Sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas
“When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son,
made of a woman, made under the law”
Some can’t wait for Christmas to be over; others want it to last forever. Yet however much Christmas has been co-opted, if not hijacked to every other agenda imaginable, it has an undeniable hold on our imaginations and our lives to one degree or another. It has a global reach and presence in very different cultures in our world and even among non-Christians. Why? Because of its catholicity, dare I say, meaning something universal and in its fullness. The word, fullness, is a repeated feature of the Christmas mystery.
There is a fullness of things in heaven and earth, a double fullness, we might say, but one which is captured in the central mystery. For in “the Word made flesh”, as John puts it “(we beheld the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth”; a fullness contained in a parenthesis. In the readings for The Sunday after Christmas we have “the fullness of the time” which is just as much “the time of fullness”. The twelve days of Christmas are unique, not just an octave such as at Easter, but an octave and a half, ultimately culminating in Epiphany on Tuesday of this week. With Epiphany, Christmas goes global. What is proclaimed as “good tidings of great joy for all people” reaches far, far beyond a tiny corner of the world. With the coming of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem, Christmas is omni populo, literally for all people, itself a kind of fullness.
But what does all this fullness mean? Quite simply, fullness belongs to God and to our being gathered into the life of God. Fullness speaks to the highest truth and dignity of our humanity; it cannot be constrained to ethnic, cultural, political, social, economic, and linguistic communities and cultures. This sense of the fullness of things is theological, not merely sociological. In a radical sense, the Christmas mystery at Bethlehem never goes away but signals the whole purpose of God’s revelation in the gathering of all things into unity in God. Like the Magi-Kings, we may leave Bethlehem and return to our own places, but, perhaps, as T.S. Eliot suggests, “no longer at ease” because the Christmas mystery at Bethlehem always remains with us. The point is that we are changed by what we have been given to see.
