Sermon for the Sunday After Christmas
When the fullness of the time was come,
God sent forth his Son, made of a woman
There is a rich fullness to Christmas, a fullness of images seen and heard, in crècheand carol, in sacrament and word. It highlights an important feature of the Christian faith. It is about the fullness of images rather than an emptying of images. But the images of Christmas are not nothing. They are not mere images, empty signs; rather they are signs that signify a fullness of meaning. They have, as it were, a sacramental quality to them. They point to the reality of Emmanuel, “which being interpreted, is,” as Matthew states, “God with us.” All of the images of Christmas dance and swirl around the mystery of God and of God with us; the idea of the sign and the thing signified have very much to do with our incorporation into the life of God through Christ’s incarnation. Such is “the fullness of the time.”
This has a profound significance for how we think about what it means to be human. God’s intimate engagement with our humanity in Christ’s holy nativity signals something profound about our humanity. It signals that our humanity finds its truth and fullness in God. As the reading from Galatians indicates, this means a certain preparation and readiness through God’s will at work in time and, more importantly, in the intersection between time and eternity captured, I think, in Paul’s rich phrase “the fullness of the time.” It suggests a certain moment of rightness, of the making adequate of our humanity for this realization in time that gives time and our humanity its truth and meaning. The concept of “the fullness of the time” also applies to humankind historically in terms of cultures and individual lives.
“There came,” T.S. Eliot says in ‘Choruses from “The Rock,”’ “at a predetermined moment, a moment in time /and of time,/ A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history:/ transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time,/ A moment in time but time was made through that moment:/ for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment/ of time gave the meaning.” As he explains, “it seem[s] as if men must proceed from light to light, in the/ light of the Word,/ through the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative being; /Bestial as always before, carnal, self-seeking as always before,/ selfish and purblind as ever before,/ Yet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their/march on the way that was lit by the light; /Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet following no other way.”
For there is no other way than the way of God despite our “negative being” and our wandering ways of deceit and confusion, of certainty and uncertainty, of sin and folly. God makes our way to him through the way of his coming to us at “the fulness of the time.” This is the wondrous mystery which we behold in the Christmas scene of the Word made flesh, of the babe of Bethlehem wrapped in the swaddling bands of our humanity, “incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary.” Christ is “that pure one,” as Irenaeus so beautifully puts it, “opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.” “Made of a woman,” says Paul, “made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”
