“Now it came to pass in those days … the days [that] were accomplished
that she should be delivered”.
What days? The days in which “there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed”, as Luke tells us, alluding to matters of politics and power, but, even more as he tells us, “and so it was, that while they [meaning Mary and Joseph], were there [in Bethlehem], the days were accomplished that she should be delivered”. Such is the miracle of birth but as the Christmas Gospel makes clear this is the greater miracle of the birth of Christ, the babe who is Christ the Lord.
All this is the miracle of Christmas which reveals to us the miracle of God making himself known to us in the commonplace and contingent realities of human experience. Not so as to be collapsed into our world and the limitations of our thinking and living but to reveal to us the wonder of God’s will for our humanity, here so wonderfully expressed in the angel’s word to the shepherds. “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people”. What is that good tidings of great joy? The birth in Bethlehem, the city of David, of “a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord”.
So much contained in so few words. “All wonders in one sight”, as the poet Richard Crashaw writes, “eternity shut in a span,/ summer in winter; day in night; /heaven in earth, God in man”.
It begins with words which seem like a fable or a fairy tale. “Now it came to pass in those days”. But then, more concretely yet poetically, “the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.” We will learn in the mysteries of Christmastide from Paul in Galatians, that “when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law”. And why? “To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons”. Even more, “because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” So much made, it seems, out of so little, yet it is all the muchness of God, on the one hand, and something more, wondrously more for us, on the other hand.
As Andrewes notes, here we have both His natures, divine and human. “‘God sent his Son’ – there His divine nature; made of a woman – here His human nature. That, from the bosom of His Father before all worlds; this, from the womb of His mother in the world,” and made of a woman (ex muliere) and no more; of the Virgin alone by the power of the Holy Ghost, without mixture of fleshly generation.” Our redemption is our adoption. “To be redeemed and to be adopted are the full of all we can wish ourselves”. “We are made the sons of God, as He [was made’ the Son of man; we are made partakers of His divine [nature], as He of our human nature.” All this is what came to pass in those days. All this is what is accomplished for us in the fullness of the time and for all.
It is what we hear from the shortest of the Epistles of Paul in the lesson from Titus. “The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men”. The mystery of Christmas is all God’s doing in the very truth and being of our humanity. The idea of salvation is about what comes to us from God and not what comes from us. Revelation does not negate the concrete and natural realities of human experience and even human knowing but raises them up and gathers them into something higher, something that exceeds our grasp on its own. Christ is God’s “great little one”, as Crashaw puts it. “Whose all-embracing birth /lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth.”
And as Luke makes clear, the sign of all this is “the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger”, attended by the angel with “a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, good will toward men.” We hear these words and yet so often miss their meaning and significance. We are so good at domesticating divinity, reducing God to ourselves and forgetting that what we are shown seeks to raise us to God. It is not about us in the sophistic and solipsistic fantasies of ourselves; it is about God with us who makes us his sons and heirs. It is thus about the radical redemption of our humanity that alone frees us from ourselves as imprisoned in ourselves in our vanities and anxieties.
The quiet blessing of Christmas morn is the wonder of “the Word made flesh”. That is the real meaning of what has come to pass, of what has been accomplished. “This thing which has come to pass” as the Shepherds will say, is the Word made flesh who dwelt among us. We behold the great something more of God’s great little one, the one whose glory we behold, “the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” This is the wonder and the mystery of Christmas. It is the poetry of God. The poet in Greek is maker; God is the great maker of all things. All our making apart from God is but idolatry and folly.
We behold the wonder of God’s poetry in the miracle of Christ’s holy birth, the wonder of God’s making himself known to us in the very being of our humanity. As John puts it at the end of the Prologue, “no one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known”. This is what “came to pass in those days, the days [that] were accomplished that she should be delivered.” We behold the wonder of God’s making, the wonder of the love of God make known. And in so doing, we behold the wonder of God’s making in us as his sons and heirs.
“Now it came to pass in those days … the days [that] were accomplished
that she should be delivered”.
Fr. David Curry
Christmas Morn, 2025