by CCW | 24 December 2017 23:00
Christmas challenges all the absurd certainties of our worried and weary world, a worried and wearied world, perhaps, because we are too much “assured of certain certainties” and only too “impatient to assume the world” (T.S. Eliot, Preludes). A virgin and a mother, a child who is God, a night that is eternal day, the Word and Idea of God made flesh, God with us and towards us and for us without ceasing to be what He is in himself – God. These are surely the ideas that challenge us. Christmas speaks powerfully to all our fears and worries, to the anxieties which arise from the absurd certainties and arrogance of the vanities of our reason when left to “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” It challenges all of the absurdities of power and domination in a world of violence and destruction, a worried and weary world, indeed.
“O weary, weary were the world / But here is all aright,” as G.K. Chesterton’s lovely poem, A Christmas Carol, puts it. Christmas proclaims the redemption of our humanity in all of its fullness, the redemption of our hearts and minds, of our souls and bodies. It is all found in God. That we might know this wonder and mystery, we have the wonder and mystery of God with us, Emmanuel. “The Christ-child lay on Mary’s heart, / His hair was like a fire./ (O weary, weary were the world,/ But here the world’s desire.)”
No doubt, it may seem de trop, all too much. And there have even been times when Christmas was banned by Christians, particularly those of a Puritan persuasion, not simply because people seemed to be having too much fun (and we can’t have that, can we?!), but because all of the images that came to surround the celebration seemed to be idolatry, mistaking God himself for the things which God has made, confusing the Creator with the Created. Christmas seemed to be mere superstition, “painted-over paganism” and anti-religious, a betrayal of the holy.
The first Book of Common Prayer (1549), too, was mocked as being “but like a Christmas game” by traditionalists, particularly in Cornwall, who wanted to retain the mystery of the Latin Liturgy and a sense of the holy as mysterious and incomprehensible. The association of the English liturgy with “a Christmas game” suggests something frivolous and not serious, something not really real. How to think the mystery of Christmas, it appears, is not a new challenge; it is the challenge for every age.
The sacred and the secular, the holy and the profane, the strange and the ordinary. Are we simply left with a pile of opposites, of contraries from which we must choose? We could add to the pile just by going through the great readings of Christmas night in all of the rich paradoxes of images they present. But there is something more to Christmas than the piling up of oppositions and a confusion of images. Christmas is about the extraordinary in the ordinary, about the mystery of God being with us in the intimacy of the humanity of Christ without ceasing to be God. For “without forsaking what he was, he became what he was not,” as Athanasius so wonderfully puts it. “Not by the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of manhood into God,” the Athanasian Creed confesses, nodding in honour to its namesake, though not its author. Both phrases are born of the most intense reflection upon the very Scriptural mysteries we ponder tonight. Something changes; not God but us. In the mystery of God with us “we beheld his glory, the glory of the only-begotten of the Father full of grace and truth.” If we will. But that is part of the wonder.
It is really all about what we behold, about how and what we see and hear this night. Instead of the banishing of the rich images of Christmas in all of their variety and even confusion, there is the redemption of images, the redemption of all things by their being gathered into understanding, into an order of meaning and purpose. “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God,” as we proclaim in the great Creed of the Christian Faith, is the God who engages our humanity. Such is the love that is God, the love that has been manifested towards us “because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him.” He is our life and our light and the counter to all our distresses and worries. To think God seriously makes violence and destruction impossible.
Christmas would awaken us to this wonder at the same time as acknowledging that we can ignore and refuse it. In fact, that is all part of the mystery. “He came unto his own and his own received him not.” It is all a question of what will we behold and see, what will we receive and believe, or not. The mystery of Christmas is the wonder of God with us, to be sure, but the great challenge of Christmas for our world is the idea of God himself. We are often too much with ourselves only to find our own emptiness, culturally and spiritually. Such is our nihilism that expresses itself either in the active destruction of ourselves and one another and our world or in the passive despair that results in our retreat into the ghettoes of our fears and petty comforts, huddled in the doom and gloom of impending catastrophe.
The great mystery of Christmas counters the nihilisms our world and day. It is a quiet but strong testament to the idea that “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves,” a testament to the destructive madness of our arrogance and ignorance, to the presumption of power and dominance as well as to the pathos of our fears and worries. The counter is found in the divine humility of the Word made flesh, in the simple story of a mother and child, in the story of an obscure birth in an obscure village, of a child “laid in a manger” because “there was no room for them in the inn.” Everything in the story of Christmas counters our pretensions and certainties. A critical and negative view of our humanity? Or an honest view of sin and folly? Yet, nothing, absolutely nothing, affirms more completely the idea of the great dignity that is bestowed upon our humanity in Christ’s holy birth. We have only to behold it, to think it and begin to live it; in short, to find ourselves enwrapped in its mystery and its glory, enfolded in love.
The images themselves challenge us to think through them and to make sense of them and everything else through them. The thunderous readings of Christmas night from Hebrews and John are about the great mystery of God engaging our humanity. That is the wonder. We do not need to be left simply to “the devices and the desires of our own hearts.” We know already too much about that. The love of God comes down at Christmas – yes, comes down, to use a spatial metaphor – but only to lift us up and to make us glad. Glad in what? Glad in the redemption of ourselves from ourselves. Glad in the redemption of heart and mind by being gathered into the Word and Idea of God. Glad in the one who comes to us without which we cannot come to him. That is the gift. The gift of love. For “love is in the nature of a first gift through which all gifts are given” (Aquinas). Building on the observation by Aquinas, Meister Eckhart adds that “the greatest good that God ever performed for man was that he became man.” The poet/preacher John Donne captures the mystery in a phrase: “‘Twas much, that man was made like God before,/ But, that God should be made like man, much more.”
To reclaim the utter wonder and mystery of God was the laudable aim of the Puritans. Many today rightly lament the busyness and the fuss and the bother of the crass consumerism that surrounds the Christmas season, turning it all, it seems, into “a Christmas game”. Our humanity in the absurdity of its follies has a way of making a mess of everything that is good and holy. But perhaps, just perhaps, this Christmas night might be our awakening to God and to God with us which is the redemption of our humanity. “O weary, weary were the world,/ But here is all aright”; “But here the world’s desire.”
Here in the wonder of Christmas is the beginning of our being freed from the tyranny of ourselves as lost in ourselves and our world, lost in the absurdities of human reason without the divine understanding which is proclaimed on this night. In the idea of God, the idea of the Divine Word without whom “was not any made that was made,” in whom “was life” that is “the light of men,” the light which “the darkness overcame it not,” “the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” for our reason is no reason apart from God’s reason, we might just begin to find joy and peace and hope and love. We might just begin to reclaim our true human dignity as the children of God. For such is the true mystery and wonder of Christmas night, the mystery of the Word made flesh who dwelt among us. Rejoice and be glad, “blessed with all spiritual blessings” in the child Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Christmas Eve, 2017
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