by CCW | 25 December 2024 10:00
In the Christian imaginary, Bethlehem is a crowded scene of symbolic significance. How much, we might say, is imagined and created out of what seems so little in terms of detail and information? There is not much data about Bethlehem but so much more in the way of symbol and significance. “This shall be a sign unto you,” the Angel says to the Shepherds and to us in the quiet of Christmas Morn. The sign of the birth of “a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord” is the babe “wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger,” born this day in the city of David, Bethlehem.
Luke uses the word manger three times in this chapter. Along with the fact that “there was no room for them in the inn,” the word manger contributes to the classical and traditional imagery of the nativity scene. But there is a deeper theological point that we hear only on Christmas Eve from John’s Prologue: “He came unto his own and his own received him not.” It signals the theme of our rejection or denial of the good.
The story of Christ’s birth in the humble circumstances of a manger or stall, meaning “a long open box or trough in a stable for horses or cattle to eat from” (OED), makes no mention of a stable or barn nor any direct mention of animals. But the word manager, (οατνη), in contrast to an inn or lodging (καταλυμα), points to the humble and lowly circumstances of Christ’s birth and thus to the realities of our finite world of limitations and hardships, of sin and evil. His birth embraces the conditions of our humanity in its various forms of brokenness or incompleteness. He does not come in power and with great glory understood in terms of worldly expectations. He comes as Saviour to redeem our finite and fallen world.
The point is that Christ’s birth confounds all our human expectations even as it reveals the deeper wisdom of the Scriptures in their interplay and interconnection about God’s purpose for our humanity. The animals associated in holy imagination with the Bethlehem scene come from the Angelic message to the Shepherds who will make their way to “see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.” From that will come a whole menagerie of animals and angels along with, finally, the Magi-Kings; all of which symbolize the whole of humanity and creation as gathered to God. What is that really all about except a profound sense of Bethlehem as paradise restored, an image of the hope of heaven, of salvation which is not a flight from the world or creation but its redemption and restoration? We make the mistake, as Flannery O’Connor has put it, of “domesticating divinity,” conforming God to ourselves and our comforts and expectations, as if Christ’s incarnation is little more than an affirmation of ourselves in our various identities and existential anxieties. We get it backwards. “Be ye not conformed to the world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds” on the things of God revealed to us in the witness of the Scriptures and by our reasoning upon them. Christ comes to redeem us from ourselves and to restore us to the truth of ourselves as known in God’s eternal knowing and loving of us.
That great crowd of creatures – animals, humans, and angels – in the artistic imaginary of Bethlehem is about the hope of our humanity and of the whole of creation as restored and raised up to its truth in God and with God. It is a kind of commentary on the story of Creation and the Fall, an elaboration and fulfillment of the protoevangelium of Genesis 3.15, where God promises that the seed of the woman (semen mulieris) shall overthrow the serpent, the evil one. “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” The full version of Charles Wesley’s hymn, Hark the Herald Angels’ Sing, includes a verse about the protoevangelium, playing with the images of head and heel by underscoring the idea of the restoration of the image of God in us through Christ, the “Second Adam from above.” In short, the restoration is through the Cross.
Come, Desire of Nations, come, Fix in us Thy humble home.
Rise the woman’s conquering Seed, Bruise in us the serpent’s head.
Adam’s likeness now efface, Stamp Thine image in its place,
Second Adam from above, Reinstate us in Thy love,
Hark, the herald angels sing, Glory to the newborn King.
Bethlehem as the image of paradise restored is not a state to which we can return. Our being recalled to the idea of Paradise means knowing it for the first time and thus pointing us to the greater end and purpose of our lives as found in God, having been reinstated in his love. This signals the deeper meaning of Christ as Saviour.
For Christ is “man born of woman to redeem both sexes” as John Hackett puts it, echoing, perhaps, Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo. “God,” Anselm argues, “can make a human being in four ways: from man and woman, as constant experience shows; neither from man nor from woman, as he created Adam; from a man without a woman, as he made Eve; or from a woman without a man,” namely Jesus. This form of dialectical reasoning encompasses all of the logical or theological possibilities of creation but in the register of redemption. It reminds us that the restoration of our humanity is the greater wonder. “God hath restored human nature even more wonderfully than he created it.” This is the basis for the priest’s prayers at the mixing of the Chalice in the Mass: “O God, who didst so wonderfully create and yet more wondrously restore the dignity of our humanity.” Redemption is new creation.
Donne observes in his Christmas Sermon of 1625 that “His birth and his death were but one continuall act, and his Christmas-day and his Good Friday, are but the evening and morning of one and the same day.” This complements Andrewes’ Good Friday sermon of 1605. “It is well known that Christ and His cross were never parted, but that all His life long was a continual cross. At the very cratch [meaning the crêche], His cross first began. There Herod sought to do that which Pilate did, even to end His life before it began.”
Christmas Morn is the Christmas of the Angels who proclaim “the good tidings of great joy” which is for “all people.” They signal the deep and profound connection between Christ’s Birth and his Passion and Resurrection. They go together and are inseparable. The one who comes whose birth we celebrate this day is Christ our Saviour.
Fr. David Curry
Christmas Morn 2024
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2024/12/25/sermon-for-christmas-morn-13/
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