Christmas: Grace and Truth
John 1.14-18
Today is an exceptional today, because of course today is Christmas Eve. We’re here to celebrate our Lord Jesus Christ, as we do every Sunday, but this Sunday is different, because we’re celebrating a particular aspect of our Lord Jesus Christ: we’re celebrating his coming.
Now, we have the kids with us this morning. Kids, I know you’ll find it difficult to sit still today, so I’m going to start with you, and I’m going to explain really quickly everything I’m going to say to your parents and your big brothers and sisters, so on the way home you can ask them questions and make sure they understand what I’ve said.
Raise your hands if you have a favorite character—a favorite princess, or a favorite superhero. So imagine how incredible it would be if I told you that Elsa or Anna (or Superman or Wonder Woman) was coming to your house this week? And that they weren’t just coming over for dinner, but that they were going to live in your house from now on?
Wouldn’t that be amazing? What would it be like to have breakfast with them, to play games with them, to talk to them? And to know that they would be living with you forever?
Well Jesus is way bigger, way more important, than Elsa or Anna or Superman—and that’s exactly what he’s done. He’s come to us, and he’s moved in, and he lives with us now, and forever.
In John 1.14-18, the apostle John ends his prologue by making explicit the things he had hinted to before: that the Son of God became flesh, full of grace and truth, in order to make God known.
The Son of God Became Flesh… (v. 14-15)
We remember that John has used several pictures since the beginning of the prologue—he’s talked about “life,” and “the light,” and “the Word”: that is, what God wanted his people to know about himself. John said that this “Word” wasn’t just a message God was sending, but it was God himself, the Creator of all things. And then John tells us the incredible news—which of course we’ve heard now, but imagine what it must have been like to learn this for the first time. V. 14:
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Hold on—John said earlier that this “Word” was God; that he was eternal; that he created everything, including us. And now he says that the Word became flesh. That is, he took on a human form, became a human being, took on a human nature.
We’ve become numb to how huge this idea is, but imagine if Tom Cruise walked in through these doors this morning. You might agree with him, you might not, but his presence wouldn’t go unnoticed, and it wouldn’t leave us indifferent.
But even that wouldn’t be all that impressive, because even if it’s unlikely that Tom Cruise would come to our church this morning, it’s at least theoretically possible.
So rather, imagine if Nelson Mandela stepped out of history and walked through these doors. On top of being an incredible thing because of his significance to world culture, it should be impossible for him to be here, because he died ten years ago. What would our reaction be if it happened, and it really was Nelson Mandela sitting here?
The Word became flesh—God himself, the Creator of all things, became a human being. This is the most incredible thing to have ever happened in the history of the world.
And not only that, John says, The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This is another callback to the Old Testament, like John did at the beginning of this chapter: the word he uses for “dwell” is the verb form of the word “tent” or “tabernacle.” In the book of Exodus, when God gives the law to the people, he has them build a big tent, called the tabernacle. In this tent, they will place the Ark of the Covenant, and that is where God’s presence dwelt with his people. If you wanted to go to God, you had to go to the tabernacle. The tent was transportable; they could take it down and put it back up as they moved from place to place. And every time they set up camp somewhere new, God’s presence would remain in the tabernacle once again.
But at this point in time, the tabernacle had been gone for a long time. The Ark of the Covenant was lost (at least until Indiana Jones found it again, haha). The temple had been pillaged more than once. The days in which God’s presence was visibly active amongst his people were long behind them.
At least until the Word became flesh. God himself, the second person of the Trinity, was born as a human baby named Jesus, and that baby grew up, and he lived an ordinary life amongst ordinary people. When God became a human being, he dwelt among his people. He became, in a manner of speaking, a new tabernacle—a place where the presence of God remained, because he was God. And he wasn’t far away or inaccessible: he dwelt among us. The apostles, who were spreading this good news throughout the Roman world, saw him. That’s what John says next: and we have seen his glory.
The phrase “we have seen his glory” can mean a lot of different things depending on what kind of “glory” you’re talking about. I remember once reading a review of a stand-up comic who gave a one-man show in San Francisco. The review was one simple sentence: “He was glorious.” Of course by that, the reviewer meant that this comic’s talent was incredibly impressive.
So we need to be specific: when John says that we have seen the glory of “the Word”, what glory is he talking about? John tells us: glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
To put it another way, the Word became flesh in order to show us who God is and what God is like. That’s what God’s glory is: it’s all of his attributes—his power, his wisdom, his goodness, his justice, all of it—made visible to the world. So it’s fairly obvious that if God wants to show us his glory, he’d make those attributes literally visible. And he did it by becoming a person. A person we could see and touch and listen to.
When you look at Jesus in the Bible, you see God. His glory is divine glory.
And John gives us another reminder of this in v. 15, when he speaks again of John the Baptist:
15 (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’ ”)
Remember what we saw in v. 1—In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word WAS God. John the Baptist is saying exactly that: even though he came before Jesus, Jesus is more important than him, because he’s always been here—he is God.
The Son of God became flesh, and he lived among human beings, and we beheld his glory—when we look at Jesus, we see God himself.
…Full of Grace and Truth… (v. 16-17)
But what precisely do we see when we see his glory? We see a lot of things, but there are two things John focuses on in particular. V. 16:
16 For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
So the first thing we see and receive when we see Christ is grace. Grace is a lot more than not getting the punishment we deserve. My dad used to make a very helpful comparison between two words we see a lot in the Bible: grace and mercy.
Here’s how he explained it—he explained it using noises. “Mercy” is when you deserve something bad, and you don’t get it. So the noise for “mercy” is: Whew!
“Grace” is when you don’t deserve something good, but you get something good anyway. So the noise for grace is: Wow!
Grace is—Wow! We deserved nothing from God but punishment for our rebellion against him. But only did we not receive his punishment, we received his goodness. We received his blessing. We received his grace.
And we didn’t just receive his grace; we received it from his fullness—grace UPON grace. It’s not as if God had to work really hard to convince himself to be kind to us. The most substantial grace you have ever received in your life is merely a drop in the bucket: we have received from his fullness, not from the tiny morsels of goodness he was able to scrape together.
So grace came through Christ, and the other thing that came through him was truth. V. 17—For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
Now, John isn’t comparing and contrasting the law (like that’s the bad thing), and grace and truth (like they’re the good things). He’s talking about progression. The law God gave to his people was a picture of his perfect character and holiness—a picture his people could never live up to. So although they had a list of things they would need to see in order to see God’s character, they had never actually seen it, because no one had ever lived like that.
Until Christ.
The grace and truth that had always been in God, that had been described in the law of Moses, manifest themselves in Jesus Christ. Perfect grace, and perfect truth.
And you need both—because grace without truth causes some massive problems. Grace without truth makes a mockery of justice, because it ignores sin, or at least treats it like it’s no big deal.
God never gives grace at the expense of truth; he gives grace because of truth. The truth is that we are sinners, we need a Savior to take our place, and we need the Savior’s help to become more like him.
…To Make God Known (v. 18)
Jesus is that Savior. Jesus is God. Jesus brings grace and truth from his fullness. And he does it to make God known. V. 18:
No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.
This is John’s concluding sentence for his prologue, and he says it as clearly as possible, just in case we hadn’t understood before.
God’s goal, since the very beginning, has always been to reveal himself—to show his glory to the world. Only God himself could manifest God’s character and holiness to us; only God himself could reveal himself to humans.
Jesus Christ is that God. He is able to reveal God’s character and holiness to us because he is God. He took on a human nature, lived a human life, in order to make God visible to human beings.
If you want to see God, you need to look at Jesus.
Conclusion
The picture in everyone’s minds at Christmas is the picture of the baby Jesus in the manger, sleeping peacefully. It is a beautiful picture—a picture of peace and happiness (new parents of healthy babies are almost always happy), and it’s a picture that naturally makes us feel restful.
But at Christmas we must remember that this picture is just the beginning. The baby in the manger grew up. As he grew, he lived a perfect, sinless life in a world full of sin. He ministered to those who needed him even though he didn’t need to do it—he didn’t have to teach or to heal or to speak to people no one else would speak to. He did those things to show us who God is.
Then he showed us even more of God: although he was without sin, he took our sin on himself and suffered the punishment we deserve, in our place. God did that, for us. GOD absorbed his own wrath against our sin, so that we wouldn’t have to. That is mercy—that is whew!
And he gave us his own perfect life, so that we would receive the reward, as if we were the ones who had lived without sin. He gave us eternal life, eternal joy, eternal peace, in a world without sin or sickness or death. Everything he deserves, and nothing we deserve. That is grace—that is wow!
Before such grace, how are we called to respond?
We are called to respond with truth—the same truth Christ came to proclaim. We are sinners, in need of a Savior, and this Savior has come. He has shone his light on us all, and we don’t want to be like those in the world who didn’t recognize him or receive him.
So we will confess our need of him, we will confess our sin, we will accept his forgiveness, and we will follow him. We will become more like him. We will not take his grace for granted, but recognize it as costly.
And for such a grace, we will be infinitely thankful.
It is the only response that makes sense.
I don’t know where you are this morning, what kind of questions or doubts you’ve brought with you, or what you’re looking for. But in all honesty, it doesn’t matter. Every situation and every doubt and every pain and every joy is changed by this simple truth: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.
Let us come to him this morning, and humbly receive his grace.
