by CCW | 1 January 2015 14:14
Wonder is one of the strong and great features of Christmas, and, of course, of Christianity and of Religion in general! Philosophy, too, it is said begins in wonder. The wonder of Christmas is about “this thing which is come to pass,” literally, this thing that has happened, “the shepherds say one to another,” saying in their own country fashion what John in his Prologue proclaims as the central mystery of Christmas, “the Word was made flesh”. For that is the wonder of Christmas.
The shepherds’ Christmas is about that sense of wonder and about their witness to what “the Lord hath made known unto us,” as they say. For “when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.” What saying was that? “For unto you,” the angel had said to the shepherds in the fields, “is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” This is the occasion for our wonder.
But what does it mean to wonder? It means to hold in awe and to ponder in our hearts and minds the meaning of what we have been given to behold. The truest sense of wonder is captured in the figure of Mary who “kept all these things,” all these things that were said about the child Christ, “and pondered them in her heart.” “Love is the weight of [our] soul[s],” Augustine said long ago, and the Latin word, pondus – weight – gives shape to the verb to ponder, namely, to weigh the meaning of things in our hearts and minds. It is the thing most necessary and yet for our culture and day, the hardest thing.
We complain endlessly about our busyness, about our stress and worry. It is a defining feature of our age. What we have failed to grasp is that it is not our busyness itself that is the problem but the meaninglessness, the emptiness, the sense of entrapment, the sense of futility in our lives. And all because we will not take the time to be quiet and to ponder the silent wonder of Christmas, the wonder of “God made man,” “the Word made flesh,” “the thing that has happened.”
Yet this is the task and the challenge of Christmastide signaled so wonderfully on The Octave Day of Christmas. We are meant to be like Mary and to keep all these things and ponder them in our hearts. We are compassed about, quite literally, with a great cloud of wonders that swirl and dance in rings of glory around the child Christ.
Something of the deeper meaning of the mystery of Emmanuel, of God with us, is signaled too in the triple-barreled nature of this day, The Octave Day of Christmas, The Circumcision of Christ, and New Year’s Day. Like the musical octave, the eighth day recalls us to the first; the circumcision opens us out to the radical truth of the Incarnation; and New Year’s Day, to the beginnings of another year in hope and joy and love.
Circumcision? Nothing speaks so directly to the bodily nature of the Christian Faith. Born of woman, born under the Law, born inescapably and necessarily into the conditions and situations of a particular culture and a particular community, circumcision recalls the ritual act by which the Hebrews understand their spiritual identity. Christ is born into the particularity of the Jewish culture through which God’s light and truth for all peoples will be shown and made known, the universal in and through the particular.
We are, perhaps, a tad squeamish about the circumcision and yet it relates to the bodily reality of Christ’s Incarnation, to the radical nature of his humanity in its maleness. He is “man born of woman, to redeem both sexes,” as an Anglican Divine, John Hackett, cryptically puts it. Circumcision, too, is about his naming. He is named Jesus; named by the Angel, named by Joseph, named by Mary, named in heaven and on earth; in short, named by us, a naming that recalls the naming in Paradise, a naming by which we enter into God’s knowing and loving of our humanity and world. His name means saviour. That is part of the mystery for us to ponder, the mystery of redemption.
How does this feast speak to our world and day? By its concreteness; by its directness about our humanity, about the bodily reality of our humanity as men and women; by virtue of the covenant which it signifies. The revelation of God in Jesus Christ bestows a new and greater dignity upon our humanity far away and beyond all our fantasies and fancies. The truth of our humanity is ultimately found in our communion with Christ, in our being with the one who has come to be with us. In pondering the mystery of “this thing which is come to pass” we discover something about the greater truth and wonder of ourselves. We are made for God.
The story of redemption is the story of Christ, his life and death for us. That is the wonder we are given to ponder in all of the things that are said about this child and all the things that are done by as well as done to this child. Here he is subject to the particular requirements of the Jewish law. He has come, he will say, not to destroy the Law but to fulfill it. Our task is to attend to his words and deeds and, like Mary, to ponder them in our hearts.
That will be the truest and the greatest blessing for the New Year. For then we shall find the strength and comfort to persevere, knowing the great wonder that has been bestowed upon us in the child Christ. Everything in the story is about Jesus. With Jesus, God is for us and with us. What else can we do but wonder and rejoice in “the love of God towards us” made manifest in “his only-begotten Son” who has come “into the world that we might live through him”?
Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of Christmas
January 1st, 2015
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2015/01/01/sermon-for-the-octave-day-of-christmas-6/
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