly more powerful in the years to come, delivering better entertainment, medical breakthroughs, cheaper and cleaner transport and energy. But while some people in our world still live in terrible material poverty, most of us here tonight are always warm, well-fed, and well-entertained. More powerful gizmos than the ones we already have aren’t going to make us happier.We need instead to become comfortable with our humanity—and I don’t think that is going to happen until we learn to get comfortable with God.

The truth is, we often look for the wrong solution to our problems. For long centuries before Jesus, the Jewish people had been holding out for a hero. That’s what tonight’s first reading is about—a prophecy of a great liberator who would lead them out of darkness. The hero they wanted seemed to be superhuman – someone who would liberate them and make Jerusalem great again (but not in that way): they wanted a king would make their country a model for other nations because it was genuinely just, especially to the poor and the elderly.

What they actually got was something greater that any human king. God, in the person of Jesus Christ. But He proclaimed a Kingdom that is not of this world, which wasn’t what people wanted to hear. He was a King who died at the hands of a petty local tyrant and a group of B-list religious bigots, yet many centuries after even the mightiest empires of Christ’s earthly lifetime have vanished, we gather here on a cold winter’s night in a village thousands of miles away to praise Him as God. The God for whom being human was good enough. The God who came to earth on a rescue mission to save the creatures He made from the consequences of their own wickedness.

For the truth is that we all have a wicked side to us. We’ve all done things a lot more serious than hitting the Tia Maria too hard on Boxing Night or having a Body Mass Index of twenty-six-and-a-half. God knows all this too, for God knows what it is like to be only human. The imperfect human that God made you to be is the imperfect human that God loves.

If you use Christmas to dedicate yourself to following Him, if you trust Him to be the perfect guide for the imperfect but loveable you, then He will forgive you your sins, and lead you to a richer and better life than you could ever have imagined for yourself.

And now to our wonderful counsellor, mighty God, everlasting Father, to Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace, and to the Holy Spirit who overshadowed Mary, be glory in the highest, until the end of all ages. Amen.

Bethlehem Twilight, © Gerry Lynch, 14 November 2022.