Year: 2023

“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”

Christ’s “whole life was a continuall Passion,” John Donne notes, echoing perhaps Lancelot Andrewes’ observation that “all his life long was a continuous cross.” We forget that we really only come to Christmas, paradoxical as it might seem, by way of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ; “a continuall Passion,” “a continuous cross.” We easily overlook this in the sensuous and sentimental features of our contemporary hedonism that overwhelm the festivities of Christmas. The three great holy days that follow Christmas Day are a great wake-up call and a necessary reminder of the radical meaning of Christ’s holy birth.

He comes as redeemer and saviour because of the darkness of our sinful hearts and world. Our refusals of his grace are made part of the Christmas story. “He came unto his own and his own received him not,” a reference to his Passion. Thus the rejections of grace are made part of the story of grace and one which we desperately need to hear. Archbishop Thomas à Becket’s sermon in T.S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral, highlights the profound point that “we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and in the Passion of our Lord,” and so too “in the death of martyrs.” “Is it an accident, do you think,” he asks rhetorically “that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ?” A martyr is a witness to another, to Christ. “A martyrdom is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission to God.”

“Not my will but thine be done,” as Jesus prays in Gethesemane. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” as Jesus teaches us to pray. “Be it unto me according to thy word,” as Mary prays.

St. Stephen’s day can only be celebrated in the context of the radical meaning of Christ’s holy birth. He has come to redeem and save through his Cross and Passion and those who are his followers and witnesses participate in his Cross and Passion. St. Stephen is the great proto-martyr who illustrates the meaning of that participation in Christ’s self-giving and sacrificial love. He is persecuted and stoned to death for being a follower of the way, of what will later become known as the Christian Faith. To be a Christian is to be a witness to the love of Christ. The story of his martyrdom in Acts illustrates this beautifully even as the Gospel reading from Matthew highlights Christ’s lament over the desolation of Jerusalem in its sinfulness and violence.

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“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour,
who is Christ the Lord”

The hustle and bustle of Christmas Eve gives way to the contemplative quiet and wonder of Christmas Morn. What seems long ago and far away is present and now. Everywhere is Bethlehem. “And so it was, that while they were there” – in Bethlehem – “the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her first-born son,” Luke tells us. Here is the son who is “the only-begotten of the Father full of grace and truth,” as we heard last night from the heights of heaven in John’s Prologue. From the heights of heaven to the lowliness of little Bethlehem. This is the wonder of Christmas morning.

The wonder is the unity of God and Man in Christ with the whole of creation. The three great masses of Christmas present to us the fullness of this wonder and delight. There is the Christmas Eve proclamation and celebration of the eternal Sonship of Christ who is the Word made flesh. There is the story of his actual birth made known in the angelic “tidings of great joy” in this morning’s Gospel. There is the Christmas of the Shepherds to whom the angelic news from heavenly heights is proclaimed and made known to us in Christmastide. Bethlehem is the place of these great wonders. It is paradise restored but also something more. It inaugurates a new vision and a new life.

The new vision and the new life is what has been made known to us in God’s self-giving love. What is made known is God with us and God for us. “Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord,” the Angel says to the Shepherds. “The glory of God,” as Ireneaus says, is vivens homo, our “living humanity” but alive only by beholding the vision of God; for “the life of man is the vision of God.” Bethlehem is the place of the vision of our humanity alive in the shining glory of the Lord. Alive in Christ, “the word made flesh” whose glory we behold, “the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father.”

But it is not our humanity alone in itself. It is not just us. Nor is it just the mighty and the powerful of the world, the privileged elite. In the quiet of Christmas morning, we are in the company of shepherds and angels with “a multitude of the heavenly host.” And only so are we with the holy Child who comes to us, the one who is the union of God and Man and who “defines for us what it is to be God and what it is to be human, in one, at the same time”. The Angel proclaims something great and wondrous; strong words of proclamation that point to a wonder and mystery. Through what the Angel proclaims and makes known we see the unity of the whole of creation with its Creator. The Angels, too, are part of that order. They do simply what belongs to their office and being, to their ministry. They are the messengers, the audible and visible thoughts of God made known to us.

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“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.

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“Who art thou?”

The questions reverberate with great intensity in today’s Gospel. “Who are thou?” If not the Christ, then “Art thou Elijah?” If not Elijah, then “Art thou the Prophet?” If not the Prophet, then “Who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself?” Only then do we learn what Jesus told us last Sunday about John the Baptist as “more than a prophet”. He says of himself “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Isaiah.” Ego vox clamantis in deserto. This in turn leads to the last question. “And Why baptizest thou then, if thou be not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”

This parade of questions might seem to correspond to our contemporary obsessions about personal identity. Rather it counters and corrects such tendencies. The whole scene is known as “the record” or “the witness of John,” meaning John the Baptist. It complements wonderfully the Epistle reading from Philippians that “the Lord is at hand.” And wonderfully so since this day, the Fourth Sunday in Advent, is also Christmas Eve. Both the readings and this day itself bring us to Christ in the meaning of his coming to us.

The questions of the “Priests and Levites from Jerusalem”, later identified as Pharisees, point us to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, namely, the desire to know. They show us that universal quest for knowledge, for meaning and understanding, not information. In a way, they anticipate and are like the “Magi from Anatolia,” seekers all. They are from Jerusalem, not in Jerusalem. They have come into the wilderness of “Bethany beyond Jordan” in the quest to know who John the Baptist is. The Christ, Elijah, the Prophet? “Who art thou?” The passage comes immediately after the Prologue of John’s Gospel, part of which is read at Christmas Eve. It focuses on the ministry of John the Baptist who prepares for the coming of Christ in us.

How? What is John’s ministry? Mark tells us concisely just after quoting this same passage from Isaiah that “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” But the baptism of John with water through the confession of sin is not the forgiveness of sins. Yet it signals the profound desire for forgiveness, a metanoia, a change in outlook and understanding in us. In other words, it highlights our desire for something more, for wholeness and truth. Thus, John the Baptist points us to Jesus. That is the point of this Gospel. As John the Baptist explains, “I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not: he it is who cometh after me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose.” And the very next day (as it will be literally for us}, “John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

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