Year A—December 28, 2025
I feel for preachers. My instinct is to try to draw something out of each of these texts and weave it all together…but what hasn’t already been said about these passages?
Not only does Christmas recycle John’s Prologue every year in multiple services, but it’s just so familiar. And yet, familiarity is at least part of the point of a cyclical lectionary, right?
Familiarity seems like a good focal point, to be honest.
I think in these texts, read in this Christmas season, we can see God’s work to familiarize us with God’s own nature, with the intention of raising us as heirs of that nature—as family.
At the same time, I want to caution against some of the familiar ways we read some of these passages, that have led to Christian anti-Judaism and antiseminitsm over the centuries. Instead, we might pay attention to how God has worked through history to find ways to extend to all people the kind of closeness God has with the convenanted Jewish people. Whatever tradition we’re in, our relationship with God will look different, but there is one God, who yearns to be in a close and loving relationship with each and every one of God’s creatures.
We start with Isaiah’s encouraging vision for returning exiles. The hard work of rebuilding that lies ahead is seen through the eyes of faith as not only a return to a familiar existence in a familiar land, but the kind of renewal we experience each year in spring, when nature is adorned with blossoms and greenery. Extrapolating further, this renewal becomes a new beginning, as brides and grooms are adorned for their weddings. This restoration is Israel’s vindication in the sight of other nations.
The Psalmist picks up the theme. The Lord is bringing exiles home and rebuilding Jerusalem. You know the Lord, right? The Psalmist lists God’s impressive resume, just in case. This is the same Lord who not only knows how many stars there are; God knows their names. God not only created the earth; God cares for it, bringing rain and providing food for all living things. God is not impressed with the shows of power that impress humans, but does take delight in God’s people who trust in God. And yet—this God could be dangerous, if you oppose God’s people. God is protecting Israel; in fact, while God provides for the whole earth, it is only to Israel that God has fully disclosed Godself through the gift of Torah.
In Galatians, Paul picks up on this gift of Torah. While we might read his description of “the Law” in a negative light, we don’t have to. To say that the Law has been a disciplinarian means that the Law has raised its children well, has taught them how to live into the salvation Paul is declaring has now been brought by Jesus. It helps to understand Paul’s place in history. He understood Jesus as the Messiah long promised who was ushering in the consumation of history, and so he contrasts the faith formation under the Law with what he sees as its maturation. That theology hasn’t aged well, as it leads so many Christians to see Christianity as a culmination of a less mature Jewish history and faith. But Paul is writing in the light he has at that time in history. His audience were Gentile Christians who were being pressured to take on Jewish practices. (As we know from history, many eary Christians believed Gentiles needed to become Jewish before or as part of converting to the Christian faith.) So Paul stresses that Christ’s redemption of “those who were under the law” places even them alongside Gentiles as both are adopted by God as children who bear God’s own spirit and call God “Father.” Paul seems here and elsewhere to be seeking equal footing for both Jews and Gentiles who want to be Christians, so that they can share in the new faith as Jews and Gentiles.
But most importantly for Christmas, he points us to Christ’s birth—”born of a woman” meaning a true enfleshment; Christ is truly human with a human nature.
And the Prologue to John’s Gospel centers on that Incarnation. It is a beautiful, poetic passage treasured by Christians, and rightly so.
But John’s Gospel plays an outsized role in Christian antisemitism and anti-Judaism. The language used here can also feed into Christian supersessionism, which I wish to caution against. However the author intended the phrase, “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him,” we should keep it in the broader context that came just before: “…the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.”
The crux of this passage is, of course, “The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
What does this mean? “The Word,” or logos, may be used in the philosophical sense of Philo’s Middle Platonism, where logos referred to something like the organizing logic of the cosmos, that makes it intelligible. This usage bridges the late biblical themes around wisdom with the Greek philosophy that was so influential on hellenized Jews and early Christians. In any case, John is telling us that the ordering principle and creator of the cosmos chose to dwell in that cosmos—among us, as a human being. And since no one has ever seen God except the Son, this logos-Son, who is “close to the Father’s heart,” makes God known to us.
In other words, the Incarnation brings to us familiarity with God. As both the author of John and Paul attest: we are part of God’s family now, co-heirs with Jesus Christ.
The Sound 
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