Reflections on “Christmas Is Our Birthday,” December 25th, 2011

On Christmas Day, our guest preacher was A.J. Espinosa, 2nd year seminarian at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, MO. He preached a fantastic sermon and I’ve asked him to provide some of the highlights here on our website. Let me turn things over to A.J.! In Christ, Dr. Espinosa

“Happy birthday Jesus.” I’ve seen it on billboards, heard it in children’s messages, and even sung it at party in a church fellowship hall. Even a child can point out what’s strange about this phrase though–if Christmas is Jesus’s birthday, why do we get all the presents, and not Jesus? This question ‘presents’ us with an opportunity for reflection.

A birthday is a celebration of life, a celebration of family. Jesus, however, is God’s Son. He’s God’s Word. John 1:1 tells us that “in the beginning the Word already existed” (GW translation). God’s Word already had life and a family. As God, He already had life in the truest sense, and as God’s Son, he already belonged to a family in the truest sense. Jesus didn’t get life and family on Christmas–we did. John says that Jesus “was the source of life, and that life was the light for humanity” (v4). He goes on to say that Jesus “gave the right to become God’s children to everyone who believed in him” (v12). We get the presents of life and family on Christmas, so Christmas is really our birthday.

On Christmas, we get another present too: God’s glory. Not even Moses got to see God’s glory. He asked, but all he got to see was a sliver of God’s back while hiding inside the crevice of a cliff (Exodus 33:18-23). Although he didn’t get to see God’s glory, he got to hear God make this declaration about Himself: Yahweh is “a compassionate and merciful God, patient, always faithful, and ready to forgive” (Exodus 34:6). This last phrase, “always faithful and ready to forgive,” is a translation of the Hebrew רַב־חֶ֥סֶד וֶאֱמֶֽת (rav-chesed we’emet), which when literally translated word-for-word is “full of grace and truth.” This phrase appears only one other time in the Bible, and that’s in John 1:14. John says, “The Word became human and lived among us. We saw his glory. It was the glory that the glory that the Father shares with his only Son, a glory full of grace and truth.” With this phrase, John declares again that Jesus is Yahweh. Moses would have died if he had seen Yahweh’s face, so he had to settle for Yahweh’s back (Exodus 33:20). God became human, so we got to see God face-to-face. When Moses saw that sliver of God’s back, he gained life to last him 40 days and 40 nights without food or water. We saw God’s face, and He injected His life directly into humanity through Jesus. We saw God’s glory, and we gained life to last us for eternity.

We see God’s glory in the way Jesus has lived. Jesus lived a life of faithfulness and forgiveness. As Yahweh was faithful when Israel was faithless, Jesus was faithful when we were faithless. Jesus obeyed his Father’s will to the point of death, the shameful death of a common criminal on a Roman cross. And the death of this perfectly faithful human being, who was ready to forgive even the people who nailed him to that cross, served as the sacrifice which purifies us from sin once and for all.

This is the glory that Jesus has shown us, and it’s the glory that he continues to create in us. Jesus is creating in you a new, eternal, and glorious life of faithfulness and forgiveness. When God the Creator joined Himself to His creation, our re-creation began. Through the birth of God’s Son, humanity’s re-birth has begun. Through God’s presence with us in Jesus, we get presents: eternal life, re-birth into God’s family, and God’s glory. Jesus gives you his presents/presence, and Jesus has come to wish you a happy birthday. Amen.

In Christ,

A.J. Espinosa

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