Thomas F. Torrance—Sermon: Immanuel
Matthew 1: 18-25; Revelation 21:1-8
“Behold a virgin shall
be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name
Immanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.”
What a sharp contrast there is between Christmas, with its
lovely carols about the birth of Jesus, and the tense life of our vexed world!
That is the baffling incongruity of Christmas which we felt during the war, and
which we understand again today. It almost seems out of place to sing: “Glory
to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men.”! But that
contrast and that apparent incongruity lie very close to the heart of
Christmas, for it was into a world engulfed in darkness and despair that the
Son of God was actually born. Indeed, the very coming of Jesus provoked it into
fearful savagery, as we see right away in the slaughter of the innocent
children of Bethlehem by the command of Herod, who was determined to destroy
the new-born King. And yet that was but a portent of even more terrible things
to come. For seventy long, bitter years the storm-clouds gathered in darkening
intensity over Palestine, and then at last they broke in all their fury upon
the Jews, as Jesus Himself had prophesied, when the streets of the Holy City
were drenched in blood and Jerusalem was ploughed up like a field. It was right
in the midst of those seventy years that Jesus was crucified with wicked
hatred, Jesus who was born at Bethlehem to be the Prince of Peace.
What is there about the message of Christmas that makes it
speak in such angelic beauty of peace and good-will and yet point straightaway
to the frenzied tumult of Jerusalem and the agony of the Cross? What is it that
links the birth of Christ with the passion of Christ, and that still makes
the tender mercy of God manifested at Bethlehem like fire cast upon the earth?
It is the fact proclaimed by the name Immanuel: God with us. Let us try to understand that.
“God with us”
means that in the birth of Jesus Christ God has given Himself wholly to us, in
a love that is absolutely unstinting and infinitely lavish. It is God’s utmost
self-giving that stopped at nothing. God could do no more than come Himself
into our humanity, and give Himself entirely to us—and that is exactly what He
has done in Jesus. The sheer extent, the boundless range, of His act of love
takes our breath away. “God with us”
means that God Almighty insists on sharing His life with us. Far from
abandoning us to the fate which we men deserve, God has identified Himself with
us. Once and for all He has become one of us, bone of our bone and flesh of our
flesh. God has committed Himself to us in such unrestrained love in the birth
of Jesus, and in such a way that now He cannot abandon us any more than He can
abandon Himself in Jesus Christ.
That is why the birth of Jesus was heralded with such
sublime joy among men and angels, for now that God is with us, the whole
situation in heaven and earth is entirely altered, and all things are made new.
Now that God is actually with us and of us, everything else is assured.
Whatever may happen in the future, God’s purpose of love and fellowship and
peace with man will all be fulfilled. If God is with us, there is nothing that
can prevail against us. If God has given us His own Son in the birth of Jesus,
then He has already given us everything, and there is nothing that He will
withhold from us. No wonder that the whole host of heaven burst out in praise,
as the good tidings were announced to the shepherds: “Glory to God in the
highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men.” No wonder Simeon said, when
he took the baby Jesus into his arms: “Now lettest thou thy servant depart in
peace according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”
The peace of God was assured, but the peace of man with God
was yet to be gained. This is where the gift of Christmas takes on a deeper
meaning.
“God with us”
means God with us sinners in our lost and bankrupt state. Where we have sold
ourselves irretrievably into slavery and perdition and are hopelessly broken
and damned, God has joined Himself to us. God has refused to let us go. He has
insisted on making Himself one of us, and one with us, in order to make our
lost cause His very own, and so to restore us to Himself in love. “God with us” means that God is for us; God is on our side; that He has come among us to shoulder our burden, and
to rescue us from disaster and doom and to reinstate us as sons of the heavenly
Father. That is the meaning of the whole life of Jesus from His birth to His
death. It was God taking upon Himself our poor human life in all its
wretchedness and need, God living out our human life from beginning to end, in
order to redeem it. Think of a son born into a family that has gone down in the
world and restoring its fortunes, or of a son recovering the family business
from bankruptcy and setting it upon a solid foundation. Those are poor
analogies, but they may help us to understand the meaning of the birth of Jesus
as the coming of the Son of God into our human family in order to make our lost
cause His own and to save it from utter disaster.
Child in the manger
Infant of Mary
Outcast and stanger,
Lord of all!
Child who inherits
All our transgressions,
All our demerits
On Him fall.
Yes, it was on our behalf that Jesus, the Son of God, was
born—not for His own sake, but for our sake. It was on our behalf that He
humbled Himself to live the life of a human infant, to share our life to the
full from its very origin. It was on our behalf that Jesus learned to pray at
His mother’s knee, on our behalf that He learned obedience both to His earthly
parents and to His heavenly Father, not simply to show us the pattern of true
sonship, but to restore our human life to perfect fellowship with our Father
who is in Heaven. It was on our behalf that He was tempted in all points as we
are. It was on our behalf that He involved Himself so fully in the life of His
fellow-men, sharing with sinners their daily bread, and in the midst of it all
offering to God a life of perfect obedience where they were disobedient. And it
was on our behalf at last that He was obedient even unto death, and in our
placed that He meekly submitted to God’s judgment where Jesus from the dead,
acknowledging Him as His beloved Son in whom He is well pleased, and accepting in
His obedient life and death a sacrifice on our behalf.
Jesus lived a fully human life, but all through that human
life it was God who was living it for our sakes that He might reconcile us to
Himself and gather our frail human life into union with His divine life. The
whole life of Jesus was the life of God with us sinners, God taking our place
and doing for us what we could not do for ourselves, God laying hold of our
rebellious will, making it His own and bending it back from its disobedience to
obedience, form its defiance to love. And so we hear Jesus praying in
Gethsemane, “Not my will, but thine be done.”
Let us think of what Christ had to suffer in order to do
that. Do we remember the parable He told about the man who planted a vineyard
and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country? From time to time he
sent his servants back to the vineyard to receive some of the fruit that was
due to him, but they were all beaten or stoned or shamefully handled and sent
empty away. Then last of all the owner sent His only son, His beloved son,
saying, “They will reverence my son”, but when the husbandmen saw the son and
heir come to the vineyard, they became even more wicked, and they took him and
killed him and cast him out of the vineyard, and took possession of it for
themselves. When God is in the far country the conflict between man and God
does not seem so sharp, but when God is with us, when the Son of God comes into
the midst of our human life, then the conflict between God and man reaches its
utmost intensity. That is precisely what happened with the birth of Immanuel.
With the coming of the Son of God into our humanity, man’s enmity to God was
provoked to its utmost intensity, but Jesus Christ came in order to take that
very conflict into his own heart and to bear it in suffering in order to
reconcile man to God. He came to penetrate into the innermost life of humanity,
into the very heart of its blackest evil in order to make human guilt and
sorrow and suffering His own. In pouring out His life upon man in utter
compassion and love for him , Jesus uncovered the enmity of sin in its terrible
depth in the human heart, and drew it out upon Himself that He might bear it on
His Spirit and on His body in holy and awful atonement, and bear it all away for
ever.
All that belongs to the meaning of Immanuel, God with us. That is why it is only with
eyes that have looked upon the Cross that we can look upon the birth of the
infant Jesus at Bethlehem and understand the boundless love of God in giving us
His only son to be our Saviour. Now we can understand why they called Him Jesus,
for He had come to save His people from their sins. And now too we can really
understand why He was born to be the
Prince of Peace, for it is through the blood of Christ alone that we have peace
with God.
It is because of this that we can really enjoy having God with us, and so enter fully into all
the rapturous joys of Christmas, and know that when all the festivities are
over the joy remains because the peace in eternal. There are some people for
whom Immanuel can only bring anxious
and disquieting thoughts at Christmas, for they have not found peace with God.
But to those who have, Immanuel
contains a prophecy of a day when Christmas will no longer be celebrated
against the background of a harsh and troubled world, for there will be a new
heaven and a new earth, such as John saw in his vision, when he heard a great
voice out of heaven saying: “Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and he
will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be
with them and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;
and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there
be any more pain; for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon
the throne,” that is, Jesus, born to be King at Bethlehem, “said: ‘Behold I
make all things new’.”
