Month: December 2014

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

The words are familiar to us from the Benedictus in the liturgy just before The Prayer of Consecration at Mass. A phrase from Psalm 118 (v.26), it is also familiar to us from the story of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday also read as the Gospel for The First Sunday in Advent. Perhaps less familiar to us is Matthew and Luke’s use of the phrase in the context of judgment and warning by Jesus to the Scribes and Pharisees in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem. Not Bethlehem and yet the mystery of Christmas in Bethlehem is incomprehensible without reference to Jerusalem. The Feast of Stephen illumines the deeper meaning of Christ’s Nativity. It has altogether to do with service and sacrifice, things perhaps that we don’t really want to hear and yet these are the things that belong to the greatest truth and dignity of our humanity. They belong to the Christmas mystery.

What, if anything, is known popularly about St. Stephen is known by way of a nineteenth century carol by John Mason Neale, Good King Wenceslaus, that refers to a touching medieval legend and one which captures certainly the theme of service and even the idea of the imitation of Christ which is certainly at the heart of The Feast of Stephen. The lesson from The Book of The Acts of The Apostles concludes the story of Stephen with his martyrdom; he was stoned to death for his testimony to Christ and in the moment of his dying he, like Christ on the Cross, prays for the forgiveness of his executioners, not the least of which is Saul who will become Paul the Apostle. “Lord Jesus,” Stephen says, “receive my Spirit,” an echo of the last word of Christ from the Cross, “Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit” and then, echoing the first word, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” Stephen’s last word is his prayer, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” The words of the dying, it seems, are often the beginning of something profound and deeply moving.

Stephen is the proto-martyr in the Christian understanding of things and what makes his feast so important is the way it illumines the deeper meaning of human redemption. His feast signals the idea of redemptive suffering and the nature of Christian witness as participation in the sufferings of Christ. We probably forget certain aspects of the larger story of Stephen.

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“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour,
who is Christ the Lord”

In the gentle quiet of Christmas morn, heedless of the wind and weather, we hear of the simple birth of Christ, laid in manger in Bethlehem “because there was no room for them in the inn,” where Mary, like so many mothers over so many millennia, “brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes”. So common, so touching. Yet, the real meaning and significance of this birth is not first made known in Bethlehem and not by man or woman. No. It is an Angel’s word to “shepherds abiding in the field” in the surrounding countryside.

The symbolism is profound and speaks, I think, to the question about what it means to be Christian in a post-Christian and a post-secular world. It does not mean huddling in the ghettoes of our minds or in the various conventicles of self-righteous sanctity. Such are really only other forms of nihilism in a world that refuses to address the wonder of Christmas. The wonder of Christmas is about the mystery of God, on the one hand, and the mystery of our humanity embraced by God, on the other hand; in short, the mystery of the Incarnation.

We can make little sense of Christmas beyond the acquisitive madness of consumer culture and the syrupy sentimentalism that attends it and manipulates us. We can make little sense of Christmas because we are busy about everything except the mystery of God. And without that, the mystery of the Word made flesh, the mystery of God with us, makes little sense. How, then, to recapture for our hearts and minds the mystery of Christmas?

Theology is a wilderness affair. Advent has been very much about the wilderness of human darkness and sin to which comes the redeeming Word of God. But on Christmas morn, in what is sometimes known as the Christmas Mass of the Angels, we are, at least in the imaginative power of the Gospel, in the wilderness with Shepherds. Only with Angels and Shepherds can we make our journey to Bethlehem. Only by way of an Angel’s word.

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“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!

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“My Lord, and my God”

The questions of the Advent season of questions culminate, it seems to me, in The Feast of St. Thomas, the Advent Saint par excellence. His feast falls, appropriately enough, about the time of the winter solstice, the darkest time of nature’s year, and yet heralds the coming of the Light of God in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. St. Thomas is an especially important part of the Advent preparations for Christmas.

And yet, there is a paradox. Rather than the intensity of explicit questions, such as the barrage of questions belonging to Sunday’s Gospel (Advent IV), known as the witness of John, meaning John the Baptist, with the heightened sense of wonder of the question, “who art thou?” which turn us to Christ, with The Feast of St. Thomas we are given a wonderful statement of faith which illumines the entire mystery of the Incarnation. “My Lord, and my God,” Thomas proclaims in the presence of the risen Christ behind the closed doors of the Upper Room in Jerusalem, eight days after the Resurrection. How does this story relate to Advent?

Because it illumines the radical nature of redemption which lies at the heart of Christ’s Nativity and to the deeper meaning of the Advent. Because it is the answer to the implicit question of Thomas which goes to the heart of the Christian faith. Because it challenges us all about our personal relation to God in Jesus Christ.

One of the darknesses of our world and day is the darkness of doubt and uncertainty about, well, almost everything, but certainly about God and religion. Thomas is traditionally known as doubting Thomas because of this Gospel scene. “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” He is not prepared to take on faith – on the authority of the other disciples – the news of the Risen Christ who had appeared to them. His eloquent though conditional sentence is a question about the reality of the Incarnate Christ and the truth of the Resurrection. He seems to be saying, ‘I will not believe unless I see and touch with mine own eyes, fingers and hands.’ He speaks to a kind of empirical necessity.

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Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world

The praises of Advent in the quiet darkness of nature’s year belong to the blessings of Christmas. They are God’s readying Word for us in preparation for his being with us and so they must be about his Word in us. The preparations of Advent are not only God’s doings for us, but also his work in us. Advent signals the great wonder of the Christian faith. Emmanuel, God with us, comes to us so that his life may live and take shape in us. The praises of Advent are God’s songs in the hearts of his people.

But what are those praises? In the watching and the waiting of Advent, we praise even the darkness; such is the purposeful expectancy of Advent.

On the darkest day of nature’s year we look to the coming of the light in a spirit quite removed from the forms of paganism both new and old. Our waiting is a waiting expectantly and not in the fear and the anxiety that, perhaps, just perhaps, the sun will not rise and that, perhaps, just perhaps, the days will not increase and that, perhaps, just perhaps, we must sacrifice ourselves to the order of nature to insure that the wheel of life rolls on. Our waiting is the counter to the greater darkness of despair and disillusionment that belongs to the fearful uncertainties of our utter hopelessness, the malaise of our contemporary world.

No. The greater darkness of the Advent season has far more to do with our spiritual lives than merely the physical phenomenon of the winter solstice. The darkness is about the forms of spiritual wickedness and folly in each of our lives, individually and collectively: “the far-spent night,” we might say, of our rebellion and revolt; “the far-spent night” of our turning away from the light of God’s Word in law and prophecy, in nature and in human experience; “the far-spent night” of the terrors of despair and destruction. But to be aware of this is part and parcel of the meaning and purpose of the Advent season. It means, strange to say, to praise the darkness.

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