Born That Men No More May Die

M atthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus. Mark, the immediate gospel, just starts, with John the Baptist preparing the way for Jesus’s public ministry as an adult. Luke opens with the nativity narratives, first of John the Baptist and then of Jesus, containing that famous Christmas passage that Linus reads in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

But John gets philosophical. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Each of the gospel writers answers the question: Who is this baby whose birth we celebrate still today? He’s a descendant of King David, inaugurating a new kind of kingdom; He’s the Messiah, coming to heal and forgive; He’s the child of Mary, conceived of the Holy Spirit and born in a manger in Bethlehem.

And He’s the light of the world.

In using this phrase, John introduces Jesus as the Messiah that Isaiah wrote about without directly referencing the prophet. Isaiah 9:2 says, “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned,” and Isaiah 49:6 says that light is for the Gentiles as well as the Jews.

John doesn’t even say “Jesus” until the 17th verse, referring to Him as “the Word,” “the light,” and “the Son” before using His given name. In this way, John’s introduction of Jesus is the most abstract of the gospels. But it’s also the most personal.

It’s easy to read the openings of the other three gospels as historical texts. Of course, the gospels are historical texts, and it’s not wrong to read them in that way. That said, we naturally read history with a certain level of detachment. Historical texts are about people we don’t know, living in a world we don’t live in, and doing things we can’t see. When we read history, we seek to learn about the people, settings, and actions described in them.

Jesus doesn’t want us to merely learn about Him. He wants us to follow Him. Learning about Him is part of following Him, but it’s not sufficient. An exceptionally deep level of knowledge isn’t even necessary. The disciples followed Him despite being poorly educated and knowing very little about Him, and they repeatedly needed things explained to them throughout the gospels. In Matthew, Mark, and John, Jesus calls His first disciples before He performs any public miracles. Yet, the disciples’ faith — which was shaky at times, to put it mildly — was strong enough to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth, and their perseverance in the face of death is one of the strongest testimonies to the power of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling presence.

John’s philosophical opening gets to that sort of faith right away. He writes, “To all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”

Contrary to the feel-good Christianity-Lite that some teach, we are not all God’s children. We are all created in God’s image, and God wants all to accept His son’s invitation to eternal life. But John is crystal clear: The light has come for everyone, but only those who believe in the light become children of God. Romans 8:14-17 reinforces this message: The Holy Spirit allows us to become children of God, with the added notion that we also become heirs of God “if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” As that passage suggests, being a child of God isn’t all sunshine and roses. Hebrews 12 says that children of God are also disciplined by God, as any good and loving father disciplines his children. Jesus Himself in John 12:36 says, “Believe in the light while you have the light, so that you may become children of light.” Belief is a necessary precondition of adoption as children of God.

But John isn’t asking us to believe in an abstraction. What begins with deep ontological statements about God continues to say, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

In his first epistle, toward the end of the New Testament, John makes it even clearer how important the Word’s becoming flesh was. In the first three verses of 1 John, he relentlessly emphasizes the sensory evidence of the good news he is sharing (emphasis added):

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched — this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

He saw Him, he heard Him, and he even touched Him. And now he and others who believe are proclaiming His message to others, with the added evidence of transformed lives attesting to His power. And He did that by becoming flesh, as a baby in Bethlehem.

John never mentions Bethlehem, but he doesn’t have to. Most Christians will never see Bethlehem, but they will nonetheless believe in the saving work of the baby who was born there. “Light and life to all He brings / Ris’n with healing in his wings / Mild He lays His glory by / Born that men no more may die.” In that third stanza of “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” Charles Wesley was echoing the point John makes in the opening to his gospel. If it’s true that the Son of God was with God in the beginning, that light has come into the world, and that all who receive Him, irrespective of time and place, become children of God, it’s tremendously important to us today, on a personal level, in a way that a historical recounting of the occasion is not.

God knew what He was doing when He decided to include four accounts of Jesus’s life in Scripture. Luke’s opening tells us a baby was born, and John’s opening tells us that because of that, we no longer have to die. John doesn’t give you room to think about Christmas without also thinking about Easter. Just as Wesley couldn’t avoid thinking about Christ’s triumph over death when contemplating His birth, we can’t skip over what this baby — whose birth we celebrate today — means for us, right now.