Creation Restored - Luke 7:1-23

Luke 7:1-23

“Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. - Luke 7:22

Today we begin the celebration of Christmas. At service we will remember the babe in the manger, the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. Due to familiarity and nostalgia brought on by years of tradition and Christmas programs, it is easy to overlook the significance of what we are actually celebrating.

Jesus. One part of the Trinity. God Himself. The Creator, who in the beginning spoke creation into existence, stepped into that creation as a man. How mind-blowing this is can get lost in the pageantry, so it bears repeating. God, the holy God who created everything (time, space, matter), became a physical part of this fallen, sinful, broken creation. He did that to redeem creation. And not just to redeem it, but to restore it.

This is another point that gets lost. Modern American Christianity has given many people an idea that heaven is simply the saints sitting on clouds and playing harps. How boring. Our readings this week give us a much better idea of what we actually have to look forward to. In Revelation 21 and 22 we get the image of a new heavens and a new earth. Creation restored. Better, even, then the Garden of Eden. We are given the image of a great and beautiful city, a new Jerusalem, one that doesn’t need a temple, because God (Jesus) is the temple.

A foretaste of this was given when Jesus entered creation. As we see in our Gospel reading this week (Luke 7:1-23), the dead are raised, the sick healed. Elsewhere in the Gospels the blind receive sight, the lepers are cleansed. Everywhere Jesus goes, the effects of the curse are reversed.

This is what it means that Jesus came in the flesh. It means that we can look forward to, as we confess in the Nicene Creed, “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” We don’t see it fully yet, but that is why the season of Advent not only looks forward to Jesus’ first coming, as a babe in the manger, but also to his second coming, when he comes “to judge the living and the dead” and restore creation.

That’s what makes Christmas so special.

Amen. Come Lord Jesus.

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Christmas Day Service is at 9am.