“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.
So much is packed into the Christmas scene. Today is actually a triple-barrelled feast. It is, first of all, the Octave Day of Christmas – meaning the eighth day, which like the notes of the musical scale returns us to the first note, albeit an octave higher – and yet there are still more days remaining to the twelve days of Christmas, a festival more full, it seems, than what even an octave can provide! But it signals an important event that, perhaps, we would like to overlook; today is also called the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ.
We are, perhaps, more than a little uncomfortable about such an explicit reference to Christ’s maleness. The Roman Catholic Church has quietly jettisoned the term Circumcision for this feast and replaced it with the Naming of Jesus. But at best, that is merely a circumlocution, an euphemism. It cannot really hide the historical aspect that the naming is at one with the inescapable Jewish identity of Christ, a religious identity that is marked in the flesh through ritual circumcision on the eighth day.
There is blood in Bethlehem and that is an important aspect of the Christmas mystery. It has to do with the objective reality of the Incarnation – that this child is “Very God of Very God”, the Word made flesh, the God made Man, “born of the Virgin Mary”, and the one who “suffered under Pontius Pilate”. Such are the essential creedal mysteries captured in this aspect of the day. At once, an affirmation of the Jewish traditions and customs into which Christ is born and with which he is inescapably identified, it is even more an affirmation of his essential humanity – it has to be either male or female; androgyny doesn’t cut it. Jesus Christ is “man born of woman to redeem both sexes”, as one of our Anglican divines puts it.
There is, as well, the rather charming theological tradition that explores speculatively the various logical possibilities relating to the necessity of the Incarnation with respect to human redemption. God made man without the aid of woman in the creation story; God makes humans through the agency of men and women; but in the Incarnation, God becomes man through a woman, the Virgin Mary, without the aid of a man. All of these reflections emphasise one thing: the reality of the humanity of Christ.
But the day is also known as “New Year’s Day”. That is rather curious, in a way, because New Year here refers to the beginning of the civil or secular year, and not the church year. And, of course, the beginning of a new year was not always January 1st. By no means. For over a millennium, the Feast of the Annunciation, celebrated on March 25th, marked the beginning of a new calendar year; it was a way of marking time according to the Incarnate Life of Jesus Christ; Mary’s Annunciation marks the conception of Christ in her womb, the beginning in time of God’s redemption of our humanity. Nine months later, in the fullness of her time is the fullness of time itself, namely, the Nativity of Christ.
There are many different ways of marking time, many different calendars even within the cultures of the West. There was the shift from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar introduced by the papal decree of Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. It became the European standard, although it wasn’t until 1752 that England finally agreed to follow it. (It is not just that the English were a bit slow; rather the English sense of insular independence, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries, has made them more than a little suspicious of all and any continental innovations, particularly anything from Rome). The Gregorian calendar was a more accurate solar-based calendar than the Julian which over a millennium and a half had become about ten days out of sequence with the movement of the sun.
The intersection of these considerations: the Octave Day of Christmas, the Circumcision and New Year’s Day gives us pause to think about the relation between time and eternity. In a way, the intersection between the ecclesiastical themes and the civil or secular themes is instructive and intriguing. It underscores a crucial theological point, namely, the dignity of our humanity. Our lives are not nothing and nothing worth. The Christmas message counters the narcissism and the nihilism of our delusions and fantasies. It speaks to us – such is Revelation – and it proclaims the wonder of Redemption. God cares for our humanity and the world. It is his world and we are his.
“In this was manifested the love of God toward us”, John says, “that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him”. We find the truth and dignity of our humanity in this story. We find our place in the crowded scene at Bethlehem. We are in the story! The meaning and purpose of our lives is found in our being with God but only because he has willed to be with us. “This saying that has happened” is “the Word made flesh”. It happened in Bethlehem, long ago and far away, but because of what happened there, everywhere is Bethlehem, where every life is precious in the sight of God. Our task is to live what we have been given to see and know.
“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord has made known unto us.”
Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of Christmas
January 1st, 2011