Readings – Hebrews 1:1-4, John 1:1-14
And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
May I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Our epistle reading at this Midnight Mass, the beginning of the Letter to the Hebrews, states that God “has spoken to us by a Son.” These days, we might joke that God should speak to us in a collection of social media memes or a Zoom call. After all, that’s the way everybody else communicates these days.
The joke is fair enough, but it also misses the point. The people of 1st Century Palestine may not have been able to log on to Zoom to take part in a heavenly videoconference, but they could and did expect God to communicate in all sorts of ways that didn’t involve anything connected with this rather odd claim that God “has spoken to us by a son”.
Receiving enlightenment and instruction from divine visions is a repeated theme in both the Old and New Testaments. Peter and Paul are both recorded as receiving direct instruction through visions. But the Father didn’t send the divine Word to people in visions, although presumably he could have done – instead He sent the Word directly, in the person of Jesus Christ.
Ancient Near Eastern cultures were quite comfortable with the idea of divine messengers; indeed the word ‘angel’ comes directly from the Greek work for “messenger” and the Old Testament claims to record angelic appearances from as early as patriarchal times. The angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she was pregnant with Jesus. But while angels announced that Jesus was about to come into the world, they don’t seem to have been able to do the work that God required Jesus to do.
God didn’t dictate a series of writings to Jesus, nor to His followers, at least not directly. That was a way that God had communicated with His chosen people in Palestine in the past, when he gave the tablets of stone containing the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Horeb. God continues to communicate with His people today through the series of writings we call the Bible, but Jesus wasn’t their author, nor were they handed down from on high, but instead were the product of centuries of laborious debate by the Church. But the only record we have of Jesus writing is with his finger, in the dirt on the ground, at the time when a woman was brought to Him to be stoned for adultery.