by CCW | 25 December 2015 12:00
In the quiet calm of Christmas morning we celebrate Christ’s holy birth. There is a certain meditative quality to our gathering, it seems to me, after all the fuss and bother, the excitement and the expectancy of Christmas Eve. There is a certain uncertainty to our world and day, a world of fears and anxieties, to which the quietness of Christmas morning wonderfully counters. We are called to the truth of ourselves individually and collectively by our gathering at Bethlehem. The real and deep truth of our humanity notwithstanding the parade of atrocities globally is found in our communion with God in Jesus Christ. It is found in the humble yet awesome scene in Bethlehem.
We are no longer “assured of certain certainties” nor quite so “impatient to assume the world,” as T.S. Eliot puts it. Our world is a dark and disturbing place where we confront the disorder and the disarray of human hearts in acts of terrorism and destruction. Suddenly our cultural certainties seem far less certain; our cultural arrogance much more dangerous. How do we face such things? Do we simply retreat into the ghettoes of our churches, huddled behind closed doors of “certain certainties”, clinging to what we call our personal faith having despaired of the Faith itself? Or do we take a hold of this story contemplatively and enter more fully into its mystery and truth, the mystery and truth of the universal and catholic Faith?
“This shall be a sign unto you,” Luke tells us the angels say to the shepherds and so to us. We are one with the shepherds as the receivers of angels’ words. They are together the messengers of “good tidings of great joy”. “For unto you,” to you and me, “is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” A saviour – Jesus, Yeshua, means saviour. Christ means the anointed one of God. Words which we take for granted through their familiarity take on a special significance. What it all means is startling. It contrasts with all of the expected signs of salvation and exaltation. What does salvation mean? What does Christ the Lord mean? Salvation speaks to the wholeness and the completeness of our humanity, to our re-creation and redemption from sin. Christ the Lord speaks to the deep mystery of Christ as God, as “I am who I am” via the biblical circumlocution of Lord for the holy name of God revealed to Moses in the burning bush, the revelation of the principle upon which the being and the knowing of all things depend.
The great glad tidings of the angels to the shepherds is about the radical idea of God and of God being with us in a new and intimate way. God? Yes, God. One of our greatest difficulties about Christmas in a post-Christian and post-secular world is about thinking God. Yet, without the idea of God, the Christmas story is but a minor tale and of little worth. The sign that we are shown makes little sense without the idea of God in his “infinite power, wisdom and goodness”, “the one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions”, “the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible,” as the first article of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion puts it, capturing wonderfully the common thinking about the idea of the reality of God for Jews, Christians, and Muslims and for the later forms of the Greek philosophical traditions as well. Only then does the article go on to speak of God in the explicit Christian understanding as Trinity. The wonder of God in himself leads to the wonder of God with us in this sign, the sign of “the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.” God made man, at once “God of God; Light of Light; Very God, of very God; Begotten, not made; Being of one substance with the Father” and yet “c[o]me down from heaven”,“incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man,” as we just proclaimed in the great catholic creed of the Christian Faith.
This is the great challenge of Christmas within and without our churches. The challenge is to think again the great wonder of the idea and reality of God and the further wonder of his being with us in the simple humanity of Jesus Christ. The sign of “the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes” is no sign at all unless we see in the holy child “a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord”. Only then can we begin to think about what it means. Such is the purpose of a sign. It points us to what it signifies. What is signified here is the radical idea of God being with us in the child Christ. What it means is the bestowal of a wonderful dignity upon our humanity – the dignity of the Incarnation reveals the true worth and dignity of our humanity.
IXTHUS – a Greek acronym which spells fish – was a sign used by early Christians and in early Christian art. It speaks to the meaning of Christ’s holy birth, to the wonder of the mystery of God made man. It signifies “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour”. It reminds us of who Christ is and who he is for us, “Son of God, Saviour,” the very things the angels tell the shepherds, the very things that belong to the mystery of Christmas. Here is the true dignity of our humanity. It is signalled in the wonder of the birth of Christ.
In the liturgy of the mass at the time of the offertory, there are the private prayers said by the priest. They, too, are like signs which point us to what is signified. One prayer in particular illumines something of the wonder of Christ’s birth. “O God, who didst so wonderfully create and yet more wondrously restore the dignity of our humanity; Grant that by the mystery of this wine and this water, we may be made partakers of his divinity who humbled himself to share our humanity, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
“This shall be a sign unto you”, a sign of God’s humility, a sign of God’s grace bestowed as a gift upon our humanity, a gift restoring the dignity of our humanity. Can there be any greater wonder, any greater gift?
Fr. David Curry
Christmas Morn, 2015
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