Sermon-Word of the Father now in flesh appearing

A homily given during a service of Holy Communion at St Olave Hart Street on Thursday 25th December 2025 based on the text of Isaiah 52.7–10, John 1.1–14.

 There’s something infectious about singing. Not the latest public health guidance on how to stop the spread of colds and flu -  singing is infectious joy! As we found out when we revived the tradition of Wassailing here earlier this month. Not long after one voice starts the melody off, a huge crowd is joining in carol singing, following us from street to street and pub to pub as the dark sheets shineth with joyous light. This is the power of song — it carries Good News to the parts speech alone cannot reach. It draws people together. It reminds us that once released, joy is hard to contain.

 

The prophet Isaiah assures his exiled people that God reigns and that he will be victorious; that God is Saviour and Comforter. This Good News sets off a chain reaction of melody. The sentinels keeping watch lift up their voices - then the ruins of Jerusalem burst into joyous song. What was desolate becomes resonant. The Good News of salvation is embodied by the whole of creation, in song.

John’s gospel begins with the same proclamation, but on a cosmic scale. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

This Word is not just speech or sound. It is God’s expression of himself. His very life and being communicated in a single Word. Today we celebrate the extraordinary claim at the heart of the Gospel – that the Word became flesh and lived among us.

 

That is the wonder of Christmas. And it’s a small wonder. God does not arrive with a bang but as a tiny infant. The infinite becomes intimate. The Word does not engulf or overpower the world; it dwells within it.

 

Because we feel it, music seems to captures this paradox better than any rational thought or explanation. 

 

An organist friend of mine maintains that Christmas has only truly arrived once he plays O Come All Ye Faithful. Specifically, when he reaches the chord in the David Willcocks arrangement of the carol at the start the last line of the final verse: “Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing”. It’s an unexpectedly jazzy chord; beautiful, but slightly dissonant - a yearning sound - something that you know is going to lead somewhere; rooted in the familiar but filled with the promise of change and transformation.

 

Some musicologists have argued that this chord - which also appears in several other popular Christmas songs - has some sort of special significance. Christmas itself compressed into a single harmony. Others think they’ve had too much sherry trifle! 

Whoever is right, there is no denying that Christmas is about both recognition and surprise. Something familiar yet something dissonant. Filled with the promise of change and transformation.  

The gospel teaches us that the Word does not remain distant or abstract but becomes familiar. God enters human life fully — with us in every possible moment that life throws at us – unharmonious times included. And not for a few beats, but forever.

More than that, the Word dwells within those who receive him. The living Word seeks to grow in us — to take root, to shape how we see, how we listen, how we love.

Whatever the circumstances we are inhabiting this day — whether a bustling family Christmas or Christmas alone, whether it will be joyful or heavy — God is with us. And we glimpse this living Word not only in what is majestic, but also in what is mundane.

In the small miracles of ordinary life: a brief phone call, a pause for reflection, the sudden memory of someone loved, an embrace, a letter arriving unexpectedly. These are places where the Word continues to take flesh — reminders that the extraordinary is found in the everyday.

The living word is God’s love compressed into a single harmony. Christ is the Christmas chord musicologists have been searching for.

In Christ, the familiar and the strange, the joyful and the painful, the resolved and the dissonant are held together. His birth set off a chain reaction of melody on that first Christmas night: a song of love which we are all invited to sing, afresh, together – and especially loudly today.

Yea, Lord, we greet thee,

born this happy morning;

Jesus, to thee be glory giv’n;

Word of the Father,

now in flesh appearing.

O come, let us adore him;

Christ the Lord!