Eternity Shut in a Span: The Nativity of Christ as the Ultimate Epiphany

Christmas is the day that holds pride of place for most Christians. Of all the holidays, it is the one that garners the lion's share of our attention and generates the most excitement. But this has not always been the case. In terms of church history, Christmas, at least as we now observe it, was a relative latecomer. The earliest Christians showed relatively little interest in fixing the precise date of Christ's birth. However, we would be wrong to conclude from this that they viewed it as either unhistorical or unimportant. The Nativity of Christ was the ultimate epiphany. 

John Koessler's latest book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, is now available. You can get it from Amazon. 

Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and retired faculty emeritus of Moody Bible Institute. John writes the Practical Theology column for Today in the Word and a monthly column on prayer for Mature Living. He is the author of 16 books. His latest book , When God is Silent, is published by Lexham Press. You can learn more about John at https://www.johnkoessler.com.

Transcript

Christmas is the day that holds pride of place for most Christians. Of all the holidays, it is the one that garners the lion’s share of our attention and generates the most excitement. But this has not always been the case. In terms of church history, Christmas was a relative latecomer. Andrew McGowan, a scholar of early Christian worship, observes that feasts of Jesus’ birth “are not part of the earliest strand of how Christians sanctified time.”[1]  Christmas, at least as we now observe it, did not become a fixture on the church's calendar until the early part of the fourth century. McGowan points out that this is also reflected in the Gospels, the church’s primary sources for biographical information about its savior, which “offer nothing of significance” about either the year or the month of Jesus’ Nativity. [2]

To moderns, this apparent lack of interest seems odd. So many biographies begin with a simple statement of the date and year of their subject’s birth that it has become a literary cliché. We usually think of such data as a fundamental starting point for understanding any historical figure’s life and thinking. The absence of such a fixed point for Jesus has even caused some to conclude that the church’s belief in Jesus is a product of myth or legend.

We would be wrong, however, to conclude that the first Christians considered Jesus’ birth unimportant or less than factual. Three of the four Gospels emphasize Jesus’ birth, and the apostle Paul asserts that Christ died for the ungodly “at just the right time” (Rom. 5:6). The precise day and month may not have been of primary interest to the early Christians, but the timing was.

Matthew, for example, begins his account with a genealogy that traces the lineage of Jesus from Abraham but does not identify Joseph as his father. Instead, he describes Joseph as “the husband of Mary,” calling her “the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah” (Matt. 1:16). This distinction sets the stage for Matthew’s narrative of the events surrounding Christ’s birth, in which he underscores its miraculous nature without minimizing its factuality. He takes pains to portray the Nativity of Christ as a natural birth that was the result of a supernatural conception (Matt. 1:18).

Although Matthew does not fix the exact date of the birth, he does provide a narrative framework that indicates that these events took place in real-time. For example, Matthew begins his account by pointing out that Mary conceived while she was betrothed to Joseph, but before the actual wedding had taken place (Matt. 1:18). In Matthew 2:1, he tells us that the Magi arrived in Jerusalem “after” Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea and “in the days of Herod the king.”

Luke also begins his Gospel with a birth story. But Luke begins his account with a narrative of the birth of John, the forerunner, whose mission will be to announce Jesus’ coming. Luke also does not give a precise date or year for Jesus’ birth but does provide the same general historical beginning point for his account as Matthew does by observing that John was born “in the time of Herod king of Judea” (Luke 1:5). Herod the Great reigned from 40 BC to around 4 BC. Therefore, like Matthew, Luke places the Nativity of Christ within the framework of history.

Luke further anchors Jesus to history when he describes the circumstances that moved Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem. He explains that the change of location was precipitated by a “census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria” (Luke 2:2). Admittedly, there are scholarly differences of opinion about the actual identity of Quirinius and the precise date of the census. However, none of these obscures Luke’s clear intimation that the birth of Jesus occurred in historical time. Luke was not repeating stories that had their roots in the mists of legend and myth. His certainty of the historical nature of Christ’s life was bolstered further by the Gospel writer’s sources. He tells us that his information comes from “those who from the first were eyewitnesses” as well as careful investigation (Luke 1:2–3). Luke interviewed those who had seen and heard Jesus in the flesh.

Luke is also the first, at least in terms of the order of the Gospels, to use language about Jesus that describes his entrance into the world as an epiphany. In his prophetic hymn of praise, Zechariah (the father of John the forerunner) employs the imagery of light in a way that characterizes Jesus’ first coming as a divine visitation. Zechariah speaks of Jesus as “the rising sun” who “will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace” (Luke 1:79). Zechariah’s language alludes to the words of the prophet Isaiah, who spoke of a “great light” that would shine upon those living in deep darkness (Isa. 9:2).

John, like Matthew, wrote as an eyewitness of Christ’s acts and words both before and after the resurrection. Like Luke, John begins his Gospel by speaking of Jesus’ birth as a manifestation of God while confirming its historical nature (Luke 1:17). However, instead of narrating the specific details, John begins with a simple statement that simultaneously affirms the factuality of Christ’s birth and the reality his pre-existence. He describes Jesus as the Word, who was with God, was God, and tells us that this same Word “became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:1, 14). Jesus, John tells us, was the God who has always existed but was also born as an infant.

Like Matthew and Luke, John does not give us the date of Christ’s birth. Yet, in his first epistle, he speaks of Jesus in the most concrete way possible, calling him the Word of Life, “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched” (1 John 1:1). John knew Jesus as flesh and blood. But he also understood that Jesus was more than this. In 1 John 1:2, the apostle also uses a word that describes Christ’s incarnation as an appearance or manifestation (φανερόω) of the divine. This is the language of epiphany, but not in the lower sense that we often use the word today. We usually speak of “having” an epiphany. It is a way of talking that implies that such experiences are primarily subjective. One person’s epiphany is another person’s fantasy (or worse). But in its theological sense, an epiphany is primarily something God does. It is a manifestation of God. John does not merely say that he eventually came to understand Jesus in a deeper sense. His assertion is more concrete than this. John claimed to have heard, seen and touched God himself. The birth of Jesus was a visitation of God.

The notion of God visiting was certainly not a radical one in the ancient world. The old myths were full of such stories. Nor was the idea of divine visitation entirely alien to the religion of Israel. The foundation of the Old Testament is laid with stories about Abraham, Moses, and others who experienced theophanies in which God appeared to them in human form.[3] In Jesus Christ, however, God not only appears in human form, he becomes human. As John so strikingly puts it, with the birth of Christ, God is not only seen and heard, but also touched. John says that the Word “became” flesh.

Matthew, Luke, and John are not the only New Testament writers to employ the language of epiphany when speaking of the incarnation. The Pauline hymn of 1 Timothy 3:16 says that Christ appeared (ἐφανερώθη) in flesh. This refers not only to Jesus’ birth but to his entire life and ministry, which is summarized in the poetry of this verse. This statement was not intended to be a work of art. It is a confession of the faith that was “preached” and “believed” by the church. In a similar way, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews calls Jesus “ the exact representation" of God's "being” (Heb. 1:2). Yet he echoes the language of Genesis 1:27, where we are told that God “created mankind in his own image,” when he says in Hebrews 2:17 that the pre-existent Son was “made like” (ὁμοιωθῆναι) us, “fully human in every way.” The Te Deum, a Latin hymn of the 5th-century church, declares: “When Thou tookest upon Thee to deliver man, Thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb.” These New Testament writers tell us that neither did Jesus abhor the humanity that he became as a result of his sojourn there.

The miracle we celebrate at Christmas is that of Jesus Christ “becoming” the ultimate epiphany. The incarnation of Christ was a form of divine revelation in a tangible mode. John testifies that Jesus was heard, seen, and touched. Luke goes even further when he tells us that Jesus was conceived, carried in Mary’s womb, born, wrapped in cloths, and laid in a manger (Luke 2:6–7). The infant Christ did not merely look like a baby. He was a baby, as human, small, and fragile as the carols say. His birth was real, and so were its effects. Colossians 2:9 tells us that in Christ, “all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” But equally astonishing is the promise of verse 10, which assures us that in Christ, we also “have been brought to fullness.” This is a consequence not only of the “fullness of the Deity” that Christ has always possessed but also of the fullness of Christ’s humanity that was made possible by the incarnation.

Christmas is a celebration of the manifestation of the fullness of God in the humanity of Christ. Implicit in this is the promise that God will also manifest the fullness of his power in us. Christ is the embodiment of God. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, we become the embodiment of Christ. We do not become gods ourselves. But as Ephesians 2:4 reminds us, by putting on “the new self,” we become “like God.” You might call that an epiphany.

[1] Andrew B. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014), 249.

[2] Ibid.

[3] For example, Gen. 12:7; 16:13; 17