Sermon for the Sunday After Christmas

admin | 29 December 2019

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.”

We are the adopted sons of God through the Son of God made man of the Virgin Mary. A new and astounding dignity has been bestowed upon our humanity at “the fulness of the time,” when all things were in a kind of readiness, a readiness defined and established by God.

Just so, “the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise,” meaning that it happened in this manner and at this time, as Matthew tells us in his account of Christ’s nativity. There is the startling and shocking reality of Mary’s pregnancy; her being “found with child of the Holy Ghost.” Joseph, not knowing this – how could he, what would it mean? – “was minded to put her away privily,” because, “being a just man,” he was “not willing to make her a public example.” His perplexity of mind is answered by the angel of the Lord “appear[ing] unto him in a dream.” Dreams are an ancient means through which knowledge is conveyed, especially knowledge of what is more than human, yet through which things are learned about what it means to be human. Gilgamesh, for example, is prepared to meet Enkidu through a sequence of dreams signifying that Enkidu will be his comrade and friend, a second self. Through that encounter Gilgamesh changes from being a bad and abusive king, through the exercise of might over right, to becoming more human and more caring of others, and, thus, ultimately, the hero of the ancient Sumerian culture.

It belongs to the quality of soul in Joseph that he can be taught by an angel. The question itself is one which is taken up directly by Thomas Aquinas. “Can man be taught by the angels?” The answer is yes; in part because angels and men are spiritual and intellectual beings. The angels, he suggests, “move our imagination and strengthen our understanding.” This is what we see with Joseph being taught by the angel that “that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost” and that he “shall be called JESUS.” The name is shouted out to us, as it were, in capital letters, “for he shall save his people from their sins.” Jesus means saviour.

The holy days of Christmastide are like the opening of gifts. Through the fullness of the images of Christmas, we discover more and more their meaning and truth, unwrapping what the images signify and being drawn more and more into the mystery of Christ which they reveal. That the story has so many moving parts which cannot be reduced to a linear progression is because it is at once in time and of time but more than time. It is God in our midst gathering us into the mystery of the fullness of his life and being.

“Love is in the nature of a first gift through which all gifts are given” (Aquinas). Among the gifts is the moving of our imaginations and the strengthening of our understanding of Christ’s holy nativity. It happens through our attention to these images seen and heard, all of which belong to “the fulness of the time,” in which the gift of the child Christ is given to us and for us to see and hear.