As has been our pattern here at First Presbyterian Church over the years, we are going to make use of the opportunity afforded by the Advent season, of which today is the first Sunday, to take a break from our studies in Paul’s letter to the Galatians and to consider the meaning of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. And God willing, we’ll come back to Galatians and finish it in the new year. This Advent we are going to come at the Christmas story a little obliquely. There are a number of places in the gospels where we hear Jesus Himself sum up the reason for His birth and for His coming. And so we’re going to listen to Jesus’ own words each week and let Him tell us Himself what Christmas was all about. This is going to be “Christmas According to Jesus” for the Advent season.
And the first passage to which I would like to direct your attention may be the least Christmasy of the lot, so take your Bibles in hand and turn with me please to John’s gospel, chapter 18, and to verses 33 through 40. John 18:33-40 and to the account of Jesus’ trial before Pontius Pilate. You can find that, if you’re using one of our church Bibles, on page 904. Now maybe you’re thinking, “Strain is trying to ruin our Christmas! We’ve barely begun the Advent season and here he goes! Everyone else is looking at the angels’ annunciation to Joseph and then to Mary, and we’re thinking about the census when Quirinius was governor of Syria, and no room at the inn, and how the cattle with their big adoring brown eyes are lowing and the little Lord Jesus no crying He makes.” And not to sound too much like the Grinch who stole Christmas here, but I very much doubt that the little Lord Jesus never cried. Don’t you? In fact, I’d argue that it’s theologically vital for us that the infant Jesus expressed Himself in the same way that all babies do when they’re hungry and let out His urgent, dependent, wails and cries for His mother’s attention just like the rest of us, because vitally, He is truly a human being. But put that aside for a minute. Everyone else is thinking about the shepherds who kept their watch by night and the angelic choir singing, as we did earlier, “Gloria in Excelsis Deo!” But not us, oh no! Ebenezer Strain has us in Pilate’s courtroom, Jesus standing trial for His life – Merry Christmas!
Well I hear you, but before you write me off, you might consider that right at the climax of the trial, in John 18:37, Pilate will shortly render his verdict and all the momentum now is racing toward the cross, right here Jesus Himself is thinking about Christmas. As He faces death, He’s thinking about His birth and about why He came. Listen to part of John 18:37 – “For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world.” We may not prefer to think about the sufferings and the crucifixion of Christ and we might wish to stay on the nativity at Christmas, but the truth is, there really is no way to make sense of the nativity without the passion, and no way to understand Christmas without the cross – is there? We can’t stay at the manger. We have to follow Jesus into the courtroom and onto Calvary. And so I guess if you’re hoping for the sermonic equivalent of “It’s a Wonderful Life” to leave you feeling all Christmasy this Advent season, I’m sure you’ll be disappointed in these messages. But if you really want to penetrate into the wondrous mystery of why God should become man in Jesus Christ, well I doubt we can do better than to listen to the God-Man Himself tell us why He was born and what it is that He came to do.
And as we think about John 18:37 in its context, today I want to consider three with you from Jesus’ words here. First of all, He will tell us what Christmas is, what it is, that first Christmas. Then secondly, why Christmas happened; why the first Christmas took place. And finally, He’ll tell us why it matters so very much. What Christmas is, why Christmas happened, and why Christmas matters. That’s where we’re going. Before we read the passage together, let’s pause and pray and then we’ll think about those themes. Let us pray together.
Lord Jesus, we are reading the account of a most solemn moment in Your life and suffering, and we pray as we hear Your Word, as we hear Your voice, we pray for ears to hear and for receptive hearts. Would You send us please the Holy Spirit to work those things into our lives, that in the light of Your Word we might trust You and live, for we ask this in Your name, amen.
John 18 at verse 33. This is the Word of God:
“So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ Jesus answered, ‘Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?’ Pilate answered, ‘Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?’ Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.’ Then Pilate said to him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world – to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.’ Pilate said to him, ‘What is truth?’
After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, ‘I find no guilt in him. But you have a custom that I should release one man for you at the Passover. So do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?’ They cried out again, ‘Not this man, but Barabbas!’ Now Barabbas was a robber.”
Amen, and we praise God that He has spoken in His holy Word.
What Christmas Is
Well the statement that draws our attention this morning is in verse 37 and it comes in the context, as we have seen, in Jesus’ trial as Pilate presses our Lord to explain what kind of king He is. His kingdom, He tells Pilate in reply, “is not of this world.” Instead, He was born that first Christmas to inaugurate a kingdom that is defined and characterized by the truth. “For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I came into the world – to bear witness to the truth.” And so here first of all we learn what Christmas is. That is to say, in the opening clauses of verse 37, Jesus tells us what was really going on that day thirty-three years earlier in the little town of Bethlehem. At the risk of stating the obvious, you’ll notice He starts by telling us, “I was born.” In some ways, that’s a self-evident statement, isn’t it, but don’t miss how He amplifies the point. Not only was “I born,” but “I came into the world.” That He was born reminds us of all the familiar details of the Christmas story. His mother, Mary, conceived, albeit miraculously while still a virgin, but the baby in her womb grew and developed just as we do. And when forty weeks were completed, Jesus was born in the same way other babies are born. Jesus had an umbilical cord. Jesus had to be fed and nursed. And yes, Jesus cried. There was a time when Jesus couldn’t walk and had to be carried. His brain was still developing. His ability to make sense of the world grew in a manner commensurate with His age. And so His parents taught Him to crawl and then to stand and then to take His first steps. Jesus fell over. Jesus bumped into things. He had to learn how to speak and how to read and how to write. He started with milk and moved onto baby food and then to more solid food. He was born. Jesus isn’t God merely looking like a man. Jesus is a man! Really, thoroughly, comprehensively, perfectly human. “I was born,” He said.
But amazingly, His birth was not His absolute beginning. The person of Christ existed before becoming human. And so He says, “I came into the world.” John who authors the gospel uses this very phrase in his prologue to the gospel to speak about Christ’s preexistence. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him and there was not anything made that was made without Him. In Him was life and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. The truth light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.” The Word who is God, who made all things, in whom is light and life, He was coming into the world. “I came into the world,” Jesus now tells Pilate.
So you see the claim that He is making. As touching His humanity, we have to say He had a beginning, conceived in the womb of the virgin, born with ten fingers and ten toes and laid in a manger and cradled in her arms. But as touching His deity, as the Word who was with God and who was God, as God the Son, His birth was not His beginning. He always was. His birth, rather, was His coming into the world in a new way, uniting human nature to His divine nature forever in one person. No wonder the skies split in rapture as the angels sang their gloria on the night of His birth. This was no ordinary birth. No wonder the shepherds worshiped Him and the wise men brought Him gifts. No wonder the aged Simeon, when he took the child in his arms, exulted and said, “Now You are letting Your servant depart in peace, according to Your Word. For my eyes have seen Your salvation!” The one who was born was the one through whom all things were made. “And without whom was not anything made that has been made.” Mary’s child, nursing at her breast, was Mary’s God in whom she lived and moved and had her being. “God of gods, light of light, lo he abhors not the virgin’s womb. Very God begotten not created. O come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.”
One more quick thing about what Christmas is from our text. You’ll notice twice over Jesus says, “for this purpose.” “For this purpose I was born.” “For this purpose I came into the world.” Not only is Christmas the birth of the God-Man, but it was therefore necessarily of course a purposeful birth; a birth according to plan. We’re not to imagine that Jesus was born and then as He grew like the rest of us He sort of figured out what He wanted to do with His life. To be sure, Jesus grew in His understanding of His mission. He learned from the Scriptures. He had the benefit of direct revelation from God by the Holy Spirit to His human mind so that His comprehension of what it was He was born to do certainly grew and matured and deepened over time. All of that is true, but there never was any question about what His purpose was. He didn’t cobble it together or invent it for Himself. He did not set His own path or chart His own course. He was born and came into the world for a purpose. His birth was itself according to plan.
He is the long, promised One. We read about the first promise of His coming in Genesis chapter 3 a few moments ago. The seed of the woman who would come to crush the head of the serpent. The seed of David who would reign on His Father’s throne forever. The seed of Abraham in whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. The Lamb of God who would come to take away the sin of the world. The prophet like Moses, the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of Jesse, the One the Father sent forth “in the fullness of time, born of a woman, born under the law to redeem those under the law.” Jesus didn’t become Messiah as He matured and began to display aptitude. This is not a job He applied for. “I think I’d be a good fit.” That never crossed His mind! This was, rather, what He was born to be and born to do. All the ages have been waiting for Him. All the hopes of Israel focused upon Him. And all the need of all the lost in every age and in every place are met only in Him. And so Jesus here tells us something about what Christmas is. It is the Advent of the God-Man, truly human, truly God, two natures in one person forever, long promised, eagerly awaited, and now finally come.
Why Christmas Happened
But then secondly, Jesus tells us about why Christmas happened. Look again at verse 37. “For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I came into the world” – why? “To bear witness to the truth.” Why did Jesus come? Why did Christmas happen? It happened, He was born, that He might bear witness to the truth. Two things to notice there very quickly. First of all, there is the “witness” language that Jesus uses. “I came to bear witness,” He said. Don’t you find it striking He should use this legal language here in His trial before Pilate. Herman Ridderbos, one of the great commentators on John’s gospel, in his remarks on this verse makes a very astute observation. He says, “Jesus standing before the judgment seat of Pilate is using the language of the courtroom but not as the accused, testifying on His own behalf, but as one who in the suit that God brings against the world has come to testify against the rule of the lie and for the truth. Jesus has reversed the roles in His trial with His answer to Pilate’s question. He makes no attempt to refute the charge brought against Him or to persuade Pilate that He is not a public danger. Instead, He is, in this trial, posing the questions that will really bring out the truth.” Jesus is a witness here, isn’t He, but He’s not speaking in His own defense. No, Jesus stands before Pilate as a witness for the prosecution in God’s case, in God’s lawsuit against all who have exchanged the truth of God for a lie and who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
Christmas happened so that sin and error and all the spiritual deception that blinds the eyes of the unbelieving world might be challenged and unmasked and exposed. Christmas happened so that no one could stand before God at the last day and say, “There’s no way we could have known better.” We can’t say to Him, “You didn’t pursue us. You never reach out to us. You left us in the dark, groping for answers on our own.” “No, no,” He will say. “I came Myself to bear witness to the truth.” That’s why He was born. That’s why He came into the world. There will be no excusing your rejection of Jesus. There will be no defense on the final day at the great tribunal of God for the way you have lived if you resist His offers of mercy. Jesus was born to bear witness.
And given all that, the other thing we need to unpack a little here is what Jesus means by “the truth.” He came to “bear witness to the truth.” Certainly He means more than that He came to set the record straight in contrast to our many errors. He means more than that He came to give us some additional facts about God to which we otherwise could have no access. He did all of that, certainly, to be sure, but in John’s gospel in particular, when Jesus talks about “the truth,” He has something much more expansive in mind than correct notions and accurate conclusions. Jesus, as John put it in his prologue, is “full of grace and truth.” Or as Christ would say of Himself in John 14 for example, “I am the way and the truth and the life. I am the true bread. I am the true vine. I am the true light.” It means that He is Himself the real thing, the ultimate reality, the final answer for which all our hearts are seeking. He is in His person the revelation of God to a sin-darkened world. In Jesus, Truth with a capital “T” has stepped onto the scene of history into a world of confusion and ignorance and error. He is the Truth.
And that has enormous implications, doesn’t it? You don’t get it yet, you don’t understand why that first Christmas happened if all you’ve got are the historical facts about the birth of this child two millennia ago. You need that, you need the facts, but you need more than that. The first Christmas happened so that the Truth Himself might step onto the scene of human history. And we can only begin to grasp its meaning, His testimony, when we begin to know Him personally for ourselves.
Why Christmas Matters
And that really brings us to the third thing I want us to see here. First, what Christmas is. It is the birth of the son of Mary, the long promised Messiah, and the coming into the world of the Lord of glory Himself, all in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. And secondly, why Christmas happened. It happened that a testimony might be made, an irrefutable testimony, in person as it were, by the truth Himself, to the Truth. God has come amongst us and taken flesh and dwelt among us to reveal God to us, to make Him known, and to call us, all of us, to Himself. Not to embrace mere information about Him, but to enter into relationship, into fellowship with Him. And now finally, with all of that in place, we are ready to think about why Christmas matters so very much. Look again at verse 37. “For this purpose I came into the world – to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to My voice.” And Pilate, for his part, is entirely unimpressed with Jesus’ words here, isn’t he? Verse 38, he responds with a sneer, “What is truth?” It is dismissive and unbelieving. These are not the words of an earnest seeker looking to know the truth at last. He’s not pleading for truth. If he had been, he would have undoubtedly received it from the one who is the truth in person, standing right there before him. No, these are the words of a cynic who doesn’t believe in truth. He believes in political expediency. He believes in power and influence. He cares nothing for truth.
But then do you see how in Jesus’ words and in Pilate’s response we actually have two alternatives set before us? As we begin this Advent season, we really have to face honestly the choice they present to us. On the one hand, we have an invitation. “All who are of the truth listen to My voice.” And on the other, we have the contempt of one who already thinks he has everything – power and money and influence and fame. What need does he have of the truth? But as you read through John’s account here, isn’t it clear that it’s not really Jesus who is on trial after all? It is Pilate himself. And in this courtroom, Pilate is the one exposed as guilty.
As you survey your life over this past year, almost now a full year, it’s entirely possible that you feel satisfied with your lot. “I have a happy home. I have a lovely house. I have a good job. I have money in the bank and food on the table and clothes on my back. I am loved. I am respected. I am valued. What need do I have for Jesus?” Like Pilate before you, you may dismiss the One who was born to bear witness to the truth. You won’t listen to Him. When Jesus says, “All who are of the truth listen to My voice,” the word “listen” there, it doesn’t just mean to audibly hear Him with your ears. It means to listen and understand. It means to listen and believe, to embrace what you hear. The One who is the truth, the real One, the One who is the answer that our hearts are hardwired to seek, this One invites us to turn from the lie of our independence and our pretended self-sufficiency and to turn instead to Him, to hear His voice in the word of the Gospel. When we do that, He says, we become people of the truth. Not just truthful people but people of the truth – true ones, joined to the one who is Himself the Truth. His kingdom is a kingdom of truth and all its citizens embrace Him, the One who is the truth. Pilate, for all his power and all his position knows nothing of the truth. He was living in darkness and spiritual blindness.
But Christmas happened, Christ has come into the world, He was born for this purpose – “to bear witness to the truth.” And all who are of the truth listen to His voice. Can you hear His voice? Are you listening? He wants to shatter the darkness of your ignorance and spiritual blindness and the illusion of your independence and self-sufficiency. It’s a hollow, empty deception that you are embracing. He wants to bring the light of truth into your hearts. Listen to His voice. Do you see why Christmas matters so very much? It’s not really about family or presents or food or nostalgia, as lovely as those things are. Christmas matters because the birth of Christ, the Truth, in the birth of Christ, the truth became to shine into the darkness to give us the light of life. Until you listen to His voice, until you come to Christ in repentance and faith, until you entrust yourself entirely to Him, you still walk in the darkness. But if you will come to Him, He promises to give you the light of life and that is the greatest of Christmas gifts. The light of life – to know the Truth that will set you free.
Let’s pray together.
Our Father, we praise You for Jesus, the God-Man, who took our humanity into union with His deity that He might become to us the path of access to God, that He might reconcile the world to You. We bless You for Him. We praise You that in Him the light of life, the light of truth, shines clearly into the darkness. Help us, all of us now, to hear His voice and to come to Him. For we ask it in Jesus’ name, amen.