by CCW | 24 December 2015 23:00
What does Christmas mean in a post-Christian and post-secular culture? Perhaps a time to reclaim something of its essential meaning. There are, to be sure, all of the many and varied traditions of family and community, of secular and social customs and practices that surround and often overwhelm us. What does Christmas really mean?
This is not the same question as what does Christmas mean to you and me individually and subjectively. What Christmas means to you and your family and circle of friends is important but results only in a kind of relativism which is unable to explain what anything means in itself. How do we think about Christmas and about its essential meaning?
“I am tired of hearing jingle bells,” someone said at the Capella Regalis concert here last Sunday night. That wasn’t on the programme. And yet that is one of the songs of the season, I suppose, just like Santa Claus is invariably and unavoidably part of the season, if not for many the heart of Christmas. We confront an almost overwhelming array of images that bombard our ears and eyes, not to mention their effect on our pocket books. It increasingly appears that Christmas is an economic event. Do your duty to the economy and spend, spend, spend. That is surely one of the reasons for the season! And yet, however much such things as giving and getting, buying and spending, consuming and consuming and consuming are a feature of the Christmas season now extending in the commercial world from at least Halloween to sometime late this afternoon, they don’t really explain anything. Why Christmas? Why a word that has inescapably a Christian religious reference in a post-Christian world?
Such questions grant legitimacy and even urgency to what the Church proclaims about Christmas. The sacred is at the heart of all of the secular expressions of Christmas. By Church, I do not mean the ghetto churches of what is really the tribalism of families in our local denominations, whether Anglican, Baptist or Roman Catholic. I mean the universal and catholic Church in the proclamation of the essential orthodox understanding of Christmas which offers a way to redeem the myriad of images that belong to Christmas and even a way to think the connections between religious cultures and identities in our global world. The celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ is central to the Christian Faith and therefore to the form of its engagement with everything else.
So what do we hear tonight? Our hymns and carols signal the most familiar aspects of the Christmas story, the story of shepherds and angels and later Magi-Kings coming to little Bethlehem to find Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger “because there was no room for them in the inn.” No mention in the nativity stories of Matthew and Luke of anything about ox and ass, let alone donkeys and even peacocks that will crowd into the visual and aural representations of Bethlehem. There is a great fullness of images in Bethlehem, even a confusion of details about the event. And yet they compel us and move our hearts and minds. Why? Because they signal certain universal themes. Bethlehem is paradise restored, a vision of the harmony of heaven and earth, of God and man, of rich and poor, of shepherds and kings, of men and women. How can we not be touched by such things of symbolic significance? There is something compelling in the story and in the accretion of images that have become so much a part of its telling in carol and song, in liturgy and art.
Our hymns and carols show us some of these familiar things. They speak to us about “the hopes and fears of all the years” that are somehow met in Christ tonight, we might say, even as we contemplate a dark and dismal world. Yet Christmas intentionally comes at the darkest time. No one knows with historical exactitude the time of Christ’s birth – such are the invariable limits of our historical knowing. Nothing new about that. The symbolic significance of the turn from darkness to light is far more important and far more obvious. That turns precisely upon the child Christ at the heart of the story, upon he who is born in Bethlehem on Christmas morn, whose name, Jesus, meaning saviour and his title, Christ, the anointed and promised one of God, belong to the meaning of Christmas.
But apart from the hymns and carols we do not hear about those things in the Epistle and Gospel readings for Christmas Eve. We hear instead the thundering and magnificent words from Hebrews and from The Prologue of John’s Gospel three essential things about the meaning of Christ’s holy birth, three essential things that illumine everything about the meaning of Christmas. They are three essential features of Jesus Christ whose name and title are not even mentioned in either text. The three essential terms are Word, Light and Son. They proclaim the great mystery of Christmas, the Christian understanding of the great mystery of all religions about the eternity of God and his being with us. In the Christian understanding that mystery is “the Word made flesh,” the Word who is the Light that overcomes the darkness, the Word who is the only-begotten Son of the Father “full of grace and truth”. At the heart of Christmas is God’s intimate engagement with our humanity in the humble birth of Jesus Christ.
We don’t get Christmas, I fear, because we don’t get God. If we don’t get the idea of God what sense can we make of the intimate form of God’s being with us in the simple story of Christ’s holy birth? We can make no sense of the very idea that most challenges our world, the idea of God incarnate, if we can no longer think the idea and the reality of God. “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness: the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible,” the first article of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion begins. It proclaims an understanding of the idea of God common to Jew, Christian, and Muslim alike and which belongs as well to the highest forms of ancient Greek philosophy. It provides the essential basis for any kind of principled discourse with other religions.
Nothing challenges the dogmatic materialism of contemporary culture more than this. The article goes on to state the Christian understanding of God as Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, terms which arise from the mystery of Christmas, and which inform the second article: “Of the Word or Son of God, which was made very Man.”
The idea of God becoming man is radical and revolutionary. It does not mean the collapse of God into our world, a kind of absolutizing of the finite, which is really the assumption of secular culture, such that God ceases to be God in his majesty and truth by becoming man. No. The great mystery of Christmas is the union of God and man, the mystery of their union. “Without forsaking what he was,” namely, God, “he became what he was not,” namely, man (Athanasius). Nothing speaks more profoundly to the dignity of our humanity. Nothing challenges a dark and disturbing world of death and destruction wrought by human beings than this idea of God becoming man. It is the great gift of Christmas. Man is made capax dei, capable of God, by the grace of God.
And yet without the idea of God, it is all meaningless and we are left with a great cluster of images, confused and confusing. The text from The Wisdom of Solomon images the wondrous dynamic of God’s engagement with our humanity. A pre-Christian text written perhaps a century before Christ, it has a rich and suggestive quality to it that captures the imagination. The longing for the peace and the righteousness of God is expressed in the idea of God’s Almighty Word “leap[ing] down from heaven, from thy heavenly throne.” That the passage goes on to think of that Word in warrior and militaristic terms no doubt gives us pause but the passage suggested to early and medieval Christians something theological. It was read and heard in the context of tonight’s lesson from Hebrews and John’s Prologue with their emphasis upon Word, Light and Son. In the darkness of nature’s night and in the darkness of the world politically, socially, and economically, God’s Word, the Word by which all things were made and are knowable, leaps down as Light in the darkness, and as Son, the Word made flesh. That leaping down bestows great dignity upon our humanity, a great gift, the gift of love through which all gifts are given. To think God is to begin to think again the great wonder of God being with us. Such is the wisdom and the wonder of Christmas night.
Fr. David Curry
Christmas Eve, 2015
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