In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

For John the Evangelist and Theologian, the good news of the Gospel is that God steps into time and space as a human being. For Christians, Christmas is uniquely God stepping into time and space as a human being; and showing us, at one and the same time, what God is like and how we might live as human beings.
When the image of the baby in the donkey’s feeding trough is laid bare before us what we have is a picture which is at the heart of the good news of Jesus Christ: God becomes vulnerable so that by following him we might learn how to be human.

For John’s earliest hearers, the phrase, in the beginning would have conjured memories of the opening of the Hebrew Scriptures: ‘In the beginning, God created’, and with the birth of Jesus there is once again an opportunity to be part of the recreation of the world. Key components of the new world are Light and Life. For Christians, Light and Life are found supremely in Jesus Christ.

Both light and life are at times vulnerable.

Light appears at its weakest just before dawn, when the first pin-pricks of sunlight shatter, yet are seemingly dwarfed by, the darkness. It is at that moment though the darkness is driven back and night begins to end. With, the first gasps of the new-born: incarnation begins to envelope the world.

Life is vulnerable and fragile – it was no more or no less so before the first Christmas, but God’s coming amongst us in the person of Jesus Christ reminds us that life is hallowed and sacred from first to final breath.

The importance of Christmas does not solely revolve around God stepping into our fragile and broken world, but that in the coming of Jesus, a new way of living is offered to us. John had seen this new way of living with his own eyes, from his calling on the banks of the Galilee to being entrusted with the care of Jesus’ mother through to the long years of exile of the isle of Patmos.

This way of living held together an acknowledging of human fragility and recognition that life is to be hallowed. God stepped into a world that knew more than its share of conflict and unrest, where those who ruled put ideology and self-interest before the people they were meant to serve. With a succession of food shortages caused by failure of crops and the lack of political will to anything about it, in Herod the Great’s Palestine, the phrase Palestine isn’t eating would strike long and hard.

And yet God comes, Jesus Christ makes his home amongst those who are the poorest. He was born to a family who would struggle and on least one occasion have cause to flee for their lives to another country, becoming refugees. His birth was not announced on the railings of David’s citadel in Jerusalem, but to shepherds on a hillside; people whose working lives cut them off from usually dealing with polite society.

It was also discovered by those who studied the stars. People who were not Jewish; those whom God had apparently not chosen.

For those who were supposed to be in the know, his birth passed by almost unnoticed; probably quite like yours and, indeed, mine.

Christmas can sometimes be a little too glitzy for what is supposed to celebrate: the hallowing – making holy – of ordinary everyday life.

Christmas calls us look again at what is important.

Christmas reminds us that to be fully human we need to learn to be vulnerable.

For it is by becoming vulnerable that we become more like Jesus, and discover once again that we can become like the divine.