Day: December 8, 2013

“Of his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace”

There is a rich fullness to the Christmas season, to be sure. Everything quickly seems all too much. To be sure, Christmas is something which one day cannot presume to capture nor that even an entire season can hope to encompass. There is such an incredible richness to the feast.

And yet, there is but one poor, humble scene of Christmas. It is the stable of Bethlehem. Therein lies all the rich fullness of Christmas. That poor, humble scene contains a great crowd of scenes, a great gathering of Christmasses; in short, it opens to view a rich fullness of grace, even “grace upon grace.” There is more here than meets the eye. It is altogether something for the soul. We are bidden to ponder the Mystery of the Word made flesh. The attitude of the Church is an essentially Marian attitude. “Mary kept all these things” – all these wondrous things that were said about the Child Christ by Shepherds and Angels – “and pondered them in her heart.” Only so can they come to birth and live in us.

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“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.”

Advent celebrates the pageant of God’s Word coming to us. That is its great wonder, the miracle, really, of God’s revelation. There is something more than our words.

Scripture in our Anglican Christian understanding is God’s Word Written. What? Did God write the Bible? No. The Bible is a veritable library of books written by human hands over vast tracks of time and in different places and even different cultures. Writing, after all, is one of the outstanding features of our humanity, the tangible expression of thoughts and ideas which we once knew as distinguishing human beings from the birds and the bees, from dust and darkness. And yet, the Scriptures, literally, the writings, are regarded as God’s Word, conveying ideas and concepts that are literally not of our devising but of God’s revealing to us and through us. That, too, is all part of the marvel. To speak of the Scriptures is God’s Word Written is to make a profound theological statement.

The connection between God and Word is central to the spiritual understanding of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For Muslims, God’s Word recited by the Angel Gabriel to the prophet Mohammed creates the Qu’ran, a work which is only holy, only the recitation of Allah’s Word, in the Arabic language. It cannot be translated and still be the Qu’ran just as there can be no other Christ than Jesus Christ for Christians, no substitute avatars. For Jews and Christians, of course, the Scriptures are capable of translation from one language to another. Why? Because of the Word beyond, behind and within the words. The idea of God and his Word opens us out to the special qualities of revealed religion; to the idea that God reveals his will for us and, especially in the Christian understanding, reveals himself to us as well as revealing ourselves. Such is the light and the darkness of Advent.

That is why there is such a strong emphasis upon the reading and the proclaiming of the Word of God. What is assumed is that God wants us to know certain things, things that are conveyed through the written word and that word as proclaimed and heard.

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