+N.T. Wright Christmas Sermon Durham Cathedral

God Inside Out
Hebrews 1.1–12

A small package arrived the other day in amongst the Christmas post. I didn’t want to open it if it was a present, but it looked more boring and official than that, and anyway my curiosity got the better of me. So I opened it; and out dropped a little metal object, about an inch square, slightly convex. I picked it up and looked at it and saw that there was some odd writing on one side. Then I realised: it was indeed boring and official. It was my own address, inside out. It was a replacement part for our office franking machine, the stamp that tells people where the letters have come from.
And then, the way preachers do, I realised it wasn’t boring at all; because I had already been reflecting on the first chapter of the letter to the Hebrews, the traditional epistle for Christmas morning. And there we find exactly that image used of Jesus: he is the radiance of God’s glory, and the exact imprint of his nature. The exact imprint: the word in Greek is character, which means the thing you get when you take a stamp and make an impression, whether on metal, to make a coin, or on wax, to seal a document, or on papyrus, to form a letter of the alphabet. The exact imprint is what you get when a stamp or a signet ring leaves the inside-out version of themselves on some other material.
And the wonder of Christmas morning is that today we are summoned to look at the baby in the manger and recognise whose stamp, whose imprint, he bears. On Christmas morning we find ourselves gazing at God inside out. This baby is what you get when the stamp of divine nature leaves its exact imprint in the soft metal of a human being. Jesus is the coin that tells you whose country you are living in. Jesus is the seal that tells us whose authority the document carries. Jesus is the alphabet, Alpha and Omega, beginning and ending, Chi and Rho, the Christ, Sigma for Soter, Saviour, Tau for the cross – the letters that speak of his identity, his vocation, his victory. When the living God wants to become human, this is how he spells his name, spells it in the character, the exact imprint, of his own nature, writes it in flesh and blood, soft, vulnerable human tissue, stamps it into the innermost being of the foetus in Mary’s womb, the light of the world who blinked and cried as his eyes opened to this world’s light, the source of life who eagerly drank his own mother’s milk. This is God inside out; O come, let us adore him.
This truth is so dazzling, so nourishing, that we ourselves blink at its brightness even as we come to feed on its richness. There are three ways in which it comes home to us today with particular force.

First, as the chapter itself emphasizes, this helpless, vulnerable, God-inside-out baby is superior even to the angels. The writer may be is responding to some in the early church who supposed that Jesus was some kind of angel, a messenger from God rather than God himself in human form. From that point of view, his human, flesh-and-blood character would be a kind of necessary accident, or even a necessary evil, rather than being part of the glory and the essence of who he was. Humans were made in God’s image against the day when God himself would come into his world in the most appropriate way, the most complete, fulfilling way, expressing his own very nature, impressing his own very nature in and as a human being. And until we grasp this – and this is of course the point of it all – we haven’t begun to grasp who God really is. The newspapers have run yet another survey on whether people believe in God, and for good measure life after death, the devil, and a few other bits and pieces, the flotsam and jetsam of the religious imagination of a bygone age. But the answers tell us little or nothing of much use, because most people, when they hear the question about God, imagine a being totally unlike the one whose exact stamp, whose precise impression, is there for us to see in the flesh and blood, the character in every sense, of Jesus of Nazareth, the baby in the manger, the young prophet dying on the cross. When people think of God they often think of him more like an exalted, detached spiritual being, a great angel, in fact, without much to do with our world of space, time and matter. I’m glad they don’t believe in that God; because nor do I. I believe in the God whose exact imprint is on display gurgling in the manger, arguing in the Temple, bleeding on the cross. I believe in the God made known in Jesus, who is so much greater than angels precisely because it is human beings who are made in God’s image, and this human being alone who bears the exact imprint of his nature. Until we come face to face with God as a baby, God as utterly vulnerable, God establishing his kingdom by living as an asylum-seeker with a price on his head, God growing up with sneers about his parentage, God announcing his kingdom and people saying he was mad, God confronting the authorities and dying a cruel death – until we come to terms with this God, until we realise that this God is far greater than all the super-spiritual beings in the cosmos, we haven’t even got on the map with Christian faith. This is God inside out: O come, let us adore him.

Second, therefore, this God is superior to all spiritual teachers and gurus. Once again – it happens every two or three years – someone has written a blockbuster full of conspiracy theories, of secret codes and suppressed documents, of hidden gospels and buried truth. We’ve heard it all before, but it still sells like hot cakes, because our culture badly wants to suppress the rumour of the true God, of the God-inside-out we see in Jesus, and so, in an act of astonishing chutzpah and projection, people make out that it is the church that has suppressed the truth – the truth, as they suggest, that Jesus was really an ordinary man, a great spiritual teacher, one who like a Buddhist master encouraged his followers to find a divine light inside themselves. This is what our generation wants to hear; which is why, quite suddenly, we are confronted in the bookshops not only with The Da Vinci Code, in several sizes and with DVDs and board games, but also with new editions of the so-called Gospel of Thomas, which is regularly cited in these conspiracy theories about early Christianity. Thomas is in fact a late second century collection of sayings supposedly from Jesus, but mostly garbled and mangled. When we look at it carefully, we find that Thomas isn’t about the redemption of the world, but about abandoning the world and escaping into a private spirituality. Tellingly, it offers a worldview from which every trace of the story of Israel has been removed; Thomas could never have had the angels singing about the birth of Israel’s Messiah. It tells you a certain amount about how to cultivate your own spirituality, but nothing about the God who turned himself inside out and became one of us.
And in particular, therefore, it offers no threat at all to the powers who carve up the world to their own advantage. The genuine Christmas story is far more subversive, far more powerful, far more dangerous, than all the coded or decoded ramblings of scrolls and paintings and secret gospels. The church rightly rejected all those as it took the message of God-inside-out into Caesar’s world, the world where what counted was not how clever you were with your spiritual interiority but how loyal you were to King Jesus when faced with lions in the amphitheatre or being burned at the stake. As Matthew saw, the true Christmas story was what made Herod shiver in his shoes; as Luke saw, it was the birth of Jesus that upended the world of Caesar Augustus. This truth is far more dangerous, not least because it was dangerous for God, the God who turned himself inside out to become one of us. That’s why the conspiracy theories are so popular: they give you the thrill of apparently knowing secrets without any corresponding cost or challenge. They debunk the truth and leave Caesar secure on his throne. The real secret, the secret we celebrate here this morning, the secret of God-inside-out, demands my soul, my life, my total loyalty. O come, let us adore him.

Third, therefore, to gaze at the one who bears the stamp, the character, of God’s own nature, is to be challenged at the deepest possible level about what we ourselves call ‘character’. We stand today at a crossroads, culturally, politically, socially, morally. We live in a world where might is right and where the greatest might on earth today gets muddled up with the message of Jesus himself. We live in a world where people cheat and lie and cover up evidence and then are congratulated on retaining their integrity. We live in a world where truth itself collapses into ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’, so that when these two collide and people get killed we can’t understand what’s gone wrong, and react in ways which simply make matters worse. And in this world you and I come to gaze on and adore a baby who bears the very stamp of God’s nature, and who therefore reveals, in that vulnerability which he carried all the way to the cross, the truth about what it means to be human, to reflect the image of God. And thus on Christmas Day, just as much as on Good Friday, we remind ourselves of one of the primary laws of spirituality, that you become like what you worship. And the test of whether we are really worshipping Jesus of Bethlehem, the Messiah in the manger, is whether as individuals and as a church we are learning to live out, and display before the world, that same character which was stamped upon him. We are called, in other words, to live by the Spirit as those in whom God’s own inside-out life has come to birth, as in our common life in the Body of Christ, our public witness before the world, our personal relationships, and the deep integrity of our own personalities, we are centred again and again in adoration of this Jesus, we find the same character being formed in us. Christmas is a call to humility and holiness, and the way we respond to that call always begins with worship. O come, let us adore him.

Christmas Day invites us therefore to see not only Jesus but our own selves in a new way. We may think of our lives, like the package I received the other day, as somewhat boring and humdrum. How can we possibly make a difference in the world, or even in the church? But God sees each one of us as a present, a special gift, which he is sending into the world, stamped with his own signature. He longs that each one of us should be within the world, by the power of the Spirit, what Jesus was uniquely and fully: God inside out, bearing the character which speaks of his love, his truth, his sovereignty. And the first step is always adoration. That’s why we’re here today. O come, let us adore him.