Day: November 29, 2015

“We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,
full of grace and truth.”

We beheld. Yet we can only behold what we are given to see. What we are given to see is something made. It is not the Word, but “the Word made flesh”. The shepherds say “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass,” literally, this saying that has happened, this Word that is made. God is the poet of Christmas. In Greek, poet means maker.

But the poet not only makes, he also makes known. We can only see “this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us”. We can only see in the light of God himself. Where God is, there his light is also.

By the light of God we are caught up into a greater understanding. We are born anew “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”; born from above into the company of the one whom we behold from above. His light perfects our light.

For by our own lights, we see but do not see. Our light is darkness. “He came unto his own and his own received him not.” Our seeing is without a beholding, without an embracing in faith and understanding what we are given to see. There is no receiving. But by this greater light – the light which accompanies the Word, the light of God as illuminating grace – our light is taken up into something more. We are received into what we receive. “We beheld his glory.” The greater light is the light of grace, the grace to behold what “the lord hath made known unto us”, “the Word made flesh”. The Word who wills to be made also wills to be made known.

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“All the city was moved saying, Who is this?”

It is the great question of the Advent season, itself the great season of questions. It complements another great question, itself a biblical question, too, “what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the Son of Man that thou visitest him?” These questions recall us to God’s great question to us, to Adam in the Garden after the Fall, “Where are you?” with the implied question, ‘and what have you done?’ Somehow the questions about God and man ultimately meet in questions about Jesus.

“Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. This is the refrain or mantra, we might say, of the Advent season – the season of God’s coming to us. What does it mean that the kingdom of heaven is at hand? Jesus takes up this refrain from John the Baptist and makes it his own. In him it has its fullest meaning. But what is that meaning?

For centuries upon centuries upon centuries, the great gospel story for this day has been the triumphal entry of Christ into the holy city of Jerusalem. He comes as a king. His coming is greeted with eager enthusiasm and joyous expectation, it seems. He is hailed as king.

But is this not the gospel of Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week leading to the dark pain and agony of Good Friday, the somber silence of Holy Saturday, and then, only then, the paradoxical and overwhelming joy of Easter? To be sure. But “Christmas and Easter are but the evening and the morning of one and the self-same day” as the poet and preacher John Donne puts it. There is an inescapable connection between these two primary centers of Christian contemplation. Like an ellipse, our faith oscillates between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, each are implicated in the other. Neither makes any sense without the other.

We know, of course, the further irony of this triumphal entry of a king to his city. The cries of “Hosanna” quickly turn to the cries of “Crucify, Crucify!” And only so can we really begin to learn what it means for the kingdom of heaven to be at hand. “My kingdom”, Jesus will say, “is not of this world”. But that is precisely what we so often want to make it. That is precisely our darkness which the Light of Christ coming to us overcomes.

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