“God … hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son”
There is very little that is sentimental about Christmas Eve, contrary perhaps to all our expectations. We hear in the readings from Hebrews and the Prologue from John’s Gospel tremendous things that awaken wonder. But we hear nothing about the baby Jesus, nothing about the stable or manger, nothing about shepherds visited by angels, nothing about a star in the east, nothing even about Jesus or Mary by name, apart from their mention in the Christmas anthems and the hymns. Yet everything about this holy night speaks to our hearts and minds.
Christmas speaks to the meaning of our humanity embraced by God in Christ’s holy birth. Far from being a touching and sentimental story about the birth of a child, a miracle of nature, as it were, our readings speak about the miracle of the Son of God, this day begotten in the flesh but who is from everlasting, the first-born brought into the world whom the angels of God worship and whose throne and kingdom is for ever and ever, as Hebrews puts it. The Son is the Lord who in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth and the heavens. He is eternally God who speaks to us in these last days. For, “the Word made flesh” is the Word, Son, and Light of God who was “in the beginning with God”, and has come unto the world made by him and has come unto his own; in short, to us.
This is a curious kind of speaking, to be sure, speaking here is a metaphor about the nature of God’s revelation to us, thus using aspects of our thinking and being to make known something which is entirely beyond our imagining in any other kind of way. It is quite simply the mystery of God’s eternal love for our humanity made manifest so that we might live through the only-begotten Son of God. Only-begotten eternally in the mystery of the Trinity; only-begotten for us as conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary, made man and born this night of her. It is the divinum mysterium revealed in the fullness and wonder of this holy night, a challenge and a blessing but not one which we can take for granted nor one which we can in any way domesticate and reduce to ourselves. We cannot make Christmas. The mystery of this holy night seeks to gather us into the mystery of God with us. God speaks things into being. God is the maker.
Hebrews exalts the mystery of Christ eternally. John signals both his eternal birth from the God the Father everlasting and his birth in flesh and in time through Mary. Yet John also signals the further wonder: he comes into the world which was made by him and yet knew him not, he comes unto his own, our humanity, yet his own received him not. There is at once the affirmation of the wonder of the Word made flesh dwelling among us and the wonder of his being rejected by the world which knew him not and by his own which received him not; all so gently, so firmly, so poetically stated. A testament to human perfidy in the face of God’s infinite love and faithfulness. Such a wondrous mystery; the wonder of God’s doing in the very being of our humanity. How can our hearts and minds not be moved? All this belongs to the mystery and wonder of Christmas in and through all of the richness of the images that circle around the Bethlehem scene.
That this ‘speaks to us’ suggests that it challenges us about ourselves even as it challenges us about God himself. It speaks about what is beyond us, to be sure, but speaks to what belongs to the real truth and dignity of our humanity. In other words, we have to think and feel our way into this mystery, the mystery of this holy night, the mystery that is always and everlasting. Here the whole of our lives is wrapped up in the gift of the only-begotten Son of God.
“Love is in the nature of a gift through which all gifts are given” (Aquinas). What God speaks to us, as it were, in the wonder of this night shapes what we say and do in our lives with one another. Each is bound up in the other, the mystery of God with us and the mystery of our lives with one another. To put it in another way, God is the poet of Christmas night; in Greek, the poet is maker. What we celebrate is what is made in us and for us in the holy birth of Christ, the Son of God become the Son of man. The poets best capture this sense of divine poetry, as in Richard Crashaw’s lovely words from his poem “In the Holy Nativity of our Lord”:
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 heav’n to earth.
Here is the wonder of the marriage of heaven and earth, of God in man, the wonder of the re-making of our humanity, our restoration to who we are in God. Kierkegaard in the 19th century noted that Christianity raised sensuality to a spiritual principle. What this means is that the material and physical world as we encounter it is not nothing, not negated but redeemed and restored, seen and understood in the wonders of this night, “all wonders in one sight”. God does not cease to be God in becoming man in Christ’s holy birth. “Without forsaking what he was, [God], he became what he was not, [man]”(Athanasius).
The tremendous readings of this holy night are profoundly theological but not at the expense of the images of Scriptural revelation. Their poetry reveals something for thought, philosophically, theologically, and ethically. God made man in Christ demands a change in us about how we see ourselves and one another. It frees us to the real and true dignity of our humanity. Made in the image of God, made in the image of Christ, made in the image of the Trinity – a kind of three-in-one. Christmas celebrates the poetry of God in the remaking of our humanity. It may seem too much more to add to the wonder of Christmas but the speculative and imaginative thinking of Anselm, the late 11th /early 12th century theologian par excellence (and reluctant Archbishop of Canterbury), may help us to appreciate the great poetry of God’s Word and Son speaking to us this holy night. He essays that:
“God 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,” Christ Jesus (Cur Deus Homo). At once a nice summary of the Biblical images, it states concisely the classical, catholic, and orthodox Christian understanding of human redemption; something which we have perhaps forgotten or ignored in our world. This logic comprehends all the logical or theological possibilities that belong to the mystery of the Incarnation, to God’s poetry, his speaking unto us in these last days by his Son. What is wanted is that his divine poetry should speak in our hearts and our lives. Only so may our lives be as lovely as poems in his sight and in the sight of one another. A blessed Christmas indeed.
“God … hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son”
Fr. David Curry,
Christmas Eve, 2025