Preacher: Rev. Andrew Richard
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Rejoice tonight, dear saints: the Son of God has become a man! “For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Lk. 2:11). Think of what it means that the Son of God has forever made Himself what we are. We can understand a good deal about this from being human ourselves, though Christ’s love surpasses ours as far as heaven is above earth. Let’s reflect on the sympathy and compassion that God has built into our human nature, and then see how that compassion is amplified and perfected in the incarnate Son of God.
To start, you’ve felt sympathy before for someone you love and care about, and who loves and cares about you. That’s very natural. Parents sympathize with their children, friends sympathize with one another. A close relationship of mutual love forges that sympathy. This is a strong bond among men. Yet we know it is a bond that can be broken. Parents and children can become estranged from each other. Friends can turn into enemies. When love given is not repaid, love grows cold, at least among sinful man. But consider the love of God. He foresaw our sin and rebellion before He even created us. When men perceive that someone is going to repay evil for good, they generally draw back rather than proceed. But God, rather than refraining from creating us, or creating us only to condemn us, appointed our redemption from eternity, and created us knowing that in the fullness of time the Son of God would become a man to redeem us. That redemption would cost Him His life. We know what it is to feel sympathy for those whom we love and who love us. But God had sympathy for us when we had made ourselves His enemies by disobedience, when we had only sin in our hearts and no love. This is a wonder: “For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:7-8). Take any natural love you feel for someone, and know that God’s love for you is a thousand times greater.
And that was even before the Son of God became a man. Now He is bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh. You know what it is to feel sympathy for a human being simply because he’s of the same flesh and bone you are. How often has your heart gone out to someone you’ve never even met? A man dies young and your heart goes out to his widow and you feel something of her grief, even though you’ve never met her, based simply on the fact that you’re both human. You hear of famine and you feel sympathy because you know what it is to be hungry. You hear of a cancer diagnosis or a kidney stone and you feel sympathy because you likewise have a body that could suffer those things. You’re made of the same stuff. Even Joseph’s brothers in the book of Genesis, brothers who envied him and hated him and intended harm against him, felt something natural in spite of their unnaturalness. Judah says, “What profit is there if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come and let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him, for he is our brother and our flesh” (Gen. 37:26-27).
It is a powerful bond, being of the same make, the same kind. Yet, as we see with Joseph’s brothers, a cloud of sin hangs over our natural attachment. The fact that we’re the same flesh and blood, all of us descended from Adam, all of us descended from Noah, all of us knit together by God of the same stuff in our mother’s womb―this should lead us to love each other unfailingly. Each of us understands what it is to be human: to think, to reason, to rejoice, to weep, to be full, to be hungry, to feel pleasure, to feel pain. And yet what do we do? We use our knowledge of what hurts us to hurt others. These sharp words would hurt me, so I’ll wield them against him. I would hate it if someone did this to me, so I’ll do it to get back at her. We weaponize our human nature against one another, taking what should be a bond of love and turning it into warlike fuel for our bitterness and pettiness and vengeance. God was gracious to make us as He did. But what have we done with our nature? The horrors that we have brought forth cry out to heaven summoning the wrath of God upon us.
Yet we rejoice this Christmas that something far different than we deserved came down out of heaven. God has looked upon us not with vengeance in His eye, but with mercy. Instead of taking back His gift of human nature, which would have been just, since we have so sorely misused it, He chose to redeem our human nature. The Son of God assumed our human nature, not in its corrupted form, but sinless, as He originally created it to be. But make no mistake: Jesus is what you are. He is a man. The difference is that His human nature does not have the taint of sin, and that difference does not separate Him from you, but draws Him nearer to you.
Sin casts a pall on our human nature so that we only partially feel our natural bond, but it is not so with Jesus. He feels that bond fully, and if He had sympathy for us before He even became a man, now that He has become a man, His sympathy for us knows no bound. For example, it is not the nature of God to be hungry. It is His nature to open His hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing (Ps. 145:16). But the Son of God is a man, and He knows what it is to call for His mother’s breast even as “He provides food for the cattle and for the young ravens when they call” (Ps. 147:9). Jesus feels sympathy for the hungry not only because in His omniscience He knows what hunger is, and knows it even more fully than we do, but because He has felt it in His own body. He not only taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” but He has prayed it Himself. And as He feels our need in His perfect human nature, He has sympathy and desires to satisfy our need.
This is but one example. The New Testament is full of Jesus’ compassion. “When He saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd” (Mt. 9:36). Jesus had compassion because as a man He knew what it was to be weary and to be driven away from others. “When Jesus went out He saw a great multitude; and He was moved with compassion for them, and healed their sick” (Mt. 14:14). Jesus had compassion because He had a body that could bear sickness. “I have compassion on the multitude,” Jesus says, “because they have now continued with Me three days and have nothing to eat. And I do not want to send them away hungry, lest they faint on the way” (Mt. 15:32), and He multiplied loaves and fishes. When the blind men cried out to Jesus, “Jesus had compassion and touched their eyes. And immediately their eyes received sight” (Mt. 20:34). When the leper approached Jesus, “Jesus, moved with compassion, stretched out His hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I am willing; be cleansed’” (Mk. 1:41). When Jesus encountered a funeral procession bearing the body of a widow’s only son, “He had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’ Then He came and touched the open coffin… and He said, ‘Young man, I say to you, arise’” (Lk. 7:13-14), and he arose.
The fact that mankind experiences a lack of anything, whether food or peace or health or righteousness, shows that something has gone wrong with the creation, namely, we have sinned. As Jesus felt the effects of our sin, as He suffered hunger and thirst and exhaustion and pain, He desired not only to treat our symptoms, but to treat the root cause. In His sympathy for us He took the sin of the whole world upon Himself. Your sins deserved death, and Jesus took on a human body so that He could die that death on the cross and spare you. He took on a human nature and weaponized it against everything that had corrupted our human nature, so that the blood of Jesus―His human blood that partakes of His divine power―cleanses us from all sin (1 Jn. 1:7). There is love. There is natural affection. There is human nature feeling the attachment to its fellow man that it should feel. It is written in Ephesians 5, “No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it” (Eph. 5:29), and of no one is this more true than of Jesus. You are bone of His bone and flesh of His flesh, and so He nourishes and cherishes you. That is the joy of Christmas.
When you are in pain, turn to your Lord who has felt your pain. He has risen from the dead, and lives, and is still the God Man who cares for you. When you are tempted, turn to your Lord, “For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:15-16). When you have sinned, turn to your Lord, who though sinless Himself, became sin for you, that you might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Cor. 5:21). When you struggle to love your fellow man, turn to your Lord who made Himself your fellow man, whose love has been poured into your heart through the Holy Spirit who has been given to you (Rom. 5:5). In your incarnate Lord you will find healing and strength and forgiveness and love and all things needful. Rejoice! “There was born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Lk. 2:11). This shall be a merry Christmas indeed, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord! Amen.