“And we beheld his glory”
We beheld. Yet we can only behold what we are given to see. What we are given to see is something made. It is not the Word but “the Word made flesh”. The shepherds say “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass,” literally, this saying that has happened, this Word that is made flesh. For God is the poet of Christmas night. In Greek, the poet is maker.
The poet makes and makes known. We can only see “this thing which is come to pass,” because “the Lord hath [it] made known unto us.” We can only see in the light of God himself. Where God is, there will his light be also. By the light of God we are caught up into a greater understanding. We are born anew “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God;” born from above into the company of the one whom we behold now with us. His light perfects our light.
For by our own lights, we see but do not see. Our light is darkness. “He came unto his own and his own received him not.” Our seeing is often without a beholding, without an embracing in faith and understanding what we are given to see; it is without a receiving. But by this greater light – the light of God’s Word – our light is taken up into something more. We are received into what we receive. “We beheld his glory”. The greater light is the light of grace, the grace to behold “the Word made flesh.”
What do we behold? It is almost as an after-thought that we are told in parenthesis that “we beheld the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” We behold the glory of the Word and Son of the Father who is Light and Life. As the 2nd century theologian Irenaeus says, “the glory of God is man alive,” but only because “the life of our humanity is the vision of God.”
Word, Light and Son. These are the three great images which belong personally and essentially to Jesus Christ. They are the trinity of his essential divinity, as it were, without which all our celebrations are really nothing but our vain pretensions and protestations against the dying of the light – our light, our dying.
Yet, here is something more without which we are ever less than ourselves, less than what we ourselves would be, less than who we are in God’s sight. Here is God’s Word now with us. Here is God’s Light now illuminating our understanding. Here is God’s Son now become God’s Son for us and with us. For “unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.” Not that we may possess him and keep him for ourselves, salvation cannot be so selfish, but rather that he might possess us and keep us with himself. He gives himself to all that all might receive him. Such is the divine mystery of love that Christmas makes known to us. Word, Light and Son are the essentials of love.
“Love is in the nature of a first gift through which all gifts are given” (Aquinas). Love is the gift of the giver. God gives himself to us. It is the nature of God’s love that he gives without losing anything of himself. He is always and eternally what he is. Such is the mystery of Christmas. “Without forsaking what he was,” namely God, Christ “became what he was not,” namely man, as Athanasius puts it. Christ is man born of woman, born of Mary in the very substance of our humanity, to redeem both sexes, as Bishop John Pearson observes. Christ reveals to us who we are in God’s sight, the living humanity that is God’s glory. Here is the grace that “keeps grace,” as another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, and “that keeps all [our] goings graces;/ [that we might] Act in God’s eye what in God’s eye [each] is – Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, /Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” To see ourselves in Christ and Christ in each other is the mystery and wonder of Christmas.
Love is made known to us in the intimacy of God’s Word and Son with us. His being with us sets the world upon a new foundation, upon the foundation of grace.
But we so easily forget this. We have so “domesticated divinity,” as Flannery O’Connor puts it, that we miss the great wonder of Christmas night. On the one hand, God’s poetry gets lost in the prosaic muddle of our daily lives which will hardly bear so much as a ten second sound-bite for Jesus – no time to behold, no time to look attentively and wonderingly at what we are given to see. On the other hand, we turn his poetry into the prose of a folk tale and claim it as our own. It becomes but a cultural artifact, a tale told to beguile and amuse, simply another myth of human making. While all the details of the story of the Babe of Bethlehem are there, they are there at the expense of the Word in the story, the Word made flesh that is the story. That is what we in our folly, it seems, keep resolutely hidden from view. We have despaired of God.
Yet this is the folly of our darkness in the face of the light of Christ. For God’s poetry is greater than the folly of all our prose. All our artifice and invention, all our deconstruction of God and his story ultimately fail to silence the poetry of God. Indeed, he makes a place for them. The refusals of grace, after all, already belong to the Christmas story. Christ’s holy birth is simply one with his giving of himself for us on the Cross for it is all love.
As paradoxical as it seems, we forget that we really only come to Christmas through the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. As John Donne says, “the whole life of Christ was a continuall Passion, his birth and his death were but a continuall Act and his Christmas-day and his Good Friday are but the evening and the morning of one and the same day.” For “Christ and His cross were never parted, but that all His life long was a continuous cross. At the very cratch (manger), His cross first began,” Lancelot Andrewes notes, alluding to the Christmas story of the Holy Innocents in Herod’s attempt to kill the child Christ that parallels Pilate’s callous indifference to the innocence of Christ in the Passion. God’s only Son Jesus Christ is given “to take our nature upon him, and to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption” (BCP, p. 82). Here is God’s Word and Son incarnate in the substance of our humanity, given to us that we might live from him but only through the “continuall Passion,” the “continuous cross” of his whole life.
The great Christmas Gospel reminds us of the essential foundation of grace. It changes everything for it means that grace is everywhere and for everyone. God is the poet of Christmas night who would make his love-song in us. Love is the giving of ourselves for the sake of one another, not our wasting and our spending. Love is that opening out of ourselves in truth and goodwill, in forgiveness and peace, in kindness and thoughtfulness towards one another. Love is that beholding of one another in the light of Christ. We behold him who in the Father’s love ever beholds us. Christ is our life who gives himself for us. Such is love in the wonder and mystery of Christmas.
“We beheld his glory”
Fr. David Curry
Christmas Eve, 2023