Sermon for the Sunday after Christmas

admin | 30 December 2018

The birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise

This is how it happened? Well, at least in Matthew’s account. But more importantly what Matthew and Luke and John offer us is a way to think about the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. We might say that how it happened and how we think about what happened are inescapably intertwined. In fact, we really don’t have any other way to think about the mystery of Christmas than what we are presented with in the Gospels.

To be sure, there are the traditions of representation and reflection upon these mysteries that belong to our thinking. But what is most striking and most important about the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation is the idea of God being with us which is simply another way of thinking about the radical nature of God as the principle upon which the being and the knowing of things utterly depends. From such a view, God is always with us. Christ’s Incarnation is the instantiation of that idea simply in its most radical guise. No cause for Christian triumphalism however; only for humility and wonder.

Matthew’s account complements John’s outstanding theological vision more than it does Luke’s economical and bare bones story which at face value has nothing really extraordinary about it other than that in the light of John’s Christmas Gospel we are made aware that is what is extraordinary. The ordinariness of the extraordinary event, if you will. Matthew offers us an insight into something he shares with Luke. It has entirely do with angelic sight, the raising of our minds from the linear and divisive thinking of ratio to the unitive reasoning of intellectus into which everything is gathered together.

Matthew’s account focuses wonderfully, I think, on the role of the angels in directing the conscience of Joseph. He confronts a conundrum, a social scandal. Espoused to Mary, yes, but lo, and behold, she is with child and not by him! Something of the character of Joseph is suggested to us in Matthew’s equally laconic account, equal to Luke’s concision. “Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily,” discreetly arrange for things, as it were, and not go viral on twitter in the manner of Trudeau and Trump. There is in Joseph’s thoughts – something which we are allowed to see – a question, a sense of mystery, that has to do, perhaps, with his sense of the character of Mary. Simply put, he is perplexed about what exactly is going on. There are, to say the least, questions.

That is exactly what Matthew wants to emphasize. Joseph “thinks on these things” and in that moment of thinking, as Matthew puts it, “the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream.” The words of the angel open us out to the miracle of the extraordinary in the ordinary even though it has all of the makings of a twitter scandal. Joseph is made aware that “that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost”. Okay, a relief of a sort – it is not some other guy, but what is he to make of “conceived of the Holy Ghost”? Well, the angel assists his thinking by saying first that she shall bring forth a Son, and that “thou,” meaning Joseph, “shalt call his name JESUS.” As the text has come down to us, the name Jesus is entirely in capital letters. A strong point is being made about the name Jesus. It signifies Saviour as is pointed out by way of another literary device, that of the parenthesis. Matthew obverts to a prophecy by Isaiah about the Virgin birth (his word in Greek, I hasten to add parenthetically). The passage also brings to the fore the great Advent name for Jesus, Emmanuel. Everything hinges on that concept, the concept which catapults God with us into God himself.

Joseph did as the angel told him, Matthew tells us. How can we know this? Only through the witness of the Gospels, only through the way in which they speak about the great and awesome mystery of God. For that is what we behold. The awesome mystery of God himself through the mystery of his being with us. Our service of Christmas Lessons and Carols serves to draw us even more into the pageant of God being with us. It is all about how we think about that which happened. Our thinking, however, actually causes nothing to happen. God’s thinking on the other hand, always does.