“When all things were in quiet silence
and the night was in the midst of her swift course,
then, thy almighty Word leapt down from heaven, from thy royal throne.”
These wonderful and wise words from the Book of The Wisdom of Solomon capture prophetically the wonder and the mystery of Christmas night and bring us into the holy quiet of Christmas morn. They refer, in their context, to political judgment; the Word of God is the heavenly warrior who comes to bring justice and peace. But theologically, the leaping down of the Word of God who takes flesh and is born of Mary is our peace and justice. “The Lord our Righteousness,” as Jeremiah says. He is our redeemer. He is Jesus our Saviour. Christmas morn holds us in the quiet wonder of God’s being with us in the intimacy of Christ’s holy birth.
Bethlehem is the humble scene of the redemption of our humanity. It is judgement, inescapably. It is the divine judgement upon our wounded and broken humanity, torn apart by sin and pride, bloodied and terrible in the cravings for power and domination. The occasion of Christ’s holy birth, as St. Luke makes clear, is entirely political – a census dictated by the Roman powers, a census taken for the purposes of taxation and control, as all censuses are. Yet God uses the powers of the world to effect his greater will and purpose for our humanity. All the wheels of the great power of Rome are turned by God to bring Joseph and Mary, heavy with child, to the lowly stable in little Bethlehem. A myriad of prophetic statements begin to find their newer and deeper truth in what unfolds in the birth of the Child Christ.
It confounds the politics of the world. A child born to be king, not in any worldly sense of power and majesty, but in the far greater sense of overruling ourselves in our selfishnesses and self-preoccupations, in the far greater sense of overturning a world turned in upon itself, and in the far, far greater sense of turning the world back to its truth in God. God wills to engage our humanity to bring redemption, a redemption that is cosmic in scope.
Bethlehem is paradise restored and more. It signals the great marvel that prophetic speech could only hint at and, then, only obscurely. Here is the great mystery and marvel of God being with us in the very flesh of our humanity. Here is the uniqueness of Christ among all the stories of gods and men. There have been, as Dorothy L. Sayers observes, “incarnate gods a plenty and slain and resurrected gods not a few but He is the only God who has a date in history.” The dialectic between the temporal and eternal, between the universal and the particular, between the divine and the human, is captured creedally in the collocation of two phrases: Christ is “very God of very God” … who “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” Here, too, in the mystery of Bethlehem, politics and history mingle and mix with the greater purposes of God; a decree by Caesar Augustus is made part and parcel of the divine will to accomplish our salvation. Christ is “born of the Virgin Mary” in Bethlehem.
It confounds all expectations. It happens not in the palaces of the mighty and powerful, not in the great cities of the world, but in “little Bethlehem,” at once recalling, of course, the political lineage of the Davidic kingship, but pointing beyond that to something more cosmic and universal. The shepherds come on Angels’ wings, as it were, to be the first to worship the new Shepherd King in the City of David. There they find “a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger,” who is “a Saviour, Christ the Lord.” Something new and wonderful is proclaimed in the quiet silence of the night that brings Shepherds and Angels first to Bethlehem. Only later will the great ones come, the Magi-Kings from Anatolia.
It all begins with humility. Therein lies the greatest wisdom, “the only wisdom we can hope to acquire,” T.S. Eliot suggests, “is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” Here, in Bethlehem, it has its beginning.
The image of God’s Almighty Word leaping down from heaven captures something of the significance and mystery of human redemption. It is accomplished in the flesh of our humanity by God’s being with us in the intimacy of Christ and his holy birth, a moment in time in which time has its meaning, we might say (echoing T.S. Eliot yet again). The prophetic word of the Wisdom of Solomon hints at the humility of this far greater wisdom. “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation” as Eliot puts it (“The Dry Salvages,” The Four Quartets).
“Here the impossible union” is made possible in what is proclaimed and celebrated. We rejoice with Shepherds and Angels at the divine condescension, the leaping down into the flesh of our humanity of God’s Word and Son. It turns the world on its head and effects the great revolution that is redemption.
Our task is simply to come and worship. It means to have the humility in ourselves to contemplate the divine humility that seeks our good. The Almighty Word of God is the Child King of all creation. In his humility lies all our wisdom.
“When all things were in quiet silence
and the night was in the midst of her swift course,
then, thy almighty Word leapt down from heaven, from thy royal throne.”
Fr. David Curry
Christmas Morning, 2010