I won’t ask you what they are, but I’m assuming that we’ve made some New Year’s resolutions between us: things we want to do in the coming year; or stop doing, perhaps.  They could be physical things (to do with diet or exercise); or mental or emotional things (habits of mind or feelings we want to grow into or out of); or spiritual things: disciplines we’re eager to adopt, commitments we feel called to make.  Now don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to undermine your resolutions at all.  If you’ve  made them, I pray you’ll find them fruitful.  But I do want to point out first that resolutions, by definition, are things we do, rather than things that happen to us; and second that the most important things about Jesus, weren’t things he did, but things that happened to him.

Just think about that for a moment or two.  In the Creed, for example, where the work of Jesus is summed up, the verbs are all passive: he was born, he suffered, was crucified, died and was buried.   The one exception is the place where it says, ‘On the third day he rose again’ – and there’s a good case for arguing that at that point the Creed writers got it wrong, because Scripture almost always says, not ‘Christ rose from the dead’, but ‘Christ was raised’ from the dead.  Even the resurrection, especially the resurrection, wasn’t something Jesus did; but something God did for him.  The Creed doesn’t celebrate the things Jesus did: the wonderful things he said, the miracles he performed; it celebrates that things that were done to him: his birth, his suffering and death, his resurrection. 

1.  The Circumcision of Jesus (Luke 2.21)

And this morning, on the eighth day of Christmas, the focus of the Gospel reading is on two more things that happened to Jesus: they circumcised and named him.  The first eight verses of Luke chapter 2 tell the story of Mary and Joseph’s journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, and of Jesus’ birth.  The next twelve verses tell the story of the angels and the shepherds.  And then in Luke 2, verse 21, it says this: ‘on the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise him, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he had been conceived’.  Obviously, these two things were not things he did for himself.  He was passive.  He did not name himself, he did not circumcise himself.  They were done to him.  Just as at Easter, we call to mind a cluster of things that were done to Jesus: he was handed over to the chief priests, he was betrayed by Judas, he was denied by Peter, he was abandoned by all the disciples, he was beaten, he was mocked, he was crucified – and all the time he was passive, so that we call that his Passion – just as at Easter we call to mind a cluster of things that were done to Jesus, so we do the same at Christmas: he was born, he was wrapped in swaddling bands, he was placed in a manger, he was circumcised, he was named – and next in Luke’s story, in verse 22 of chapter 2, he was presented to the Lord in the Temple.  And throughout, Jesus is passive. 

And you may be thinking, of course he was passive: he was a baby.  How could he name himself, or circumcise himself.  Babies are helpless.  But that’s part of the point: for God to come among us as a human, meant becoming helpless – to allow things to be done to him, instead of being the Great Doer of All Creation. 

2.  The Meaning of Circumcision

But particularly where circumcision is concerned, there’s more.  From a theological point of view, there’s an oddness about the fact that Jesus underwent that procedure.  It’s like the oddness of the fact that, in Luke 3.21, Jesus is baptised.  Don’t you find that odd?  Isn’t baptism to do with spiritual washing, cleansing from sin?  Then why should Jesus be baptised, if he had no sins to wash away?  There’s a similar question about circumcision.  In the Old Testament, circumcision a mark, not just of belonging, of a relationship with God -- but of holiness and purification.  Cutting away this piece of flesh becomes a symbol of cutting away sin.  As early as the book of Deuteronomy, it says, ‘The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants  so that you may love him with all your heart’.  And Jeremiah the prophet can say, ‘Circumcise yourselves to the LORD, remove the foreskin of your heart’. 

But the more circumcision has to do with cleansing from sin, the odder it is that Luke tells us Jesus was circumcised.  So why?  Why was he circumcised?  And why was he later baptised?  The answer lies in the second thing that is recorded as having happened to Jesus in Luke 2.21: he was named with the name the angel had given him before he was even conceived: they called him Jesus, which means ‘he saves’, because he had come to save his people from their sins.

The point is that in order to save the human race, Jesus had to enter it and identify fully with it.  And what we see in the circumcision of Jesus and his baptism is the full extent of his identification with us.  He entered our sin, in order to save us out of it.  One of the great ancient theologians, Anselm, once wrote: ‘whatever Jesus did not take on, he could not redeem’.  He could not redeem our flesh without becoming flesh. He could not redeem us from sin without coming, as St Paul put it, ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’.  Paul had a daring way with words.  In another place he wrote: ‘God made him, who had no sin, to be sin for us, in order that we might become the righteousness of God’. What we see in Jesus’ circumcision and later in his baptism is his becoming sin for us. 

Conclusion

I wonder what 2006 holds in store?  I wonder what joys it will bring for each of us.  I wonder what sorrows?  Whatever they may be, we don’t face them alone.  Jesus himself walks into this year beside us, and identifies fully with us.  When this year gives us cause to celebrate, he’ll be rejoicing with us.  When it gives us cause to grieve, he’ll be weeping with us.  That’s what it means to have a Saviour who is able to identify completely with us.  That’s why it matters that he was even circumcised: it marks the full extent of his identification with us.  But it also cautions us.  I suppose it’s inevitable, on New Year’s Day, when we look ahead into the comign year, to think first about the things we want to do: to set goals, to make plans, to think in terms of what we hope to achieve: a target weight, a target grade, a target milestone, a target place, a target condition, a target relationship.  But it’s good to remember that for some of us, if not all of us, the really important things this year will be things that happen to us, not things we do for ourselves.  I think it may be true to say that it was in the things that happened to him, that Jesus most fulfilled his calling and God’s purpose for his life.  And who knows.  Perhaps it will be that way for us too, in the coming year.

Given at St Paul’s Church at The Crossing, Walsall