Christmas is radically better news than we tend to think, because incarnation (God coming to live in a human body) means much more than we realize.

When we think of incarnation–particularly at Christmas–we usually leave out a huge part of it. Perhaps we could say that it has two phases, and God becoming human is the first of them, to which Christmas is our great signpost. Think of passages such as these, which all hinge on the message of Christmas:

• “The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
• “The Father and I are one…the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”
• “If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”
• “He is the image of the invisible God…For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell….”
• "He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being….”

My name is Daniel Ethan Harris. My father, David Edwin Harris, was my hero, and I grew up being very proud of being able to scribble DEH on things and convincing myself that then no one would be able to tell whether the item was mine or his. When my wife and I found out we were expecting a son, we knew we wanted to pass on the initials, and he is named David Ethan Harris, after both my dad and me. And yes, the tradition continues–I often see my initials scribbled on things around the house, pointing to the common parts of our identity. It makes me glad every time.

Why is your name what it is? Did your parents just like its sound, or was it given to you as something they hoped would carry meaning throughout your life? As is the case for my son, it might be a name intentionally meant to connect you to the stories of people in previous generations. Or, perhaps, the name itself carries a meaning.

Today is the eighth day of Christmas, a day in which we pay particular attention to the name given to our Messiah. Following Jewish custom, Mary and Joseph took the baby to be circumcised on the eighth day, and he was then "called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”

I can be a remarkably patient father for a full five minutes. After that, a lot of variables come into play, but once I’m past the five-minute mark, my patience tank often ends up running on fumes. I wasn’t always this way. In fact, if I think back through my life, I can identify some major turning points in my own character. For example, I was once an exceptionally unselfish person. Then I got married. Whatever unselfishness remained after entering marriage also seemed to vanish, right along with my patience and level-headedness, once our children were born.

Of course, despite how I might like to convince myself otherwise, my selfishness and impatience were really part of me all along, but it took the closeness of these very cherished family relationships to bring me face-to-face with my own flaws. So, as a father whose patience tank often runs on empty, even with these kids whom I love so dearly, I find Luke’s final story about Jesus’ childhood to be strangely comforting.

I have two exceptionally kind children (not to mention how cute, talented, smart, humble, etc. they are...and I think I’ve read somewhere that each of those traits can be traced to the skill of the father in the family–especially the humility). Yet even with as great as my kids are, I can’t really wrap my mind around what it might have been like to parent the incarnate Messiah. I think that’s part of why I have found this story at the end of Luke’s second chapter to be much more encouraging in the years since I became a parent. Though it isn’t the point of the story, this passage shows that–regardless of the child’s identity–those on whom we gazed in awe and wonder when they were infants can come to push the limits of any mother or father.

The only problem with trying to write “Christmas According to John” is that there is no Christmas story in John.

John gives us no stories about Mary being with child before being wed to Joseph, nothing about shepherds finding a baby in a manger, no dreams with messages from God about the baby. Joseph is never a character in the story, except basically as part of Jesus’ name (“Jesus, son of Joseph”). Mary doesn’t show up much–she’s at the wedding when Jesus turned water into wine near the beginning of John’s gospel, and then at the cross, near the conclusion.

Yet it’s a characteristic of this fascinating gospel that just because John never mentions something directly, we cannot conclude that he had nothing to say about it. Rather, we might want to listen with very attentive ears and see how he may want to give us a very different perspective on the well-known stories of Jesus’ life.