I saw Christ today.
Not as he is in stained glass windows, but as a Black woman with a purple coat. Christ drove a beige minivan, which she pulled into Moss Park [a Toronto neighbourhood]; and when she opened the back hatch, it was filled with meals in take-away containers and boxes of Tim Hortons coffee. And as the people gathered around, she blessed them as she served them: “God bless you. God bless you. God bless you.”
I saw Christ today. Not in Galilee or Jerusalem, but in the blue seats on the eastbound No. 12 bus. He had a grey moustache and a hat that I’m sure was the height of style when he bought it in 1962. I don’t think Christ had anywhere in particular to be; he just seemed to like riding the bus and talking to people. And whenever he saw someone without a seat, he would stand on shaky legs and smile and say: “Please, this is for you. Please, this is for you. Please, this is for you.”
I saw Christ today. Not at the height of his power, but as a child in reindeer footie pajamas. He was woken by his parents because this just couldn’t wait until morning. Christ was crying as he approached the hospital bed and saw the tubes and the medicines in bags. His dad lifted him up onto the bed, and Christ gave his grandmother a kiss on the cheek and whispered in her ear: “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it” (John 1:1-5).
No angels or Magi or shepherds or donkeys. No Mary or Joseph. Not even a baby in a manger. The Gospel of John begins by leading us to contemplate the origin of all things. It pulls the lens way back and takes us back long before Bethlehem — long before time itself, to when there was nothing but chaos. The prelude to John’s Gospel, as it is known, can be read as a Midrash, a Jewish form of biblical interpretation that reimagines readings by crafting new ones, not to replace, but stand alongside, other readings.
John’s prelude is a Midrash of the first Creation story found in the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”
John retells the story of Creation, where the light by which the Creator brings forth all life was the luminous Word, the light of Christ, the light that no darkness or chaos or evil could ever overtake. This is the Cosmic Christ, one with God, beyond our limited understandings of time and place, but through whom all time and place find their origin.
This is how the Gospel of John starts: with the lens pulled out as far as it can go revealing an ethereal starscape of dreams and creative intention, but then, then — even before our conscious minds have had a chance to take in the vastness before us — the lens zooms in with laser-beam accuracy: “There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world” (John 1:6-9).
From the vastness of the cosmos, we are immediately grounded in a particular time, the time of John the Baptist in the first century CE, and with a particular people, the Jewish people. The light that is to shine comes through this time and this people with John the Baptist as the narrative link between the time before the incarnation and the time after the incarnation.
This particularly is vital to the story we tell at Christmas. The light through whom all Creation came into being has a face, a Jewish face, born into a Jewish family in a time of Roman occupation. This light that enlightens everything and everyone came as a baby, a baby conceived in his mother’s flesh, nourished at her breast, needing her love and also the love and support of a community in order to grow and flourish.
More on Broadview:
God’s eternal love had a face and lived in a place with a people.
The fully human Jesus would experience humanity by walking the hill country of Galilee, learning a trade, helping with the harvest, building friendships, going to wedding banquets and reading the sacred texts of his tradition, the stories of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam. The fully human Jesus was shaped by the words of the prophets who spoke God’s intentions into the world of how people should treat each other.
The Christmas story is a foundational story for our faith, but also for our humanity. How we tell it and how we interpret it matter.
Now, if you have been around churches for a while, you likely will have encountered the story of Jesus’ birth in the Gospel of Luke many times. If you’ve seen a Christmas pageant or two in your day, you may even think you know the story by heart. How does it go?
The imperial decree. Check. The donkey trail to Bethlehem. Check. Angels and shepherds. Check and check. Mary giving birth to Jesus in a stable because there was no room for them at the inn. Not so fast!
If you have been around churches for a while, you may be surprised that in more recent translations of Luke’s Gospel, the word used to describe Jesus’ birthplace is not an “inn” but a “guest room.” It reads: “The time came for Mary to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no place in the guest room” (Luke 2:6-7).
In biblical Greek, there are two words for the English word “inn,” one being like a hotel, where the owner of a building rents out several rooms each night. Luke uses this word in places like Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, where the beaten–up man is taken to an inn to recover. But that’s not the word being used here in Jesus’ birth story — the Greek kataluma is actually more like an ancient version of Airbnb.
In first-century Israel, most people lived in a one-room structure. In that room, there was space for living and sleeping, a fireplace, and often the animals were brought in at night to that same space, for protection from thieves and because of the warmth they’d give. So a manger to feed the animals would have been a common piece of furniture in people’s homes.
Now, some larger homes would also have had a kataluma, an additional upper room that could be rented out to travellers. The newer translations make it clear that it is this guest room that was already full. When we read that Mary gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a manger, this would have been in the main living space of the family that owned the home.
Mary and Joseph weren’t turned away — they were invited into someone’s home. It is simply incorrect to think that Mary and Joseph were forced into a stable that night. They found shelter in the kindness of people. This kindness was so ordinary, so expected within first-century Jewish culture, that Luke did not even make mention of the family whose home was used for what we as Christians now consider to be the birthing of God into the world.
The Christmas story is foundational for faith, and for humanity. And how we tell it matters.
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In ancient Israel and within the Jewish faith, welcoming the weary traveller was not merely a question of good manners but a moral and spiritual imperative. Biblical law specifically sanctified hospitality toward the stranger, for, as it says in Exodus 12: “You were once strangers in a strange land.” The Talmud even says that welcoming guests is “greater than welcoming the divine presence.”
This was the social and religious location that formed and shaped the human Jesus. This was the lens through which the light of Christ, which, as the Gospel of John asserts, “enlightens everything and everyone,” was refracted into the world.
Kindness. Hospitality. Welcoming the outsider as the divine presence. These became central tenets of the ministry of Jesus who taught his followers in this way:
“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”
Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you or naked and gave you clothing?”
And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:35-40).
“What you do to others, you do to me.” God’s eternal love has a face.
The 20th-century English mystic Caryll Houselander once had an experience on the London Underground that changed her life. In her book A Rocking-Horse Catholic, published in 1955, she describes it this way:
All sorts of people jostled together, sitting and strap-hanging — workers of every description going home at the end of the day. Quite suddenly I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them — but because He was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too.…I came out into the street and walked for a long time in the crowds. It was the same here, on every side, in every passer-by, everywhere — Christ.…
Christ is everywhere.…Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.
After a few days the “vision” faded. People looked the same again.…Christ was hidden again; indeed, through the years to come I would have to seek for Him, and usually I would find Him in others — and still more in myself — only through a deliberate and blind act of faith.
The prologue of John’s Gospel says, “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” Or as The Message translation puts it: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.” The great cosmic being at the heart of all Creation became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood. This is the story of Christmas. And how we tell it matters.
Christmas is about the kindness and hospitality modelled by the family who took in Mary and Joseph. It is about welcoming the birth of God into our homes and neighbourhoods and lives. It is about that deliberate and blind act of faith to live as if each person we meet on the street or on the bus or in the hospital is luminous, aglow with the original holy light through which God spoke all of Creation into being. And even if you don’t see it yet, even if you don’t believe it yet, imagine how different the world could be if we trusted that it was true anyway.
How could the world be different if we treated each person as the divine guest, and not just our friends and family members, but strangers, outsiders, even enemies? How could our world be different if we designed our institutions and economies and public policies around this truth? In these times when so many of us are struggling for so many reasons, how could our lives be different — how could our lives be different — if we trusted that the light of Christ shines through us as well, that eternal love has a face.
I saw Christ today. Eternal love has a face, and it is yours.
God bless you. Merry Christmas.
***
Rev. Jason Meyers is a minister at Metropolitan United in Toronto. He will be offering this sermon there on Dec. 25 at 11 a.m., and it will also be livestreamed. At broadview.org/sermon-2024, you can watch a recording of Meyers delivering his sermon, and read and watch the sermons of first runner-up Patti Rodgers of Bond Head (Ont.) United and second runner-up Rev. Ryan Slifka of St. George’s United in Courtenay, B.C.
This article first appeared in Broadview’s December 2024 issue with the title “God’s Eternal Love Has a Face.”
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