A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on December 25, 2023 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: John 1: 1-14
I lived for several years in Norwich. About two miles from my home was a small church called St Julian’s. On the north west side of the church was a room, about the size of an average sitting room. In that room, for several decades around the turn of the fifteenth century, lived a woman who gave her life to prayer. We don’t know her name, so she’s known as Julian, after the church where she lived. She had a series of visions when she was 30 years old. She wrote them down in a book called Revelations of Divine Love, which is the earliest surviving English language work by a woman.
In one of the best-known of her visions, Julian sees a hazelnut in the palm of her hand. She asks, ‘What may this be?’ and hears the reply, ‘It is all that is made.’ She marvels at how small the hazelnut is, and ponders how it is that things exist at all. She learns that things exist by the love of God. God makes, protects, and loves. Which, she realises, are the characteristics of God the Holy Trinity – the maker, the protector, the lover. She realises that the smallness of the hazelnut is significant, because through its smallness she realises how small the world is in God’s hands. Today we might say, how small the universe is in God’s hands. It is as if the hazelnut becomes, for Julian, the keyhole through which she sees the wonder of God.
That ability to perceive all truth through one tiny, created thing is a legacy picked up by poets that followed Julian. George Herbert says, ‘A man that looks on glass, On it may stay his eye; Or if he pleaseth, through it pass, And then the heav’n espy.’ Like Julian, Herbert is saying you can just focus on the window – or, you can see through that window and see all God’s heaven. Likewise William Blake says, ‘To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower: Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.’ Blake is making the same point – that through something tiny you can see everything.
When John begins his gospel with the words, ‘In the beginning was the word,’ and goes on shortly after to say, ‘And the word became flesh,’ he’s going a step beyond Julian, Herbert, and Blake. All three of them realised that a thing could be just a thing or become a keyhole through which we could espy all things. But John goes a step further. He doesn’t say a thing. He says a person. Jesus Christ is that person through whom we see all humankind, all creation. And Jesus Christ is that person through whom we see all of God. You can’t have a relationship with a hazelnut, a window, a grain of sand or a wild flower: they remain at arm’s length. But a person is different: a person can get inside your soul.
Nonetheless, Julian alights on something John’s gospel doesn’t identify. Julian highlights the smallness of the hazelnut. And its fragility. And that’s the insight that we uniquely get at Christmas. In fact, that’s the insight that’s at the very heart of Christmas. Because, yes, Christmas is the moment we see that everything in created existence is in Jesus, and everything in uncreated essence is also in Jesus. But we also see something else. And that is, that all of these things, created and uncreated, are embodied in the fragile frame of a tiny child. This tiny, vulnerable body is the world in a grain of sand, is heaven in miniature, is eternity in the hour of his birth. Mary really does hold infinity in the palm of her hand. John’s gospel doesn’t show us the baby: but Luke’s gospel does, because Luke paints the picture of the global census and the angels filling the starry sky and then narrows the picture on a stable, a manger, a baby, and swaddling clothes. What’s bigger than the huge census and the massive sky is the tiny baby.
But Christmas shows us another thing more than Julian, Herbert or Blake. The author chooses to enter the drama this way. The infant Jesus shows us who God is. The discovery of God in the body of a tiny, fragile baby shows us that God is not a threat to us. This is not a God who will overwhelm us with carpet bombing, savage slaughter, or cruise missile. This is a God who wants to sit in the palm of our hand. Christmas shows us that God is not determined to dominate us. This is not a God who will dictate rules to us or catch us out when we’re foolish or look to undermine us. This is a God who calls forth our care. Christmas Day shows us that God is not going to reject us. This is not a God who judges, condemns or humiliates us. This is a God who cries out to be embraced, longs to be enjoyed, and gurgles with delight in us.
Julian of Norwich discovered during many decades in that room that a hazelnut could tell her everything about God’s love for creation. We discover each Christmas Day that this tiny baby shows us everything we need to know about God, because God is pure gift, pure delight, pure joy. At the same time this tiny baby shows us everything we need to know about ourselves, because we are made to embrace, to care, and to cherish. This is our revelation of divine love; through this we the heaven espy; this is infinity in the palm of our hand.
Merry Christmas.
