“And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father”
“Let us now go unto Bethlehem and see this thing that has come to pass which the Lord has made known to us,” the shepherds say one to another. Yet in our readings tonight there is not a single mention of Bethlehem at all! Instead we hear the strong and profoundly meditative words of John’s Prologue who only mentions Bethlehem once elsewhere in his Gospel and in a context of controversy. Mark in his Gospel never mentions Bethlehem at all. The imaginative centrality of Bethlehem is left to Matthew and Luke whose story is amply captured in the hymns and music of this season.
Yet everywhere is Bethlehem tonight. But what is Bethlehem, we may well ask, and what does it mean that “everywhere is Bethlehem tonight”? We may be somewhat cynical about Bethlehem. After all, what’s so great about Bethlehem? Christmas? And where is the glory, the peace, the joy, good will towards men in a world distraught and dangerous, a place of terror and foreboding, of violence and abuse? Where was the glory, the peace, the joy, the good will and all that jazz in the School in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the Lindt Café in Sydney, Australia, on Canada’s Parliament Hill and in Quebec in November, in the bewildered and bedeviled communities of Africa striken with Ebola, not to mention some of the examples of moral turpitude more closer to home? And that is only to make a beginning of all our woes, our confusions and uncertainties, globally and locally.
Is not Bethlehem itself a place of confusion and chaos, of violence and strife, of hatred and blood, of blood shed, quite literally, in the holy places? As the journalist, Neil Lochery, once observed “modern day Bethlehem is little short of a rundown dump of a town, located in the middle of a war zone, troubled not only by war but by the incessant hassle of local souvenir sellers desperate to peddle their goods, the place of the tyranny of conflict and the tyranny of consumerism,” caught between consumerism and terrorism, it seems, between Walmart and Jihadis, trampled in the aisles or blown up by terrorists! O joy!
“A rundown dump of a town.” Yet, perhaps that, too, is very much like everywhere with the same frenzy of buying and selling and the similar conflicts and animosities which arise out of the frustration and futility of our desires. Perhaps Bethlehem is the everywhere, the everywhere we don’t want tonight.
Yet the Scriptures and the Mystery of Christmas offer us another view than such dark and cynical views of our world and day. Bethlehem is about peace and harmony within and without our hearts of war and distress; the counter to all the confusions and chaos of our hearts. It is the place where the healing grace of God’s love is bestowed upon our wounded and broken humanity. For this is what it is all about! “Jesus Christ was born for this,” as the old carol puts it, born for a world broken and bloodied, wounded and broken, dead and dying; a world in need of healing! In dulci jubilo, indeed. The point is that this isn’t of the world but only in the world through God’s Word. It requires that we pay attention to what we are given to behold.
Christian contemplation is about the fullness of images not the emptying out of everything to a barren nothingness. Nor does that sense of the fullness of images, such as we see in the crowded scene at Bethlehem on Christmas night, merely mean a smorgasbord of sensual delights, of sights and sounds, from which we might pick and choose what suits us best, for that is part and parcel of the disorder of our consumerism, our tendency to turn everything into a commodity, God and ourselves included. And all in flight from our spiritual emptiness which becomes the breeding ground of nihilism and destruction. No. There is an order to the images through what lies at the center of the vision of Bethlehem on Christmas night. And that is altogether God’s doing.
Bethlehem on Christmas night is paradise restored. At Bethlehem tonight we behold the wonderful harmony of every aspect of our humanity with the whole of the created order; shepherds and angels, the highest and the lowest; humans and animals together in a moment of calm and peace precisely in the face of a world that is troubled and perplexed, anxious and stressed, quite literally and metaphorically taxed with the burden of power and the chaos of war and destruction, quite literally, a “world wrapped in fear,” as one of the Advent hymns puts it. And to this scene will come in time the rich, the wise and the powerful of the world, the Magi-Kings of Anatolia. They will come to learn from the little ones who already kneel and adore “God’s great little one.”
For this is the great wonder of Bethlehem on Christmas night. It has nothing to do with the busyness of our doings or even with the endless spectacles of death and tyranny. It has altogether to do with what God has done and gives us to see. At the center of the Christmas mystery is the wonder of God with us without which there can be no peace, no order, no joy, no love. The wonder of Christmas night is the wonder of what we behold. We behold the glory of God in “the Word made flesh”.
The Word of God who makes all things has entered into the world which he has made but which we have made a mess. He enters into that world in all of the lowliness of our humanity and into the lowliest of the world’s towns, a poor “rundown dump of a town” like Bethlehem. It is good enough for God to work his wonder in our hearts and to put the whole world on a new foundation, the foundation of grace, the grace which perfects nature and does not destroy, if only we would see and enter into what we have been given to behold. It is one of the great commonplaces of the world’s religions that we should become what we behold. It means paying attention to God; the very thing forgotten and denied by our world and day.
Here we behold the perfect vision of the peace and harmony of our humanity and our world. It is found in the wonder of God with us. Here is God’s great reaching down to us that we might be raised up into the dignity and truth of the humanity which he has created for himself. It is what we behold on Christmas night, even in Bethlehem, a rundown dump of a place enshrined in glory.
“And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father”
Fr. David Curry
Christmas Eve, 2014