by CCW | 1 January 2014 12:29
And so must we. It is, in a way, the deep meaning of Christmas. We find our abiding in God by pondering the wonder of God’s Word incarnate in Jesus Christ. It means coming, like the Shepherds on Angels’ wings, to “see this thing that has come to pass” and to ponder its meaning. How? By keeping all the things that are said about Christ in our hearts and minds, to be sure, and even more to ponder them.
It is a strong image. “Love is my weight,” Augustine said, echoing what is said here about Mary in St. Luke’s Gospel. Here is “the world’s desire,” to use the words of Chesterton’s poem and hymn. We ponder the mystery of the Incarnation and what it means.
The Octave Day of Christmas helps to underscore some of the essential features of the Incarnation. Christ is the Word made flesh who came unto his own, a phrase which suggests, first, the ancient people of God, the people of Israel, but, secondly, our humanity in general. But, in becoming flesh, becoming man of woman, means, as it does for all of us, a birth in a particular place, a particular culture, and with a particular history. We may use the phrase ‘a man or a citizen of the world’ but all our lives are inescapably local. This place at this time subject to these conditions. And so, too, for the holy birth of Jesus.
Yet here is the great wonder and truth of the Incarnation: through what is individual and particular we are opened out to what is universal. God makes himself known through the things of the world and nowhere more completely and more strikingly than in the birth of Jesus Christ.
The lesson from Isaiah also helps us to appreciate this. There is the idea of a marvelous transition and transformation from darkness and oppression to the joy of liberation and salvation through the birth of a child and son who bears the wondrous titles or names of “Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” These terms are indelibly engraven on the Christian imagination as references to Jesus. They signal something of the divine side of the equation of the Incarnation. Jesus Christ is true God and true Man. Or, to make the point more emphatically, as Dorothy L. Sayers did, ‘this man is the universal God.’ Such is the drama of salvation, as she observes. The universal is made known in a wonderful kind of intimacy through this child. Not just any child.
Part of that particularity means the necessary embrace of the features of the religious and ethical culture of his time and place. Born a Jew, he is subject to the central traditions and customs of the Jewish religion, a point which Paul makes and which we heard last Sunday. “God sent forth his Son, made of a woman” – the theme of creation – “made under the law” – the theme of redemption – “to redeem them that were under the law,” that theme taken up into a Christian understanding. Powerful stuff. Thus The Octave Day of Christmas marks a significant Jewish theme, the idea of circumcision, one of the identifying features of Judaism which will have its Christian counterpart in baptism. A kind of naming ceremony as well, this day marks the formal naming of Jesus by Joseph and by Mary at this time even as he has been so signified by the angels eternally. “His name was called JESUS, which was so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” It is one of the few times in the King James translation of the Scriptures and, as following an ancient precedent, where certain words are printed in capital letters. It is a way of saying, ‘pay attention, this is important!’ And, indeed, it is.
Names and titles from Isaiah that signify so much of the divine purpose for our humanity; and those names now as focused in the simple and single name of Jesus. Saviour.
Yet not without blood. There is blood in Bethlehem, we noted, in the story of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents – the slaughter of the little ones who die for Christ who comes to die for us all. But the blood of Christ is here in Bethlehem, too, and all before the shedding of his blood for us in Jerusalem. Something of the radical meaning of Jesus is signified in the blood of his circumcision. It connects both to a form of identity and inaugurates a new understanding. It is captured in the name, JESUS, the name which gathers into itself all the fullness of meaning found in the prophecies of Isaiah and even more, in the richness of the Christmas images concentrated for us in Bethlehem.
There is a danger, though. The idea of the universal revealed in and through the particular has a way of turning everything on its head. What is meant to reveal the significance of the particular as the means of revealing the universal results in a kind of perversion of both. There is the sad spectacle of trying to claim too much with respect to this tradition and this institution that ends up denying what I can only call the essential catholicism of the Faith. To put in simply in ways that connect to both classical Protestantism (i.e. Hooker) or counter-reformation Catholicism, there is an important and necessary distinction between the visible and the invisible Church, an important realization about the ways in which the universal is made known in and through the particular. For all that it legitimates the particular, it refuses the idolatry of the particular. The principles are paramount; their expression if it is to be universal must be through various forms.
Like Mary, we are meant to ponder all the things that are said about Jesus, not only the things of the nativity narratives, but everything in the grand and larger pageant of the Scriptures, Old and New. It belongs to the nature of our abiding at Bethlehem with him who is the Word made flesh and who abides with us. We behold and ponder, like Mary, all these things.
Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of Christmas,
January 1st, 2014
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