Introduction
This week many folks will be jumping to Epiphany, I’m sure. But if you’re staying with 2nd Sunday of Christmas, there’s an interesting angle that we can take this week.
Narrative Context
The lectionary gives us an interesting, and somewhat unsettling, way into John’s Gospel this week. We are offered the option to hear the full sweep of the Prologue thanks to the brackets. That soaring poetry about the Word before time, light before darkness, creation itself coming into being. And yet the lectionary quietly signals where it wants us to listen most closely. Not at the beginning, but a little further in. Not away from the poetry, but into what happens when that Word actually enters the world it made. The heart of today’s reading lives in verses 10 through 18, where the Word is no longer hovering over creation but moving within it, among real people, real responses, and real consequences.
That shift matters. Because this portion of the Prologue introduces a note that can feel jarring, even uncomfortable. “He was in the world… yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” These are lines many of us preachers approach with caution. They sound harsh. They raise concerns. They feel like abstract judgment. In a time shaped by the pressures of Christendom (where Jesus is familiar, named, assumed) it can feel strange to imagine “the world” rejecting him at all. And so, it must be about a group of “them.” And then there is the very real worry about how these verses have been misused, especially when questions of antisemitism come into view.
We get lost in the poetry. Unsure of who or what exactly we’re talking about. So, we often try to explain these verses away, soften them, or move quickly past them back to safer theological ground.
But if we step back from the abstraction for just a moment, what John is naming here is not a theoretical problem. It is simply the Jesus story. The one we already know.
Jesus comes into the world. He heals and teaches, loves and challenges, gathers and disrupts. Some follow him. Many misunderstand him. Others reject him outright. Even those closest to him falter and fall away. This is not cosmic poetry floating outside of history. It is the story of Jesus’ life among real people. The story we are about to hear in the rest of John’s Gospel.
And that is what makes the claim that follows all the more meaningful. Not that rejection is avoided, but that it is not the final word. “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”
The scandal of this section of the Prologue is not that the world fails Jesus, it’s that Jesus does not abandon the world in return.
John is not protecting God from human failure, nor condemning the world for it. He is telling the truth about what happens when God comes close, and about the grace that keeps coming anyway.
Preaching Possibility
Christmas Is Not a Reset Button
One way into this text is to name how disorienting the season shift actually is. Just a month ago, we were still in Luke’s Gospel, hearing hard words about cost, disruption, and division. Jesus speaking about allegiance that divides families. About watchfulness. About a world that resists God’s reign. Those were not gentle endings to the Church year.
And then suddenly, Christmas. Light. Familiar words. Poetry. Candles. It is tempting to imagine that Christmas somehow resets the Jesus story. That the incarnation smooths over the rough edges. That once the Word becomes flesh, everything settles down.
But John refuses to let us forget.
John’s Prologue does not contradict the gritty Jesus we just left behind in Luke. It explains him.
“He was in the world… yet the world did not know him.”
That is not a failure of Christmas. That is Christmas.
One of the reasons the church insists on returning to this story every single year is because the world did not recognize Jesus the first time and neither do we. Not fully. Not consistently. We forget what kind of Messiah he is. We domesticate him. We expect him to arrive on our terms, confirm our instincts, and stabilize what we already value.
And when he doesn’t, when he comes vulnerable instead of victorious, gracious instead of condemning, truthful instead of transactional, we miss him again.
This is not about shaming the world or the church. It is about honesty. Christmas does not introduce a different Jesus than the one who will challenge, unsettle, and eventually be rejected. It reveals how God chooses to be present in the midst of all that.
And that is the good news John is pressing toward.
The Word does not withdraw in the face of misunderstanding. The Word does not come back later when the world is more receptive. The Word does not pivot to judgment or destruction when recognition fails.
Instead: “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”
Grace that shows up when we are not looking for it.
Grace that comes even when it is not recognized.
Grace that enters the world as it is, not as it should be.
This is why we need Christmas again and again. Not because the story changes, but because we do. And because the Jesus who comes is always more disruptive, more tender, and more faithful than we expect.
The scandal is not that the world misses Jesus. The scandal is that Jesus keeps coming anyway. Full of grace and truth.
Micah Krey 
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