the prophet’s words—“the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor; he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind and to set at liberty those who are bound, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
We are here today to think afresh both of the meaning of the coming of Jesus, and of the works of the Church. Here are both. This is what Jesus came to do, noted by Matthew in a curious little parable of four women—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. He came to seek and save that which was lost. And he has handed on his task to us, not to seek respectability and reward for ourselves, but to minister in his name to the frustrated, the sinful, the outcast, and the sorrowing.
I recalled recently an essay on William Booth that told the story of the old man. He lay dying, death was not far away. His son Bramwell bent over him and whispered “Is there anything you want Father?” “Yes,” said the old man, “I want to hear dear old Wesley say ‘here’s another one coming for God, General, another one of the outcasts and sinful, another finding their way home to God.’” This is what Jesus came to make possible. That is what he has left us to do.
“JESUS: FOR HE SHALL SAVE HIS PEOPLE”—Matthew 1.21
[Preached 24 times between 12/24/39 at Hollyhead Road and 12/11/83 at Trimdon]4
What’s in a name? Not very much to us. We are matter of fact people and sufficiently scientific to recognize the fact that to call a rose a turnip would make no difference to its scent. And we are not very impressed by another’s name either. And the names we give to our children are not, as a rule, based on any strange insight into their character or even hopes of what their character will ultimately prove to be. A name is therefore just a convenience, and that’s all.
But customs have not always and everywhere been like that. In the country and times of Jesus names were very significant things. To know the name of a person or a demon was to have him in your power. Have you noticed how Jesus himself would ask the demons their names? And to know the name of God meant not merely to know what was the proper title by which to address God, but what was his nature, and what he would do. So when Jesus said (John 17.26) “I have made known unto them thy name and will make it know,” he meant that he, in his teaching and life, was telling people what God was like, who he was, and what he was doing.
The name therefore of God’s Son, of him who was God, and was doing the work of God on earth is very significant. Of course before the birth of Jesus, people were expecting a Messiah, the King of the Jews. And they were expecting him to do many things. They thought of him as a great military leader, who should drive the foreign armies out of the land. They thought of him as God coming to judgment, one who would drown the world in the blood of his enemies. But it was a different idea that was expressed by the name Joseph was commanded to call his child. The name Jesus (“Yeshua”) means God saves, and the angel knew what sort of a savior this child was to be. It was true, as for hundreds of years, God’s people had dreamed, and hoped, and despaired that God was on his way, stooping from heaven to deliver his people from that which oppressed them. But it was also true, that God could see much more clearly than could his people what was their worst enemy. It was not easy to look beyond the hard lives created by the Roman army rambling across their land; it was not easy to feel more than the prick of hunger and hardship, the humiliation of defeat; but there was something else. There was a greater enemy, a more bitter defeat. There was Sin.
SIN
It may be that sin is an idea one would prefer not to think about at Christmas time. This is a season, we like to think, of general goodwill and kindliness. There is no one so hard of heart but that Christmas makes him merry and kindly. Christmas reveals the innate good nature in us all, often buried, often dissembled, but always there. Is that true? Are we really like that? Ought we really to use the fact of Christmas to set aside the matter of sin, as an excuse for putting aside the probing questions of the New Testament?
Let us at least make no mistake about the first Christmas. It is very easy to think of it as a beautiful, happy, idyllic scene, especially with so many Christmas cards about. I should rather like to send out more Christmas cards not with pictures of romantic looking shepherds, but with a realistic view of Herod’s hired assassins murdering young children. I don’t want to take away the beauty of Christmas but let us not act the ostrich, and hide our head in the sand when anything unpleasant appears.
Do not forget why Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem at all. They were living in a land not unlike Poland today (i.e., 1939), and had to go where they were told for the convenience of those imposing crushing taxation upon them. Do not forget that after that weary journey, and arriving in a blackout, there was no room in the inn. Do not forget where the birth of Jesus took place—in a stable, and let the stained glass windows go and see the stench and filth of it. Do not forget Herod and his massacre. Do not forget the hurried flight into Egypt.
There is plenty of beauty indeed in the story of the Nativity, but there is a dark side to the picture. It is the very contrast that helps us to see the infamy, the ingratitude, the utter sinfulness of it all, and so to the Cross. And having seen that contrast we may move on to another which extends as far as our own time, and as far as our own lives; the contrast between God’s act in sending his only Son into the world, and the sort of world we have made to receive Him. I suppose the most obvious thing to do is to point out, that he, the Prince of Peace, came and still comes into a world of war. In Jesus, God offers to us, to all his peace.
But there is something which strikes home even more personally than that. God’s coming into the world in Jesus, proclaims most of all God’s love, a love not based on merit or desert, but freely descending to the undeserving, a love that gives its all for people, not because they are loveable but only of its own inner necessity. “He hath loved, he hath loved us because he would love.” The love of God and his wonderful patience, even his humility.
A very old Christian writer pointed out the wonder of this. How did he send him? Not in wrath, not commanding, but in love, persuading, exhorting people, being patient with them. And on our side, what corresponds to this? What is our reply? In our behavior toward God and toward our fellow human beings governed by the same love, the same patience, the same humility, that we see in Jesus?
In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles is spoken of as a “spirit which ever denies.” And there is something of that in us; something that says no to God’s love and kindness, something that is on Herod’s side rather than Christ’s. A communist I was arguing with after an open air meeting told me that our present rulers were entirely selfish, and the people should rule themselves. Without quarreling with the principle, I wanted to know how he could be sure that the new rulers would not show the same selfishness. He said ‘you must change their ideology. That’s a big way of putting a simple yet terribly difficult thing. Change their ideology, that means change the “No” into a “Yes,” and turn the hard selfishness into the love and patience of God.
We may well recognize anyway, that it is something that needs to be done. It is true that we live in a world that is saying no to the God who with infinite love and compassion made his home and his grave among human beings. Do not think this is something abstract. It appears again and again in the whole fabric of human life. Sin is a fact of experience. You may forget it for a time, but you cannot blot your sinful acts out of your mind. Like David, you will meet your Nathan. Like Elijah, your Ahab. And sins are not isolated, because they are built up into habits, the chain that we forge for ourselves and bind upon our own limbs. This is the human NO! to the grace of God, which is more than the no to his commandments. Can nothing be done about it? Something has been done about it.
HE SHALL SAVE HIS PEOPLE FROM THEIR SINS
That is what Jesus came to do. He it is, and no other can do it; that is the meaning of the stress in the Greek—“thou canst save, and thou alone.” We run in vain from one supposed source of help to another, and he is the only Savior from sin. And that is what he is. People have tried from time to