Dec
16
2006
God Inside Out
”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.”
N.T. Wright – from Christmas Sermon at Durham Cathedral
See other Quotes of the Week