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Something is happening before our very eyes, as we gaze upon the baby in the manger, the Word made Flesh, and reflect on what it all means.

God’s gift of his own very self isn’t, as people so often imagine, a kind of alien invasion, an intrusion from outside.

It is of course a matter of grace, of totally undeserved mercy, the free gift of an uncaused and overflowing love – and if you want to see what free and overflowing love looks like and feels like, (and which of us doesn’t?) then read the rest of John’s gospel and marvel at Jesus loving his own who were in the world and loving them to the uttermost.

But this free grace, coming to us from beyond the world, is precisely coming from the one who created the world in the first place and made it to be a place of truth, of solid reality… so that when grace happens, truth happens. And in the baby in the manger we see them both happening; we see them both married for ever.

In the Word made Flesh we gaze upon the glory not just of the living God, coming to us in utter love in the person of this tiny baby, but of God’s design for his whole world. As St. Paul put it, God’s plan from the beginning was to unite, in Christ, all things, things in heaven and things on earth.

And part of the point of Christmas is that this marriage of heaven and earth, of grace and truth, has now begun and isn’t going to stop until it’s complete.

Welcome to the wedding.

N.T. Wright, “Full of Grace and Truth”

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