“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”
She was an old woman, weary and worn, burdened with the cares and worries of life. She paused for a moment before a Crêche scene in the park of a big city. It was a time when such things were more common and were yet to be regarded as politically incorrect. She put her bags down and looked upon that quiet scene in the midst of the city’s bustle. I watched as she slowly crossed herself before picking up her bags and shuffling on. A Christmas blessing, I thought.
Christmas seems sometimes just too much. Perhaps some of you know what I mean. Kathy and Scotty Cameron have a pillow inscribed with the letters OCD meaning Obsessive Christmas Disorder! All the hustle and bustle, all the frantic press and bother, all the manic shopping and travel, all the tinsel and wrap; all too much. Not to mention the great plethora of images, the sights and sounds that surround this thing we call Christmas. Not to mention the sad array of images of violence and destruction, of war and sorrow that equally confront us and which stand in such glaring contrast to the claims of peace and prosperity, goodwill and charity. All too much, it seems. No time to stop and think.
Such a rich fullness of images. Are we simply to pick and choose whatever suits us or whatever happens to come to the surface of our hearts and minds? Are we like Dylan Thomas in his celebrated poem “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” simply to plunge our hands “into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea” and see what comes out? What comes out is “Mrs. Prothero and the firemen” attending a kitchen fire on Christmas day, a memorable event, no doubt, but it is the question which Jim’s aunt raises, Miss Prothero, who “said the right thing, always” which frames the narrative. “Would you like anything to read?” she asks.
Christmas Eve is about something read. “How do you read?” Jesus asks a questioning lawyer, meaning how do you read the Law, the Torah? He draws out of him what is known as The Summary of the Law, the ethical and spiritual teaching which is at once common to Judaism and Christianity, to Islam and to Greek philosophy and which connects to the teachings of the great religions of the world. The love of God and the love of humanity are somehow inescapably bound together. The lawyer’s answer, itself a collation of passages from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, two of most your favourite books, I am sure, leads to another question by the lawyer, “and who is my neighbour?” Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan. It is, we might say, part of the Torah of Jesus. Torah properly means instruction or guidance, an instruction and a guide for life. How you read is also about what you read. It leads to how we live. As we read so we do, as it were. In the mystery of Christmas, God becomes neighbour.
Yet, it must come as a kind of shock and surprise to hear what we read tonight at Christmas Eve. While our songs and carols tell the familiar story of a child born in a manger, of angels and shepherds, of sheep and cows and lowly asses, of Mary and Joseph, of no room in the inn at Bethlehem, and looming in the background the ominous presence of powers political and economic, of taxation and enumeration, the readings of Christmas Eve concentrate our attention on God as Word and Son and Light. Powerful theological ideas are set before us. They go to the heart of the matter, to the essence of Christmas.
It is all about the divinum mysterium, the mystery of God and the greater mystery of God with us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. This redeems all the rich fullness of Christmas, makes holy of what seems to be too much by gathering everything into the infinite greatness of God, a greatness which none of our Christmas busyness can possibly comprehend. Christmas in its truth speaks to the darkness of our finite world, confronts us with the myriad of partial truths and images that belong to our finite and limited grasp of reality. Christmas challenges the reductive certainties of the natural sciences in reducing the world to the quantum uncertainties of random contingent existence. It challenges the reductive claims of the social sciences in reducing everything to mere social constructs of our devising as if everything, as Terry Eagleton puts it “is cultural, including the Andes and the aorta” which is really, he suggests, “a piece of self-flattery on the part of some in the humanities”. It challenges the reductive ideologies of the global world of neo-liberalism which has benefited the few at the expense of so many, destroying in its unfettered wake the institutions that make life meaningful, what Edmund Burke called “the little platoons”. One has only to consider our Maritime world. It challenges, too, the view that Christmas is really about family, or children, or the economy. It is none of those things in themselves but only through these great words.
The point about these rich and powerful Christmas words is that they engage us and our world. They do so by virtue of the infinite greatness of God. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity”, the great catholic Creed of St. Athanasius avers before going on to proclaim the essential aspects of the Incarnation in the creedal story of Christ. The Trinity? Yes. Nothing less than the mystery of God himself, as it were. Think the Trinity in this way? Yes. What is this way? The way of negation and affirmation. For that is the check and the counter as well as the redemption and the truth of our own finite thinking. God is at once no-thing and yet the principle of everything each in their own individual integrity. So God is not to be collapsed and confused with the things of creation in their finitude; at the same time, God is the basis and foundation for the being of each and everything in its truth.
To think God is the beginning of the Christmas mystery. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”. This is great spiritual and intellectual truth which is the common ground of many of the great religious and philosophical traditions of the world. As an anonymous medieval carol puts it, “that which the Jews and the Greeks did divine/ Is come in the fullness of Jesus to shine.” Such is the infinite light of the greatness of God. This is the great reality that gives meaning and purpose to all of the rich fullness of our Christmasses.
The great wonder and miracle of Christmas is the wonder and miracle of God with us. It is the burden and task of the Church on this most holy night to proclaim this great wonder and mystery. The task is to open us out to Love Incarnate that alone can change our hearts and minds and redeem all the confusions and chaotic kaleidoscope of images that surround and bombard us. The love of God engages us in the darkness of our fears and uncertainties to recall us to the truth of our being in him.
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”, literally ‘tented among us’, lest we might suppose that God has been taken captive more permanently to our devises and desires. “Without forsaking what he was”, God, “he became what he was not”, man. And for what end? That we might discover the true worth and meaning of our humanity. It is found in God, in our being with God because of God being with us. “No one”, John goes on to say in the Prologue of his Gospel, “has ever seen God”. God cannot be grasped empirically, but “the only-begotten Son of the Father, he has made him known”, literally ‘exegeted him’. This is the point. God reveals himself to us as “infinite power, wisdom and goodness” (Art. 1, Articles of Religion, BCP, p. 699) in the most paradoxical and yet wondrous way imaginable, in the Word made flesh, God with us, Emmanuel. We see but “through a glass darkly”, to be sure, yet we see for we behold what we have been given to see. It is what we read and how we read that makes all the difference. Here is the redemption of all our hearts and minds, the redemption of our humanity. It is found in the Word made flesh who dwelt among us. Here is the love which redeems our loves if we like that old lady pause and behold this holy scene. Only so can it speak to our hearts.
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”
Fr. David Curry
Christmas Eve, 2016