What Child Is This? / John 1:1-14 / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Wednesday December 25th 2025/ Christmas Day / Mount Olive Lutheran Church

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Thursday December 25th 2025: Christmas Day / John 1:1-14 “What Child Is This?”

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 without Him was not any thing made that was made. 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.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through Him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, yet the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own people did not receive Him. But to all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends today during Holy Communion we are slated to sing the Christmas hymn “What Child Is This”[1] which starts out with the question “What Child is this, who, laid to rest, On Mary’s lap is sleeping?” Our Gospel Reading from the Gospel of Saint John sets out to answers this question. This Child is the Word who became flesh who dwelt among us, who Saint John and the other disciples, and all who followed Him in those days, became witnesses of; witnesses of His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

For the most part, these days, when a baby comes into the world we don’t know what they will be when they grow up. But there was a time when if your father was a shoemaker and you were the eldest boy of a shoemaker then you would grow up to work as a shoemaker like your father and your father before him. And this was true from shoemakers to kings. The other children in the family would also be involved in the family work, any of you who grew up on a farm likely knew this to be true in your childhood.

Last Sunday I mentioned Jesus’ guardian Saint Joseph as being a carpenter as Scripture teaches and this is fitting. Jesus’ heavenly Father chose to have Jesus raised in the house of man who built things, made things with his hands. Think on the way Jesus is described by Saint John in our Gospel Reading today, “All things were made through Him, and without Him was not any thing made that was made.” You fall under the category of “any thing made that was made,” Jesus and His heavenly Father and the Lord and giver of life the Holy Spirit where all involved in making you,[2] in giving you the gift of your, “body and soul, eyes, ears, and all [your] members, [your] reason and all [your] senses.”[3]  What we do with them and the way they are treated by others, and what you are taught about them will vary. Sometimes you will be in alignment with what the Lord intended, and sometimes due to the fall you may be guided down perilous paths that that Lord never intended.

Because of the fallen nature of the World, where thorns infest the ground, you are not simply one who needed to be created but also one who due to the effects and powers of sin needed to be redeemed and rescued: which leads us to the purpose of the coming of this babe, the son of Mary who ‘shepherds guard and angels sing,’ and likewise leads us to the second question that this Christmas hymn asks, “Why lies He in such mean estate where ox and ass are feeding?” Saint John in our Gospel Reading says that Jesus came to give us “the right to become children of God.” This is one of the reasons why He came as a child, a baby conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary His mother. While silent in the womb through those nine months leading to His birth, while an infant who said no words wrapped in swaddling cloths and laying in a manger this Child was already at work to save you from your sin, from the works and ways of the devil, from death, from the World and even from yourself and so we’ll sing, “Nails, spear shall pierce Him through, The cross be borne for me, for you; Hail, hail the Word made flesh, The babe, the son of Mary!” And so we see how from the beginning, from before the beginning, from eternity this Child was always about His heavenly Father’s business, His heavenly Father’s work.

And so as Saint John says: “For those who did receive Him He gave the right to become children of God” a gift given through a redemptive rebirth that lavish washing away of sin in the waters of Holy Baptism. And because His heavenly Father loved us in this way: Saint Paul explains that “[the Father] saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, so that being justified by [His Son Jesus’] grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.”[4] And so Saint John says “were [therefore] born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”

Yes, Jesus came to redeem us in the flesh so that we in our flesh could be redeemed. This is the Child who lay on the Virgin Mary’s lap, the very “King of kings [who] salvation brings.”

Those little kisses on the crown of this Child’s tender head that would on Good Friday be wreathed in a dreadful crown of thorns as He was stretched out and nailed upon the cross as an adult, this is the kind of thing that can hardly be imagined when one holds a precious baby in their arms. And to think that the same face of the Virgin Mary that looked down with awe upon Jesus’ little face upon her lap would later look up and see her baby boy crucified as a man for the sins of the whole world, even for her the sins she herself committed in her life. We are not told how much Mary knew about what was to come when she looked down upon His sacred face that first Christmas but she was told by the angel Gabriel that this Child would be great and would be called the Son of the Most High. And that the Lord God would give to Him the throne of His father David, and He would reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His kingdom there would be no end.”[5] And to Saint Joseph an angel of the Lord said to him in a dream that this Child conceived of the Holy Spirit would “save His people from their sins.”[6] I’m sure Mary and Joseph compared notes.

Dear ones they each had Good News to tell the other and you have Good News to tell to the people in your life. 1) First that this Child in the Virgin Mary’s lap is the Son of God, the very Word of God made flesh, 2) that He came to as the Light of the World in the darkness to save us and to give us the right to become children of God. There is no better gift that this. This is a gift you cannot give to yourself. As Saint John likewise teaches “from His fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”[7] Which is unmerited, undeserved love, the same sort of love a baby needs to survive the winter cold of this life into which Jesus, this blessed Child was born. If you’re not a Christian you’re only visiting Christmas  you don’t live there, but thanks be to God that through His Son, this Child we remember today, we have been made Christians and are now not simply visiting the grace of God at Christmastime but are living in it each and every day. Amen.    

Let us pray: Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] “What Child Is This” Lutheran Service Book, Concordia Publishing House 2006, #370
[2] Genesis 1:26
[3] The Creed, First Article, Luther’s Small Catechism, Concordia Publishing House 2017, page 16.
[4] Titus 3:4–7
[5] Luke 1:32–33
[6] Matthew 1:21
[7] John 1:16

Photo Credit: "What Child is This?" image designed and generated by Gaven Mize adapted with permission by Pr. Ted Giese.