by CCW | 1 January 2012 19:50
I love this passage from St. Luke’s gospel[1]. Not just at Christmas but as a maxim for the life of the Church, year in and year out. And how wonderful that it is heard, year in and year out, on New Year’s Day, at the ending of one civil year and the beginning of another! How perplexing though that what is kept and pondered in the heart of Mary is connected with what must seem to be a most arcane and disturbing event, the circumcision of Christ.
The rite is associated with what it means to be Jewish. In the context of the Gospel, it is intended to be understood in terms of Christ’s submission to the Law, the Torah, in its particular forms. An allegiance and loyalty to what is transcendent and utterly beyond the phenomenal world is signaled in the flesh, in what is simply most, well, there is no getting around it, most male. Intriguingly, in more modern times, until very recently, the medical profession, especially in North America, tried to provide medical reasons for the practice.
This misses the point historically and religiously from the standpoint of ancient Israel and contributes very little to the metaphorical transformation that circumcision undergoes via the New Testament, especially through Paul. The circumcision of the heart, he argues, is what is necessary for our true commitment to God, not simply some questionable surgical procedure, about which there continues to be debate within and without Judaism, a debate which is only heightened by the disturbing and hideous matter of female genital mutilation in Arabic countries closely associated with the aspects of African tribalism. There is simply no getting around these things in the contemporary culture. There is, instead, the need to think through them and beyond them but in a way that does complete justice to the foundational principles of Christianity and Judaism and Islam.
On that score, Mary’s response to what is said and heard about her son is most instructive and profound. She ponders, weighs within herself, the meaning of what is being said. It is not too much to say that what is being said about the Child Christ is written in the flesh, circumscribed on the heart, circumcised in the core of our being spiritually, we might say. In a way, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ is the fullest possible affirmation of the very flesh and being of our humanity at the same time as it is the most complete liberation of our being. The things of the body have become the perfect vehicles of the matters of the spirit. This does not mean a kind of antinominian rejection of the law; it conveys, instead, the deeper concept that laws have to be held accountable to intellectual and spiritual principles. Without that they become perfectly hideous and altogether tyrannous.
What Luke reveals here about Mary in the context of the nativity narratives is absolutely profound. It signals the very life of the Church, the precise attitude of the Christian soul. We cannot be like Christ if we are not like Mary. Her attitude is the quintessential attitude of faith, namely, a thinking upon the things that are said and a loving appropriation of all the words of Christ into our hearts. Only so is our love the weight of our being, to use Augustine’s wonderful phrase which arises, I think, out of this passage from Luke. Pondus meum amor meus. Love is the weight of my soul. In the long end of the day, we are and we shall be measured by our love.
Christmas is the feast of divine love. God embraces our humanity in the intimacy of Jesus Christ, true God and true man. Our humanity finds its fullest expression in the ‘yes’ of Mary to the Divine will by which God becomes man without ceasing to be God. This is the profoundest mystery and one with the profoundest consequences.
It is the precise counter to our contemporary dis-ease and disarray. We want to collapse what is absolute and perfect into the realm of the relative and the imperfect and incomplete. The Incarnation is about the exact opposite. It argues that the world of flesh and matter only has meaning and comprehension through the divine embrace of that world in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.
The story shows us the fullest possible affirmation of human dignity and purpose. It is captured in the figure of Mary, keeping all the things that are said about her son and child and pondering them in her heart; in short, weighing the meaning of such things, even as she has been the bearer of that meaning into our world and day. Through her, “the Word [is] made flesh and dwel[s] among us” and we behold a whole new way of looking at ourselves and our world and day, seeing everything as belonging to the glory of God in which we find the truth of our humanity.
The Archbishop of Canterbury[2], Rowan Williams, in his Christmas Sermon[3], referred to the 350th commemoration of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer in 2012, “a book,” he said, “that defined what a whole society said to God together,” and as providing “a source of vision for an entire society.” It is, as he noted “a treasury of words and phrases that are still for countless English-speaking people the nearest you can come to an adequate language for the mysteries of faith. It gives us words that say where and who we are before God;” in short, a way of responding to the Word like Mary. It requires our hearing and keeping those words, and pondering them in our heart. Only so can they begin to be expressed in our lives.
He noted that “we’re much the poorer for forgetting it and pushing it to the margins as much as we often do in the Church. And it is crucial to remember the point about the Prayer Book as something for a whole society, binding together our obligations to God and to one another, in a dense interweaving of love and duty joyfully performed.”
Because of that “the coming year’s celebration is not a museum piece,” he stated. The Prayer Book if used thoughtfully and prayerfully in worship teaches us “how to join up” what the Archbishop called “the muddle of [our] experience in a coherent pattern by relating it to the unchanging truth and grace of God.” It is our constant struggle to let the Word of God that is heard and proclaimed define us. For “once the word is spoken in the world, there is no way back. Your response to it, says the gospel again and again, is what shows who and what you really are, what is deepest in you, what means most;” in short, the love that is the weight of your being. I pray that we may take these words to heart and that we may be worthy of the spiritual legacy that defines our Anglican identity especially in a year that will mark as well the 50th anniversary of the 1962 Book of Common Prayer[4], the only modern, post-World War II Prayer Book that stands in conscience fidelity to the Common Prayer tradition captured in the 1662 book.
Today, on the Octave Day of Christmas, we are bidden to ponder the mystery of “the Word made flesh,” to see in Bethlehem the holy significance of God’s great will and purpose for our humanity. Our task is nothing less and nothing more than to keep all the things that have been said in the witness of the Scriptures about the child Christ and to ponder them in our hearts. It is nothing less than to be thoughtfully engaged with the Scriptural witness to the Incarnation. Its truth challenges our world and day, then and now. But always, the Church is called to be like Mary, keeping these things and pondering them in her heart. Such is the mystery and the wonder of Christmas. Such is the glorious beginning of each and every New Year.
Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of Christmas, New Years
January 1st, 2012
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2012/01/01/sermon-for-the-octave-day-of-christmas-3/
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