Month: January 2021

“They presented unto him gifts”

One of the most beloved aspects of the Christmas scene is the image of the Magi-kings coming to Bethlehem. There is something intriguingly strange and exotic, something mysterious and wonderful in the coming of “the Magi from Anatolia” that complements and completes the tableaux of glory that surrounds the infant Christ in the humble lowliness of the stable scene. The Magi have captured the imaginations of the artists down throughout the centuries both in terms of the literary arts and in terms of the visual arts. Legends and stories have gathered around the Magi-kings both in numbering and naming what is otherwise unnumbered and unnamed by Matthew in his Gospel. In these works of holy imagination, something of the universal aspects of our humanity are signified with the Magi imaged as young, middle-aged, and elderly or as representative of the peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Such are the traditions of the holy exotica of the Magi.

What is said about them scripturally is sparse and yet so suggestive. Yet nothing says education quite so clearly as epiphany which is what the Magi are all about. Epiphany has to do with the making known, the manifestation of things worth honouring and worth knowing. The whole scene is about their coming to see, their coming to know, their willingness to enter into the arduous quest to know, the passion or eros to know, as Plato puts it. The Epiphany Gospel begins with an investigative journey, we might say, and ends with a reflective journey about what has been seen and heard, worshipped and honoured. They return not to Jerusalem but to their own country another way, “no longer at ease”, the modern poet T.S. Eliot suggests, because they have been changed inwardly by what they have seen.

They journey first to Jerusalem inquiring about “where is he that is born King of the Jews?” They have followed his star, following the light into the greater light. Herod in Jerusalem is troubled and worried at their coming. He gathers the chief priests and the scribes to find out the answer to the birth of this “King of the Jews”. For Herod it is really about a potential rival to his own power. The chief priests and scribes recall Micah’s prophecy about little Bethlehem. And so, paradoxically, at Herod’s direction the Magi set off to Bethlehem where they see “the young child and Mary his mother”. They fall down and worship him and, opening their treasures, “they presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh”. The gifts are, as one of the great hymns puts it, “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, gifts that teach and illuminate our understanding.

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“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass”

Christmas is more than a three-day wonder or even a nine-day wonder. The festival of Christmas extends to twelve days, an octave and a half, as it were. The readings from the Octave Day of Christmas are appointed to be used until the Epiphany. The Gospel reading from St. Luke continues directly from the Christmas morning Gospel. The shepherds, having heard the angelic Gloria, make their way to Bethlehem.

Along with the poetic, prophetic and philosophical reading from Isaiah, these readings bid us ponder more carefully and more thoughtfully the wonder of Christ’s holy birth. The shepherds say one to another, quite literally, “let us now go even unto Bethlehem and see this saying which has happened”, capturing something of the very idea of the Word made flesh, the very wonder of Emmanuel, the great Christmas name of Jesus, we might say. The emphasis of these readings is on that which is heard and seen and which occasions two things: the “mak[ing] known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child”; and the sense of wonder “at those things which were told” by the shepherds.

The quiet focus of this Gospel reading is on the activity of Mary in relation to the making known and to the sense of wonder. Her activity is the profoundly spiritual activity of the Church. It is, first and foremost, about contemplation, the highest activity of the human spirit, as Aristotle teaches. Mary is the theotokos, the God-bearer, the one who bears God into the world, the mother of God, as the orthodox faith confesses. Not the source of divinity which she cannot be but the human source of God becoming man in Jesus Christ. What that means concerns the more radical meaning of what it means to be human and in ways that challenge and counter our contemporary assumptions about the autonomous self. That more radical meaning is captured wonderfully in Mary’s fiat mihi at the Annunciation, “be it unto me according to thy Word”, her willing acquiescence, her ‘yes’ to God so central to the mystery of God with us. But it is equally captured in this Gospel reading: “Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”. That is to attend to God in his Word and in his Word with us.

Pondus meum, amor meus. “My love is my weight”, Augustine famously says in his Confessions (Bk. 13). The entirety of his being, he has come to recognise, is defined by the love of God, just like Mary. Her activity here is the activity and mission of the Church. It is about our constant and steadfast attention to the Word of God and to the motions of his grace in our lives. To keep all these things and to ponder them in our hearts is to pay serious attention to all that is said concerning this child.

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“His name was called JESUS”

Christmas is more than a three-day or even a nine-day wonder. There are the proverbial twelve days of Christmas, an octave and a half, as it were. Only so, it seems, can we begin to unpack the mystery of the Incarnation and its radical meaning of human redemption. The blood of the Holy Innocents on Monday past anticipates and participates in the blood of this day. The Octave Day of Christmas locates the story of Jesus and his sacred humanity concretely within the cultic and cultural realities of ancient Judaism. The Octave marks the Circumcision of Christ, the first blood-letting of Christ in the Christian understanding, circumcision is the Old Testament ritual that has its Christian counterpart in baptism.

We are apt to be squeamish about such a direct and emphatic insistence on the physical reality of the body and that of a male, to boot. But it belongs to the logic of the Incarnation itself that Christ is “made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law” as Paul in Galatians puts it. Only so might we receive the adoption of sons, our being made partakers of God through God’s Word and Son made man. Circumcision was the ritual of Jewish identity signifying a bond with the God who is beyond all nature as its principle and signifying that in the most particular aspects of the human male. Yet such is the logic of redemption. “Christ was man born of woman to redeem both sexes,” as John Hackett (17th c.) wonderfully notes.

The readings for the Octave focus on a further signifier in this ritual, the idea of naming. In Christian contexts, baptism is sometimes called Christening. It has entirely to do with our being incorporated individually into the body of Christ. More significantly, Christian baptism has to do with our being named individually in the giving of God’s own name as Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Here on the Octave Day of Christmas, the theme of naming is emphasized by way of Isaiah and Luke. Isaiah in a lovely passage which highlights the various titles or names of the expected one who comes as child and son and whose “name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, the everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” All of these connect to Luke’s Gospel reading where Jesus at his circumcision “was called JESUS”. The name Jesus is all in capital letters, thus screaming out to us the meaning of Jesus as saviour, on the one hand, and then reminding us, on the other hand, that he was “so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” He is JESUS from eternity. This name conveyed by God to the Angels is conveyed in turn to Joseph who “called his name JESUS,” as Matthew notes.

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