“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”
“Love is in the nature of a first gift through which all other gifts are given”, Thomas Aquinas remarks. Christmas makes that gift visible in Christ’s holy birth. What it means is captured in the great Christmas Gospel that builds on the thundering words of Hebrews. Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh. There is really nothing very cutesy and cuddly about that statement though it belongs to the radical nature of God’s engagement with our humanity. God with us, Emmanuel, in the simple and lowly humanity of Jesus, means God’s embrace of the human condition in all of its forms. Such is the divinum mysterium. God becomes man without ceasing to be God. That is the gift that changes everything. It is everything. God does not change but everything changes for us. Jesus is both God and Man yet one Christ, “not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh”, thus being collapsed into the world and ceasing to be God, “but by taking of Manhood into God”, as the Athanasian Creed puts it. Everything changes for us.
But what does it mean to celebrate Christmas in a post-Christian and post-secular world? Simply this, to ponder the mystery of the Christmas gift of God himself. No greater antidote to the myths and misconceptions about the Church, about the Christian Faith itself, and about our current angst and unease in the myths about culture and identity. Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all religions of the Word albeit in different registers of emphasis and meaning. Christianity is the religion of the Word made flesh. That highlights the order and unity of the intellectual and the sensual. Christ is the Word made flesh. He is the Father’s Son and Word “incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary,” and “made man”, as the Creed puts it.
The challenge is to think and feel this mystery, the mystery of God, on the one hand, and the mystery of God with us, on the other hand, in the intimacy and wonder of Christ’s birth. To think and feel. To feel the thought, the intimate association of intellect and sensibility.
Christmas is not simply about the narrative story of Christ’s birth so familiar to you in carol and song, and in the various crèche scenes of Bethlehem that traditionally belong to the cultural landscape of Christmas. Such things all belong to the greater mystery to which they point us. Christmas Eve goes to the heart of the matter without which everything else is but tinsel and wrap. The great lesson from Hebrews sums up the pageant of law and prophecy in God’s eternal Word and Son while the great Christmas Gospel highlights that God’s Word and Son is “the Word made flesh … dwell[ing] among us”. The wonder of this holy night is what we behold, “the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”.
God’s Word, eternal and self-complete, engages our world and our words which are so incomplete and finite. In so doing, God bestows an incredible dignity upon our humanity. He does so not by way of the mechanics of power and dominion but through the quiet and humble humanity of Christ born of Mary. Love, as Paul will put it, “vaunteth not itself”, “is not puffed up”, “seeketh not her own”, “rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth” and, contrary to the world of darkness and despair, “beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things”. “The love of God”, John tells us in his Epistle, is manifested “toward us”, “because God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him”. Something is seen and heard through the things of creation that awaken us to the uncreated and eternal truth of God.
It does not depend on us but seeks something from us. Christ is “the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world”. His birth is omni populo, for all people, but that requires our seeing and embracing what we behold. “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not”. Such is the darkness of sin and evil in the denials of our hearts and minds. Christ’s holy birth seeks nothing less in us than our being born of God, our being awakened to his grace and truth alive in us.
In this sense, the great mystery of Christmas is the mystery of God himself which in turn opens us out to the mystery of ourselves as the children of God. Never more so than on this holy night. On Christmas night, we are all the children of God who delight in what God gives. He gives us himself. He is light and life to all “them that believe on his Name”. We behold the glory of God in the Word made flesh whose dwelling with us overcomes the divide between the intellectual and the sensible. We are freed to love itself in the simple wonder of the Word made flesh. “In the beginning God”, Genesis states. “In the beginning was the Word”, John begins, “the Word which was with God”, and “was God”, by whom “all things were made”.
The wonder of Christmas is that Word is with us in the humanity of the Word made flesh. God makes himself known in the fullness of his grace and truth and what is made known to us has the power to change us into that which we see. This is the great joy and blessing of Christmas, notwithstanding the uncertainties and the distemper of our times. We behold a great wonder.
And as is often the case, the poets put it best, and so Richard Crashaw (c. 1613-1649) gives voice to the wonder of Christmas night.
Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span
Summer in winter, day in night,
Heaven in earth and God in man.
Great little one, whose all embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth.
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”.
Fr. David Curry
Christmas Eve, 2022