God stepped into human time: Sermon for Midnight Mass, Christmas Eve 2025

preached by Fr Christopher Woods, Vicar. The Gospel Reading is John 1. 1-14

I’ve become very interested in the way in which Professor Brian Cox explains the mystery of Physics and Science. Since his job involves public engagement in science, he’s doing his job well. He tells us that travelling close to the speed of light might allow us to cross unimaginable distances in what feels like moments. For example, we could go to the Andromeda Galaxy in about a minute. But there’s a catch. You could go. You could see. You could experience wonders beyond words. But you could never really come back. Not in any meaningful way. By the time you returned, everything and everyone you loved would be gone. About 4 million years would have passed by. The knowledge would be locked inside you. The journey would be real, but un-shareable. But it is so far only a fantasy. A dream.

It’s a strangely poignant thought: that there are truths so vast, realities so extraordinary, that they lie beyond our ability to communicate them. We might glimpse them, but we cannot bring them home.

And that is where Christmas begins.

Because the Christian claim - the surprising, scandalous, joyful claim we celebrate tonight is that God refused to remain distant, un-shareable, locked away in inaccessible glory. God did not merely glimpse humanity from afar. God did not send back a message across the abyss. God did not shout instructions from the edge of eternity.

Instead, God came home. We can answer why to an extent, but how? We cannot.

“In the beginning was the Word,” says John. Not the kind of word spoken once and then lost to the void, but the Word who was with God and was God. The Word through whom all things came into being: galaxies, light, time itself. The Word that holds Andromeda together, and this fragile planet too. And that Word was and is Jesus Christ. Always existing with God and seemingly distant and mysterious but always longed for.

And then John says the impossible thing: “The Word became flesh and lived among us.”

Not appeared as flesh. Not pretended. Became.

The one who exists beyond time stepped into time. The one whom the universe cannot contain allowed himself to be held in a human body. The eternal Word learned to speak in syllables, to cry, to be fed, to sleep. God made the impossible possible — not by bending the laws of physics, but by bending low in love.

Christmas therefore is not the beginning of a story where God visits us briefly and then disappears again. It is about God staying. God choosing not only to come, but to remain close enough to be known, touched, rejected, loved, and finally crucified.

Unlike the impossible journey to the stars, this journey ends not in silence, but in communication. God comes back to us in a way we can understand — not as abstract truth, but as a human life. If you want to know what God is like, says John, look here. Look at Jesus. Look at how he lives, how he speaks, how he gives himself away.

And that’s why this night matters.

Christmas is not sentiment. It is not nostalgia. It is not about pretending the world is gentler than it is. It is about God insisting that the darkness is not final. That the gap between heaven and earth can be crossed — not by us striving upwards, but by God coming down.

John says that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Not because the darkness isn’t real — it very much is — but because God has entered it. Fully. Vulnerably. Irrevocably.

Tonight, we are not celebrating a clever idea or a comforting myth. We are celebrating the astonishing truth that God has made himself communicable. Shareable. Near. The knowledge of God is no longer locked away beyond time and space. It is wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger.

And that changes everything.

Because if God can do this then perhaps our own impossibilities are not the end of the story either. Perhaps forgiveness really can happen. Perhaps hope is not foolish. Perhaps light really does have the final word.

At Midnight Mass, in the stillness between one day and the next, we are invited not to understand everything, but to receive something. To welcome the God who has come close enough to be held.

The Word became flesh. And in doing so, God came back to tell us what love looks like.

Amen.