Month: December 2019

And this shall be a sign unto you

The gentle quiet of Christmas morn is itself a Christmas blessing, a gift to the understanding. In the noise of our world and day we overlook what is wrought in the great silences of God. Creation, Christ’s Incarnation, and Christ’s Resurrection all happen “in the deep silence of God”; we know them only after the fact. Ignatius of Antioch, one of the Apostolic Fathers, second-generation Christians as it were who had first-hand contact with the Apostles, speaks wonderfully about the silences of God.

Mary’s virginity was hidden from the prince of this world; so was her child-bearing, and so was the death of the Lord. All these three trumpet-tongued secrets were brought to pass in the deep silence of God. How then were they made known to the world? Up in the heavens a star gleamed out, more brilliant than all the rest; no words could describe its lustre, and the strangeness of it left men bewildered … The age-old empire of evil was overthrown, for God was now appearing in human form to bring in a new order, even life without end (Ignatius’s Epistle to the Ephesians).

He could be commenting on this morning’s readings. “The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men,” Paul tells us in his letter to Titus. “And she brought forth her first-born son,” Luke tells us. Such are the quiet graces of Christmas morn.

They are there for our understanding, a challenge and a counter to our post-Christian world. How do we think God? Through the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology, the dance of negation and affirmation that distinguishes God as the principle upon which everything depends and so is not to be confused with anything in the created order. Without the dance of “this is thou and neither is this thou” we collapse God into ourselves and into all of the petty nonsense of our world and day. Such is our atheism. It is for that reason that the so-called Athanasian Creed with its sequences of negation and affirmation about the mystery of God as Trinity and the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation might well be our best Christmas contemplation. “Without forsaking what he was,” namely, God, “he became what he was not,” namely, man, as Athanasius himself says, providing the key insight that belongs to the Creed which much later came to be named after him. We cannot not think God and we can only think God in this way.

The mystery of the union of God and man is the heart of Christmas, its wonder and truth. Nothing is but what is in God and apart from God nothing is. The mystery of God with us is the mystery of God himself. All of the wonderful images of the Christmas scene laid out so wonderfully by Luke for us this morning are but signs that point to the wonder of God. Angels and shepherds come to worship and so do we. To worship is to contemplate what is worthy of all our attention. We are enfolded into the mystery which we behold. Through the dance of negation and affirmation we participate in the mystery of Christ, the Word made flesh, “wrapped in swaddling bands and lying in a manger.” The very contrast between such glory and such lowliness is the greater glory, the greater unity of God in whom all things find their truth and being.

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And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father

Christmas is really all about what we behold, about what we look at attentively; in short, to what we think about in a serious way. How strange and counter-culture that must seem in the hustle and bustle, the stürm und drang, the storm and stress of the Christmas season. And yet, perhaps, nothing is more needed.

What we are bidden to behold is the mystery of God, first and foremost, and then the mystery of God with us. This is the necessary corrective to all the frantic pressures and hectic busyness of Christmas and to its opposite in the empty loneliness of so many in the world of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. We look out, I fear, on a world of lonely people, isolated and afraid. “Look at all the lonely people, where do they all come from, where do they all belong,” as the Beatles sang in ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ It may be, too, that I am simply like Father Mackenzie, “writing the words of a sermon no one will hear.”

What does Christmas mean in our post-Christian culture? Apart from the commercial aspects of getting and spending, I suspect it mostly has to do with a certain desire for a kind of coziness and comfort with family and friends, hyggelig, to use a Danish and Scandinavian term. But the pursuit of such material comforts paradoxically seems to create all of the anxieties of Christmas and turns hygge into something more like Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream.” Cozy comfort and hugs become nordic noir! Instead of a more profound sense of the unity of our humanity we retreat into our little cubby-holes of comfort over and against what has become a fearful, uncertain, fractious and disordered world. We are trapped in a culture of divisiveness and fearful animosities.

But why? In part, because we make the mistake of thinking that we can and must make Christmas for ourselves over and against the other whoever that other may be; that we can and must make the world comfortable for ourselves which is always at the expense of others. We forget the radical meaning of Christmas which is about God and God’s love for his creation and for the whole of our humanity. We forget everything that belongs to the wonder and the mystery of the Christmas scene. What is that scene? What do we behold? Simply this: Bethlehem is paradise restored. The images of Bethlehem in our churches and even in our post-Christian culture signal the mystery of God and man, of a mother and a child, of men and women, of shepherds and kings, of angels and sheep and, by extension and beyond the Scriptures, of ox and ass, of camels and peacocks, quite literally the whole menagerie of creation in the Christian imaginary of artists and poets. Bethlehem recalls us to the harmony and peace of the Creator and his creation, to something universal and yet intimate, a hyggelig that embraces rather than excludes.

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“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”

We seem to have come full circle. The Gospel for the Sunday Next Before Advent in our Canadian Prayer Book begins with John the Baptist looking upon Jesus as he walked and saying, “Behold the Lamb of God.” This morning’s Gospel on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, also from John’s Gospel, ends with  John the Baptist “seeing Jesus coming unto him, and saying, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” Such is the witness of John the Baptist to the advent of Christ and to the meaning of human redemption.

In between the two Gospel readings for these Sundays are four verses which open us out to the mystery of Christ in his Advent to us. John the Baptist points us to Christ. That is his ministry. He identifies him as “the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.” But in the intervening verses (John 1.30-34), we have John’s account of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. An Epiphany theme, it nonetheless highlights the fuller meaning of his witness to Christ, “the one who comes after me,” he says, “ranks before me, for he was before.” Why? Because he is divine. “I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.” This is the witness of John.

The form of this witness is instructive to us in our approach to Christ and to Christmas, our approach really to the mysteries of God and his love for us. Quite simply, John the Baptist, like Mary, shows us the attitude of faith. They provide the strong counter to the endless narcissisms of our age. As if it was all about us! But no. The witness of John is very much about notcalling attention to himself, but to the “one who cometh after me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose,” he says. The questions about John the Baptist in this Gospel are all turned by John to Christ. “Who are thou?” he is asked.

There is in this a wonderful sense of wonder about John the Baptist, this strange and arresting figure of ascetic rigour and disturbing intensity. Last Sunday, Jesus pointed to John the Baptist and the significance of his ministry of preparation. Today, John the Baptist insistently points to Christ. “I am not the Christ,” he says. He calls attention not to himself but to Christ.

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