“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass
which the Lord hath made known unto us.”
They are the words of the shepherds to one another after the angels had departed from them into heaven. And so begins the Shepherds’ Christmas as they make their way to Bethlehem and “[find] Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger”. Everything converges on Bethlehem, it seems. Such was the Angels’ Christmas on Christmas morning in the angel’s announcement to the shepherds that “unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord”. It is the occasion of great joy in heaven and on earth. For “suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, good will toward men”.
The Angel’s word launches the shepherds on their journey to Bethlehem. And while Luke tells us that Mary’s first-born son was “laid in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn”, in the Christian imaginary, the stable of Bethlehem, too, is a most crowded scene. And we are drawn to that scene to do like the Angels, like the Shepherds, and like Joseph and Mary; in short to behold and wonder “at those things which were told them by the shepherds”. The lowly shepherds have become, it seems, angelic messengers of the mystery of Christ’s birth. For “when [the shepherds] had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.”
Everything converges on Bethlehem and yet everything is concentrated on the child Christ. Everything circles around the child, the center of wonder and worship. As the great mystical and theological definition of God puts it, “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”. At Christmas that center is the babe of Bethlehem around whom the whole of creation gathers in wonderment and joy. The mystery enfolds us in the divine love which cannot be constrained and contained by us. Rather it envelops us.
“High and low, rich and poor, one with another,” Palestrina’s great Advent Matin Responsory begins. That crowded scene is not a jumble of indiscriminate things. It is not like Holy Week, the madness of crowds. Rather like Pentecost, it opens to us a wonderful vision of creation restored into unity and wholeness. It sets before us the true vision of the universality and unity of our humanity at one with God and with the good order of God’s creation. Matthew’s account of the Nativity will result in the coming in of the Magi-Kings which in some sense completes the tableau of creation restored. Thus both Matthew’s and Luke’s account of Christ’s Nativity complement the great Christmas Gospel from John which centers on “the Word made flesh”.
This is captured here by the shepherds’ words. They go to Bethlehem to “see this thing which is come to pass”, literally, ‘this saying that has happened’, το ρημα τουτο το γεγουος. This complements John’s great insight about the Word made flesh. And for both it is what God has made known to us. Bethlehem concentrates for us the double mystery of Christmas: it is at once the mystery of God and the mystery of God with us. It concentrates the central Christian idea that our humanity is radically incomplete and in complete disarray without God. God is not of our making. “It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.”
Bethlehem is really ‘paradise restored’ and marks the beginning of the journey of the understanding into the radical meaning of God with us, signaled already in his circumcision and naming. It teaches us something about our humanity as grounded in God and his creation. Men and angels, shepherds and kings, a man and a woman, a child and its mother, sheep and, in holy imagination, a whole menagerie of animals, even sleepy cows and asses, peacocks and camels, “the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come” (Is. 60.6); they all crowd into that holy place. “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them … they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11. 6, 9). But above all else in that crowded yet orderly scene: God and man, heaven and earth united.
This rich fullness of images counters the nihilism and the narcissism of our times. We are too much with ourselves only to find a great emptiness within our hearts and minds and endless divisions and animosities among ourselves about ourselves, a world of them against us, of nature red in tooth and claw. Such is our fallenness, our falling away into the vanity of ourselves in the subjective categories of radical indeterminacy, as if we can simply choose to be whatever we think we want to be; in short, as if we were God and the world and even ourselves simply things to be manipulated. Bethlehem offers a vision of the true universality of our humanity; it offers a vision of humanity restored by God’s dwelling with us.
It is what we are given to behold, to contemplate and wonder. “All they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds,” Luke tells us, but it is Mary who shows us the true way. “Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” It is the true vocation of the Church to be Marian. To ponder in wonder at the mystery of God himself and the mystery of God with us which opens us out to the true wonder of our humanity. Pondus meum amor meus, Augustine famously says, “my weight is my love”, before going on to famously say, that “we ascend in the lifting up of our hearts”, ascendimus ascensiones in corde (Conf. XIII, 9). God comes down so that we may be raised up. God becomes a child that we might become the children of God, that we may “become partakers of the divine nature”(2 Peter 1.4). But only by pondering the wonder of Christ’s holy birth that awakens us to the vision of our humanity restored to wonder and dignity.
All because, like the shepherds, we have come to Bethlehem to “see this thing which is come to pass”, and, like Mary, we might “[keep] all these things, and ponder them in [our] hearts”. The gift of Christmas is the gift of God himself.
“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
Octave Day of Christmas, January 1st, 2023