Sermon for the Octave Day of Christmas
“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord has made known unto us.”
Literally, “this thing which is come to pass” means “this saying that has happened”. Thus, does Luke proclaim, in his own way, the essential Christmas message about the Word made flesh. Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh, the saying (το ρημα) that has happened (το γεγονος). It is something made known to us through the witness of men and angels, through what has been heard and seen, declared and written down. In a way, the liturgical celebrations of the Christmas season offer a profound and sophisticated commentary upon the idea and concept of Revelation.
There is a rich fullness to the Christmas story concentrated in the rather crowded scene at Bethlehem. This fullness relates directly to the very dynamic of the Christian faith. Christian contemplation is the exact opposite of Buddhist meditations, for example, precisely because it is about the fullness of images (and at the fullness of time, too!) and not about the emptying of images from our minds as if they were essentially illusions. It counters, too, the despair and emptiness of the contemporary culture of nihilism. For in “the fullness of the time”, to use Paul’s phrase in Galatians, all time finds meaning.
The consequences of this fullness of images are huge. To put it simply, it provides the logic for redemption. The images convey meaning and truth. There is something that has happened in time and in space. While the material and the physical, the sensual and the tangible are not everything, neither are they nothing; they have their substance and meaning precisely in the embrace of the spiritual and the intellectual; in short, in God. There can be no greater intersection between the eternal and the temporal than what the Christian story proclaims and no place where that is more concentrated for us, it seems, than in that crowded scene at Bethlehem. And here is the redemption of our humanity, the redemption of desire, of love; in short, the redemption of all that belongs to the truth and being of the created universe.
It is found in the mystery of Christ’s holy birth. It is found in the simple humility of this holy scene at Bethlehem.
