God Became a Baby - Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon

God Became a Baby - Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon

Bishop Robert Barron 

God Became a Baby

Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon

Merry Christmas, friends! 

As you gather today with family and friends, it is likely that someone, at some point, will bring in a newborn. And everybody will want to see the baby. The whole room will stop whatever they are doing to see this child. There is something irresistibly charming about babies; they bring out the best in us and call forth love from us. Well, at the center of our Christmas celebration is a strange, astonishing fact: God became a baby. The all-powerful Creator of the universe, the reason why there is something rather than nothing, became a baby too weak even to raise his own head. This was a stroke of divine genius. Again and again the Hound of Heaven sought us out, and again and again we ran away. But who can finally resist the baby who is God? 

Friends, our Gospel for Christmas day is the Prologue to the Gospel of John. In many ways, it is the entire Gospel, indeed the entire Bible, in miniature. 

Let’s turn to the central passage: “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” The word used in Greek here for “dwell” is Eskenosen, which means literally, “pitched his tent among us.” Don’t read that in a folksy way. It is meant to call to mind the tabernacle of the temple. 

The Word becoming flesh is God coming to dwell definitively in his world, undoing the effects of sin and turning it into what it was always meant to be. Notice, too, what we see in the wake of this tabernacling: “And we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.” 

So John is telling us that Jesus is the new Eden, the new temple, the restored creation, the realization of God’s intention for the world. And our purpose is not simply to gaze on this fact with wonder, but rather to enter into its power: “From his fullness we have all received, grace in place of grace.”