Month: January 2016

“They found him in the temple”

Where do we find God? In the places where he is named and praised, honoured and worshipped. “This is none other but the house of God … the gate of heaven” is written on the walls of this Church. “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God” is written in the narthex above where you enter into the Church. How little do we notice these things that remind us that this place, this Church, is and must be a place of teaching, a place where we find God because this is his temple. This is the house of God, where God is to be sought and found, where the things of God are to taught and learned. If the Church is not the place of teaching about God then it is not the Church.

This doesn’t mean that only the Church is the place where God is sought and taught. No. One of the sad tragedies and peculiar paradoxes of our contemporary culture is the failure to realise that there is not a single discipline of the mind, not a single aspect of human intellectual and spiritual culture that is not shaped and formed by religion and religious discourse. And the churches, more sadly, have been complicit in an atheist agenda – trying to make religion acceptable to the age, accommodating the teachings to the assumptions of the culture. From this standpoint, Christmas has become the atheists’ delight since it seems to confirm the essential atheist insight that God is made in the image of man. In the God made man, we see, the atheist claims, the fundamental point that we make God in our image. Nothing could be further from the truth of the Christmas story yet it is easy to see how Christians so easily collapse the Gospel into their own lives and expectations. Christmas quickly and easily becomes a form of self-worship.

Epiphany to the contrary is the atheists’ nightmare. Why? Because it is so resolutely set upon the themes of divinity. Its primary focus is the argument for the essential divinity of Jesus Christ and as such it argues for the essential attributes of God. We “turn ourselves” as John Cosin, the 17^th century Bishop of Durham in northern England puts it, “from his humanity below to his divinity above,” a turn from our contemplation of “His coming in the flesh that was God to His being God that was come in the flesh.” Epiphany is full of divinity.

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“They departed into their own country another way”

Epiphany marks the completion of the mystery of Christmas with the coming of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem. They are the proverbial Johnny-come-latelies as well as the come-from-aways. They add a certain exotic quality to the humble scene at Bethlehem. Suddenly we realise that Christmas is omni populo, for all people, for rich and poor, for humble shepherds and wise kings, for men and women.

The coming of the Magi-Kings elevates the vision of paradise that Bethlehem represents into something more. It becomes a polis, a city-state, as it were. The social and the political aspects of our humanity are added to the simpler, more agrarian and humble features of our humanity. God’s great little one is not just for the little ones of our society and world but importantly for all. Little Bethlehem, “great among the cities of Judah,” is great not just because of the coming of the wise men but because their coming reveals something more than simply the harmonies of the created order; something more than paradise renewed. Suddenly, the paradise of Bethlehem becomes an image of the City of God!

The coming of the Magi-Kings also marks the beginning of the tradition of gift-giving. Yet, importantly, their gifts are more than the stuff they bring: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Their gifts reveal the greater gift of Christ, the gift of divine love incarnate in the child before whom they fall and worship. Their gifts honour the greatest gift of all, the gift of God’s love for us in the Child Christ. Their gifts reveal who he is both in himself and for us. No greater gift and no greater way for us to be gathered into the circle of eternal glory.

Their gifts of sacred meaning reveal Christ to us as King, and God, and Sacrifice. They at once complete the circle of Christmas love and set us upon another journey into a greater circle, one which is implicit already in everything that belongs to the celebration of Christmas in the cycle of holy days that belong to the Christ Child’s crown of glory. The transition from paradise restored to an image of the heavenly city deepens the mystery of Christmas; nostalgia for a lost past changes into a prophetic present. Bethlehem is complete; everything has been gathered around the Word made flesh.

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“But while he thought on these things, behold”

Christmas really is all about what we are given to behold. To be sure, there is rather a lot to behold in the richness of Christmas, itself a twelve day wonder that not even twelve days can exhaust. After St, Luke’s story of the nativity and St. John’s theological tour de force, we have St. Matthew’s account. It sounds a more human and a more personal note. It is not by accident that the symbol for St. Matthew’s Gospel is a winged man. His account of the nativity shows us the perplexity of Joseph finding himself in the strange predicament of being betrothed to Mary who is found to be with child. Matthew quickly adds “of the Holy Ghost” but Joseph has yet to learn that. His initial response is to make private arrangements. “But while he thought on these things, behold…”

To behold is to pay attention. It requires something of us. What it requires is exactly what we see in Joseph. There is the equally outstanding measure of Mary, who is really in the background here, the figure of Joseph’s musings and perplexity. “How can this be,” it might seem he is asking, even though that is, quite literally, Mary’s question at the Annunciation. Matthew, of course, does not provide us with the account of the Annunciation to Mary; only Luke does. Here in Matthew’s account, however, is a kind of angelic annunciation to Joseph. In his quiet musings, “being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example,” he “was minded to put her away privily.” An angel of the Lord appears to him in a dream to direct him otherwise but only because he was thinking on these things, things which have all his attention.

Matthew’s account unfolds the story of Christ’s nativity through the quiet, humble eyes of Joseph to whom the angel speaks. His words to Joseph are like the angel’s words to the shepherds, “fear not.” What we are given to behold is something wonderful, something for all. Notice how Matthew, quite marvelously really and with great economy of words, unfolds all of the significant points. Mary is your wife. What is conceived in her is “of the Holy Ghost” – though what exactly he is meant to make of that remains unclear! “She shall bring forth a Son,” and, here is something else quite wonderful, “And thou shalt call his name Jesus.” The explanation is precise, “for he shall save his people from their sins.”

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