“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass,
which the Lord hath made known unto us.”
The language and images that belong to the Christmas mystery illuminate and instruct. They do not hide from view the grim and dark realities of sin and evil in its variety of forms, yet they signal a profound note of positivity and joy which is largely concentrated in the idea and concept of Bethlehem. It is the place of our abiding in the mystery of Christmas for the space of twelve days. In and through the great cluster, even a confusion of images, Bethlehem has a powerful symbolic force as the place where the pageant of themes belonging to redemption and salvation meet and cohere in a radiancy of joy and awe.
While the Christmas mystery culminates with the coming of the Magi-Kings at Epiphany, the readings for the Sundays after Christmas enrich our understanding of the mystery of Christ’s holy birth. The Epistle reading from Galatians for the Sunday after Christmas Day affirms the reality of the Incarnation in terms of the sending forth of God’s Son, “made of a woman, made under the Law” to redeem and, even more, to adopt us as the sons and heirs of Christ. The Gospel from Matthew unfolds the story of Christ’s birth, highlighting the uncertainty and compassion of Joseph about Mary being “found with child of the Holy Ghost” who in “[thinking] on these things” is instructed by an angel who reveals to him the essential mystery of the birth of a Son whom Joseph shall call Jesus, meaning Saviour. Matthew offers a further elaboration in parenthesis, quoting Isaiah, that Jesus is “Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us”.
The Second Sunday after Christmas follows upon the Octave Day which commemorates the Circumcision of Christ, a further affirmation of the humanity of Christ, who, as human, is man born of woman. As John Hackett nicely observes, “Christ is man born of woman to redeem both sexes”; it is a kind of testament to the concrete realities of the human condition. “Male and female he created them”. And while that is not everything about what it means to be human, it is not nothing; it is an important affirmation of the embodied nature of our humanity. Those propers, the appointed Collect and readings, are also appointed to be used on this Sunday.
The lesson from Isaiah is especially familiar with the ‘names’ of the child and son who “is born” and “given unto us” upon whom the governance of the world rests. The idea of name here takes us on a deeper meaning recalling the name of God given to Moses at the burning bush; not just the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but “I Am Who I Am” which is further elaborated here in terms of names or titles which signal the divine attributes of power: “Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, the everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace”. They are all terms that contribute to the wonder of the babe of Bethlehem in his symbolic and essential being as God with us and God for us.
The Gospel builds on these images from the Hebrew Scriptures and draws them into the scene of Bethlehem. What the shepherds say to one another complements John’s great insight into the Word made flesh. They go to Bethlehem to “see this thing which is come to pass”, literally, this saying, το ρημα τουτο, which has happened, το γεγονος, which has come to be. They go to Bethlehem following the encounter with the angels but, like Joseph in Matthew’s account, they understand that what they have learned is something which “the Lord hath made known unto us”. There is the constant emphasis on things being made known to us rather than invented by us.
That is an important feature of the Christmas mystery of the light of God overcoming the darkness which belongs to the limitations of human knowing and the realities of human sin. The mystery of Christ reveals what belongs to the fullness of our humanity as the children and sons of God. The shepherds make haste, Luke tells us, and find “Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger” and, having seen, they become the evangelists of the Christmas message, “[making] known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child”. It awakens wonder in those that heard it, most especially in Mary, who “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”.
In Mary we see what belongs to Christian contemplation and devotion. It is about abiding with the things that are said, with the things that have come to pass, with the saying which has come to be; in short, the Word made flesh. The whole thrust of the Christmas mystery is about who this child is, namely, “God, of God, Light, of Light, Very God, of very God”, as the Creed proclaims, itself the result of keeping all these things and pondering them, weighing their meaning and thinking upon them.
It is also what the second lesson at Matins signals in the powerful imagery of Colossians about Christ as “the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation” in whom “all things were created through him and for him” and who “is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” The coherence of images is in the child Christ. He is the mystery and the wonder of Christmas. “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell”, a fullness which is captured in the cluster of creatures which belong to the imagery of Bethlehem, not just as Paradise restored, but as signalling the nature of the greater redemption of our humanity. It is found in “the fullness of God” in Christ through whom God “reconcile[s] to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross”. Once again we see the crucial interplay of Christmas and Easter.
Bethlehem becomes the place where we ponder the nature of our relation to one another and to God in love. It means a kind of watching, itself a pondering and a watching upon the things that matter, not altogether unlike the Passion scene in the Garden of Gethsemane. Wendell Berry, in a very powerful and touching short story called ‘Watch With Me’, shows rural life in terms of the care for one another; a group of neighbours following one of the community who has gone off with a gun, fearing for him and caring for him as he meanders through the countryside during the day and into the night. The men persist in following him and define themselves by their concern. “They lost all sense of where they were except in relation to one another”. All other concerns are forgotten save their quest. “They seemed to have become enlarged out of their bodies into sight itself and the effort of sight, and they walked owl-eyed among the confusions of things and the shadows of things”. It is wonderful language that speaks to “the confusions of things and the shadows of things” that we behold in Bethlehem and which define us and enlarge us into sight, into the understanding of the love which belongs to our relation to one another.
Love comes down at Christmas to enfold us in the divinum mysterium of God’s love. But it does so only through our being like lowly shepherds who come to see “this things which has come to pass” and our being like Mary who “kept all these things” that were said, “and pondered them in her heart”. Pondus meum, amor meum, my weight is my love, Augustine will observe, the weight of our souls by which in a marvellous paradox of language “we ascend in the ascension of our hearts” (ascendimus ascensiones in corde – Conf.XIII, 9), the lifting up of our hearts that places us and one another in the love of God. The love which comes down lifts us up and into the love of God. To abide in Bethlehem is to ponder that love and to walk “owl-eyed among the confusions of things, and the shadows of things” to discover the intelligence of the coherence of the love which holds all things together.
“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass,
which the Lord hath made known unto us.”
Fr. David Curry,
Second Sunday After Xmas, 2022
(under lockdown conditions imposed by the Bishop)