The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
There’s an old theological axiom. They go back to the early church fathers — some scholars attribute it to Saint Augustine. The axiom is this: what God has not assumed, God has not redeemed. You see, within the early church there arose several heresies regarding the divine and human nature of the person of Jesus Christ. One of these groups was called the Docetists. They taught that the Son of God did not take on flesh — that Jesus was not really born of the virgin — that Christ, the real Christ, was merely an illusion of the physical body, and that only the divine nature existed in the illusion of actual physical appearance.
The idea that God would defile himself by taking on flesh was simply offensive. It was unreasonable. It broke all the axioms accepted by philosophical reasoning. One of those responses to this false doctrine was to assert, and rightly so, that if Christ has not taken on human flesh, then no human flesh is redeemed. That Christ must take flesh — human being completely, every single self, body, soul, and mind, as well as the human experience — into himself, if he is in fact going to cleanse it, redeem it, atone for it. Conversely, if Jesus was fully human and fully divine, then all things in the human body and the soul and every single individual human experience, and human life itself, is redeemed.
The Docetists believed that Jesus was divine, but they could never get over the fleshly part of the Son of God. Now for the past 150 years, modern and post-modern theologians have gone in the opposite direction, trying to accomplish the very same goal. By the way, most colleges, including most seminaries and colleges related to churches, along with their sponsoring church bodies, deny the divine nature of Jesus and any miracles associated with him, including and especially a miraculous conception and birth. These so-called scholars teach that Jesus was not born of a virgin. They typically believe that Jesus is the biological son of Joseph, or perhaps a Roman soldier that violated Mary.
But on either side of the heretical street, the same axiom applies, to ancient and modern theories alike: what the divine nature has not taken into itself shall not and is not redeemed — that is, is condemned unto everlasting damnation. If Jesus isn’t fully human and fully divine, then your sins are not forgiven. And if your sins are not forgiven, you are not then saved from eternal condemnation.
Luther, in his typical diplomatic form, said it this way: “Christ must be true God, otherwise we are all damned to hell forever. We worship the God-man Jesus Christ. There is no other holy, fully divine being to whom we can look for our salvation.”
Thus Isaiah 7:14’s promise is a unique promise — utterly unique: “Behold, the virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call his name Emmanuel” — which of course means “God with us.” Then there’s Colossians 2:9-10: “For in him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form; in him you have been made complete.” Or Philippians 2:6-9: “Who, being in the very nature of God, did not consider equality with God a thing to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing, taking on the form of a servant, being made in human likeness, being found in the appearance of a man. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross.”
Jesus was and is the perfect Son to his heavenly Father, as well as his legal earthly father. Throughout the Advent season, we each Wednesday night considered a father-son relationship, and as we learned, those relationships — marred, begun, and carried out in sin — turned out very badly, mostly for the sons. Right? Okay: Cain, the murder of his brother Abel; Ishmael, one who made a false claim to being the promised one of Sarah and Abraham; Absalom, who lived in absolute rejection of his father, plotted against King David to kill him and to take the throne. Three sons you don’t want to have in your family — three sons who went terribly wrong.
Thus the whole world needed a son who didn’t do any of those kinds of things. Jesus Christ, true God and true man, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, is the perfect Son to God the Father, who himself is perfect, in whom — his standards quite high — of Jesus the Father said, and only about Jesus: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” No other person in all history has that statement made about them other than Christ Jesus the Lord.
Remember: the story — he tells the story — of the only perfect Father and the only perfect Son dwelling in a perfect relationship in a post-fallen world. Jesus summarizes this perfect relationship in this way: “I and the Father are one.”
Even as a boy, Jesus devoted himself to his Father’s business. Right? He turned up missing on that famous trip to Jerusalem. Mary and Joseph looked all over the city, everywhere, trying to find him. For days they looked. And then finally they found him in the temple, and Jesus said, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
This father-son relationship is proclaimed in many of our Christmas hymns and carols, some of which you’re singing this weekend: “Hail to the Lord’s anointed, great David’s greater Son.” “Of the Father’s love begotten, ere the worlds began to be, He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He.” “Silent night, holy night! Son of God, love’s pure light.” That’s from “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” And this last one: “Now, through the sun, the shine of the Father’s divine grace.”
Time and time again we simply take it for granted, this father-son relationship between the Son of God and God the heavenly Father. But we don’t quite really grasp exactly what it means not to be one of his sons or daughters of the heavenly Father. The Scripture teaches we were all once children of darkness, and still today our sinful nature visits that dark — that darkness — day after day, time after time. But to make us children of light once again, in God’s image, God the Father sent God the only-begotten Son into the world — the Son of Man and the Son of God — to be the perfect child, the perfect Son, in our stead, under the law which God himself had given.
Galatians 4:4: “When the fullness of time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law” — that you and I — “so that we might receive adoption as sons.” Or Romans 8:3: “For what the law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh as an offering for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.” Had he not had flesh, he could not condemn sin in the flesh.
Jesus is, you see, the true Son of the heavenly Father. He is a true and faithful son of Adam, the promised seed of Genesis chapter 3. But unlike Adam, the first father, the woman’s seed committed no sin. 1 Peter 2:22-23: “He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. He was reviled, but he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.”
Unlike their first son — Cain — you know what that turned out like. Mary and Joseph’s son committed no murder, nor did he have any thoughts thereof, of murder or of hate. He did no evil deeds and spoke no evil words — in other words, he was the perfect Son. In thought and word, instead of hating and wanting others dead, he offered himself up as the perfect sacrifice. The Son of God, our Good Shepherd, gave himself up into the hands of murderers and breathed his last and gave up his spirit in atonement for the sins of the world and for your sins.
That was the will of the heavenly Father, and that’s exactly what the Son came to do. The thing that the other three sons never did: the will of their father. John 6:38: Jesus says, “For I have come down from heaven not to do my will, but the will of him who sent me.”
Jesus is also the son of Abraham, the one through whom all the nations of the world would be blessed. Jesus is no Ishmael. Paul wrote that Ishmael was a “wild donkey of a man.” He’s quoting that Old Testament text: his hand was against everybody, and he lived in defiance of all of his brothers. He was an outlaw — horrifically, one openly hostile to the very promises of the Lord God. But the perfect Son of the Father, who was no wild donkey — he rode a donkey, but he wasn’t one. His hand was against none. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, for they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. And of his brothers, Jesus said to his Father: “Of those whom you have given to me, I have lost not one.”
Jesus is the true son of King David, who himself is the King of kings and the Lord of lords, who remains the perfectly obedient Son to his heavenly Father. Jesus had no deceit in his mouth. He sought no earthly kingdom. He said, “My kingdom is not of this world” — “if my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting.”
Unlike Absalom, the perfect Son of the perfect Father became a curse and was hanged from a tree for the sins of the world and for yours. Thus the promise: “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be upon his shoulders, and he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
God provided for himself the perfect Son, the perfect child that we could never be — perfect in all things — so that you and I would be regarded, imputed, with his perfect righteousness as a son and as a child of the heavenly Father, so that you too, by faith in the water and the Word of Holy Baptism, would also be made children of the heavenly Father — perfect sons and daughters, perfect brothers and sisters to Jesus Christ — here in part, but there in eternity, in all its fullness.
Before the foundation of the world was made, God chose you to be holy and blameless and spotless in his eyes. On this Christmas Eve we humble ourselves, and we celebrate with reverence the perfect child who was born unto us, the perfect Son who was given in our place.
For what God has not assumed into himself, he has not redeemed. What God has assumed into himself, he has redeemed. And what has he assumed into his own flesh? You. Your sins are forgiven. May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.