A group of blind men heard that something new had been brought to town, something they had never heard of before, something called an “elephant.” Curious to learn about this new thing they said, “We must lay our hands on it to discover what it is like.” The first laid his hands on the elephant’s trunk and said, “An elephant is like a thick snake.” Another man’s hand reached the elephant’s ear and said, “No, it’s like a fan.” Another found a leg and said, “The elephant is a pillar like a tree trunk.” A fourth leaned on its side and said, “It’s like a wall.” Still another found its tail and said, “It’s like a rope.” And the last man felt a tusk and said, “You’re all wrong. An elephant is smooth and hard like a spear.”
That parable of the blind men and the elephant comes from India and is at least 2500 years old. There are a number of different versions of it. In some the men fight. In others they work together to try to understand what’s going on. In still another a man who can see comes along and explains to them how they were all right, but wrong at the same time. There are a few different lessons there, but the main point of the parable is that truth might sometimes be bigger than what we can see. We might think we know everything we need to know, but the whole truth, the totality of truth, might be a whole lot bigger than we realize, maybe more than what we are even capable of knowing.
God is infinitely bigger than an elephant.
That’s a ridiculously obvious thing to say. God made the elephants, after all. God made this whole world in which the elephants live. He made the universe, with its galaxies and countless billions of stars so that he could set the earth in this vastness of space, infinity surrounding the tiny blue speck of this globe, populated by elephants.
And not just elephants, but everything. The weather patterns with their conversation-spurring variety, changing every five minutes. The solar eclipse where the moon matches just perfectly with the sun so that the solar corona streaks brilliantly through the sky and the light sparkles through the lunar mountains and craters. Dogs with all the possibilities of breeding that give us Great Danes, Pugs and Labradoodles. The color green!
All of this and so much more is made by God, by his mighty hand. And we can learn about God by these things. We can learn of his mighty power. We can see the terrifying strength of a hurricane or a volcano that erupts with many times more energy than our most powerful nuclear weapons and we can know, “God made that.” We can learn about God’s wisdom, that created human brains that with all our advancements in technology and enormous power-draining draining data-centers we still can’t match with artificial intelligence. We can learn about God’s orderliness, that physics operates by universal laws, that the Mandelbrot Set in mathematics plots an infinitely complex fractal pattern.
It’s all amazing. Psalm 104 says, “How many are your works, O Lord! In wisdom you made them all.”
And yet with all of that, all the wonders of nature, all the calculations of mathematics and the musings of philosophy, we still know God less than the blind man who grabbed an elephant’s tail and declared, “An elephant is thin and bendy like a rope!”
How could we possibly know God? We barely even understand ourselves. Do I know why it is that no matter how many times I tell myself that I’m going to stop procrastinating I do it anyway? Can I explain why sometimes I am the most patient man in the world and other times the stupidest little things annoy me to no end? How is it that I could I could look at the face in the mirror and say, “I don’t even know that man” and then turn right around and then declare that I know everything there is to know about God?
The Word became flesh. That’s what the Apostle John says in the first chapter of his gospel, and what a statement that is! That name, “the Word” directs us to the infinite wisdom and knowledge of God. The Greek word is logos, and it’s describing more than letters on a page or sounds formed by lips. It envelops the concepts of thought, idea, logic, order. In the beginning God spoke, and by his word the heavens were made and he brought forth the earth and the sea.
Where is that glorious God? The one who spoke and it was? The one who breathed into the man the breath of life? We’re in utter darkness. We can’t know him except by blind grasping. Where is the God who gave his righteous law? This God we can know much more. We can know that not only is he a God who is wise and powerful, but he is also a God who demands perfect righteousness. He is a God who does not tolerate the darkness of sin and unbelief, no matter how much that darkness might try to obscure him.
The Word became flesh. You cannot touch God. You cannot hold him. You cannot lay your eyes on him. You cannot even imagine in your mind the perfect Logos, the Word who is with God and is God and was and is and is to come. Except the Word became flesh. That great, infinite, almighty, all-knowing God became flesh, he was born, for you.
“You will conceive and give birth to a son”, the angel Gabriel told the virgin Mary. “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.” This is no accident, no happenstance event. This is the fulcrum of time, on which all of history pivots. God was laid there in that manger. God was that baby, wrapped in swaddling cloths. Infinite, mighty God, now tiny, helpless.
Why? Why would he do that? He did it for you. In his infinite wisdom and knowledge, in his all-pervasive presence that transcends even time he saw you, in your darkness, in the blindness of your sins. He saw you in your weakness, completely helpless to know him and his glory and righteousness, unable to do anything except die. And the one thing that you could never know from the vastness of nature or the accusations of your conscience is that God is not just wise and powerful and holy but that God is love. And from eternity he saw you and he knew you and for no reason that you can claim for yourself he loved you.
The Word became flesh and dwelled among us. The glory of God has been revealed. Far greater than the vastness of space. Far wiser than the most complex of mathematical formulas. A Savior is born for you. He is Christ, the Lord. He is your light, your life, your salvation.
To all who did receive him, to those who believe in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. 13They were born, not of blood, or of the desire of the flesh, or of a husband’s will, but born of God.
The day of your natural birth is a day you probably celebrate. It’s the day that God brought you into this world and so it’s a day worth observing and even more, a day that ought to be, for you and your loved ones, a day of thanksgiving. But the birth that we celebrate today is a day that means new birth for all of us. The Word became flesh for us in the shadow of death so that in him we might have the light of life.
This is not natural birth. It is not of blood. It has nothing to do with our human ancestry. The Jews boasted, “We have Abraham as our father.” We cannot claim the piety of our parents for ourselves. It is not of the desire of the flesh. We were brought into this world by biology which isn’t always a beautiful thing, and in our personal and family histories there are probably more than a few things which are downright shameful. That’s not what this is. And it’s not “of a husband’s will” either. Every child who has been born into this world has been born either because of the desire of the flesh and a lack of self-control, or because of an honorable husband who sacrifices of himself and willingly marries a wife.
Except for Jesus. Jesus came into this world because he was born of God. He was the Word who became flesh in the womb of the virgin Mary. And he came into this world to be born for us, and to live for us, and to suffer and die for us, so that we too might be born of God, so that we might have this new birth, a true birth, in him. You must be born of water and the Spirit, Jesus said, and that we are. In Holy Baptism we are born again, to a new life in God. Our blood has inherited the original sin of Adam, but in baptism we are robed in the blood of Jesus, the Second Adam. The desire of the flesh has led us into one sin after another as far from God as we can run, but God has sought us out and sent to us his Son. Our very will is corrupted so that the sinful mind is hostile to God, but God in his grace has chosen us to be his own, and made us heirs of his heavenly kingdom together with our Lord Jesus Christ.
We have seen his glory. You are not groping in the dark to know God and his love for you. God in his infinite mercy has revealed himself. He came as a small and humble baby to hold in your heart and your mind. He stretched out his arms on the cross for you so that you can know the forgiveness of your sins. By Word and Sacrament he gives you a new life to live with him now and forever in the knowledge of his peace. The Word became flesh. Glory to God in the highest. Amen.
— Pastor Seth Georgson