Year: 2020

“Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people”

So the Angel says unto the shepherds. Two things stand out for us on Christmas morn, the words, “fear not” and “good tidings of great joy”. We are much in need of both, to be not fearful and to hear good news. This is Christmas.

In the lovely quiet of Christmas morning, we hear the classic and familiar Christmas story about Christ’s holy birth in Bethlehem. The details are intriguing. In the turn and churn of worldly powers, of Joseph taking Mary being great with child to Bethlehem in obedience to the civil powers of that day to be numbered, enrolled, taxed, something else of greater meaning is accomplished. “She brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn”. The story touches us with the realities of the poor and the displaced in our own times, of those who are caught in the machinations of our global world. And yet, that sad commonplace of human hardship and suffering is eclipsed by a sense of wonder. Something else is being set in motion and among the little ones of our world and day, the shepherds.

They are not the great ones in executive power and will. Indeed, the shepherds contrast completely with the elites of every age. They care for the sheep, “keeping watch over their flock by night”, we are told. It is an image of care and one with a deep resonance of meaning about the real nature of political leadership. Thrasymachus, in Plato’s Republic, argues that justice is only “the interest of the stronger”, that might equals right because they can get away with it, that shepherds are really only business men driven solely by profit, only in it for themselves. But Socrates points out that no leader can simply be in it for himself, that political order radically depends upon the common good, that justice is for all and not simply for the few. This ancient insight and idea continues to challenge us in our own world and day. The care of the sheep is the shepherd’s primary and defining task or vocation to which everything else is but secondary.

And so it is fitting, if I may use a term beloved by medieval theologians, that the news of Christ’s holy birth, the birth of Mary’s son, should be made known to the little ones of the world and not to the magnificoes, the great ones. The shepherds are a standing criticism of political misrule and injustice by leaders in every age. They are especially receptive, we might say, to the higher form of justice that Christ’s birth portends and establishes. Such is the wonder of the Gloria which the angels sing and teach to the shepherds and through them to us. Peace on earth and good will toward men is the opposite of a world of abusive power and the domination of the few over the many.

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“In him was life, and the life was the light of men”

The words of life and light counter our world of death and darkness. This is Christmas. God is life and we have no life apart from God in himself and God in us. God is light, the light which “shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not”, cannot overcome nor overwhelm the light. Darkness and death are overcome and understood only in the life and light of God. This is Christmas. The mystery of God is the mystery of God with us.

This is Christmas, the counter to our fears and hatreds masked as care and compassion or, vice versa, care and compassion masking our fears and hatreds of one another. In the mystery of Christmas we behold one another in a new and deeper way. We behold one another in God and that makes all the difference.

Christmas makes known to us with a kind of simple clarity the abiding and eternal truth of God as life and light. Word, life, and light all spiral down to the nativity or birth-day of Christ, to the making known in the world of time and space the eternal nature of God as life, light and love. God gives himself and is none the lesser for it. God’s life and God’s light belong to the self-diffusive nature of the Good. “In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him.” This is Christmas. It counters not only the fears and anxieties of our world but also our enmities and divisions that separate us from one another in our fear of the other. Herein is love, the love which bestows dignity and meaning upon our lives in the embrace of one another in the light of God’s love.

Christmas is a rich collage of images both in terms of Church and culture. It is easy to reduce it all to sentiment and emotion, the feelings of the season. The greater challenge is about the lifting up of our hearts and minds to the light and truth that the story of Christmas presents to us. That is, perhaps, why on Christmas Eve we have such thundering and magnificent words in the Epistle reading from Hebrews and in the Prologue of John’s Gospel. Nothing about the babe in the manger, nothing even about Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. The entire focus is on the life and light of God made known in the Word made flesh and upon what we behold in that eternal word dwelling with us. “We beheld his glory”, we are told in parenthesis, “the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth”. The Word which was in the beginning, which was God and which was with God is the creative Word without which nothing was made that was made. The Word which is the life and light of God is Christ Jesus, unnamed but proclaimed in parenthesis, almost as an aside, as “the only-begotten of the Father”, as the eternally begotten of the Father. There was not when he was not.

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“My Lord, and my God”

The Collect for the Feast of St. Thomas in the week of the Fourth Sunday in Advent reveals the significance of Thomas for our approach to Christmas. It is about doubt leading to certainty. As such it helps us to think about doubt in a more positive and even metaphysical way that belongs to the larger traditions of philosophy and religion. The doubt of so-called doubting Thomas is really about the forms of intellectual inquiry, about wanting to know and in ways which challenge our assumptions about what we think we know. Thomas, the Collect observes, was “doubtful” about Christ’s Resurrection. No body, no incarnation, therefore no resurrection, we might say. Hence the reason for this feast and Gospel in the days leading to Christmas, to the Incarnation. Resurrection and Incarnation are indubitably and necessarily connected, it seems.

Descartes in the early seventeenth century uses doubt in an hyperbolical way in the quest for certainty. He highlights the uncertainties or the doubtfulness about what we can know simply through our senses in order to bring us to realize that our knowing anything at all depends upon the knowledge of ourselves as thinking things which in turn depends upon the knowledge of God as good and not a deceiver if we are to have any knowledge whatsoever whether of mental or physical things. Calling into question what we ordinarily take for granted leads us to a deeper understanding of the metaphysical principles upon which thought and being depend. Perhaps we can see the biblical Thomas as a kind of precursor of such forms of philosophical inquiry.

For the doubt of Thomas is really a kind of questioning about the reality of God’s intimate engagement with our humanity, an engagement which opens us out to the reality of the mystery of God who cannot be contained to the limits of human knowing, on the one hand, and to the spiritual truth about our humanity and its differing capacities to apprehend truth and meaning, on the other hand. The so-called doubting of Thomas provides “the greater confirmation of our faith,” as another Thomas, Thomas Aquinas, reminds us and which the Collect seems to suggest. The doubt of Thomas is “for the more confirmation of the faith”.

That “greater” or “more confirmation of [our] faith” is captured in Thomas’ words to Christ, “my Lord, and my God.” We are not told whether he reached out with fingers and hands to touch; we are only told what he says. Yet his words are testimony enough. They convey the reality of the encounter with the risen Christ. He can only be risen if he first was dead and he can only have died if he had a body. Christmas is all about the wonder and marvel of God becoming man, the Word made flesh. “Without forsaking what he was, he became what he was not,” as St. Athanasius puts the essential mystery of the Incarnation. With The Feast of St. Thomas we glimpse something of the larger nature of that mystery. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ is not just about Christmas; it embraces the entire life and work of Jesus Christ, the work of the redemption of our humanity.

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Link to the audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-communion for Advent 4

“And he confessed, I am not the Christ.”

There is a certain wonder, a sense of excitement and intensity, in the readings for The Fourth Sunday after Advent. “The Lord is at hand’, Paul tells us, near at hand. “I am not the Christ”, John tells us while pointing us to the one “who cometh after me” who is greater than me “whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose”. The questions all seem to circle around the idea of Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah, upon whom the hopes of Israel all depend especially in the context of Roman oppression and persecution, but also taking on a more eschatological tone. Such things are seen through the lens of scriptural prophecy such as in Daniel and Ezra about the vindication of Israel by God. Yet the witness or record of John explicates those things through another register. “Behold the Lamb of God”, John says, upon seeing “Jesus coming unto him”, “which taketh away the sin of the world”, something more universal.

This ending phrase takes us back to the Gospel for The Sunday Next Before Advent, at least in our modern Canadian Prayer Book, where it is the opening or beginning phrase. We have come full circle. Yet that is the point of Advent and Christmas; it is all about our circling around and into the mystery of God and of the mystery of God with us. John’s witness is his confession of Christ as the expected Messiah albeit in a new and deeper register of meaning with the idea of sacrifice in the one who bears in himself all of the sins of our humanity and world. “Behold, the Lamb of God”, John says.

But what are we looking for? Advent is about the awakening to the desire for what is absolute, for God, without which all our other desires turn to conflict and animosity, to division and enmity. Nothing is more clear in the climate of endless division and self-certainty that defines our post-Christian secular culture. John is pointing us to something very different and yet universally significant. He identifies the one who comes as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Can we really delude ourselves about the sin of the world? Can we really imagine that the sin of the world is everybody else except us? In a way, this is our modern dualistic dilemma. We demonize the other in order to assert ourselves and in so doing deny God. What you have done unto the least of these my brethren, you have done unto me, Jesus says in Matthew’s Apocalyptic vision. This is the contradiction of our age. The autonomous self confronts every other autonomous self. To put it simply, we are not self-complete but interdependent and dependent upon God.

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