Sermon for the Octave Day of Christmas
“But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”
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.
