Author: CCW

“Take the young child, and his mother, and flee into Egypt”

Fuga in Egyptu, the flight into Egypt, is one of the more intriguing stories of the Christmas mystery and yet belongs to its most disturbing moment, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. Nothing more apocalyptical, it seems, and certainly no story speaks so hauntingly to the hideous spectacles of destruction and violence which belong to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It brings out something of the deeper meaning of the Incarnation as providing the only real counter to human evil and wickedness.

The fuga in Egyptu is a salvation story within the salvation story of human redemption. It looks back to Exodus and to Pharoah’s attempt to control the population of the Hebrews through a policy of infanticide. Out of that story comes the birth of Moses, God’s instrument for the Exodus, the intellectual and spiritual journey of Israel which culminates in the Law. With Matthew, the flight into Egypt portrays Joseph as the instrument of the deliverance of the Holy Family from Herod’s wrath, envy, and fear about a potential rival to his power through a similar policy of infanticide.

That this story should be captured in one of the loveliest of the carols of the season reminds us of how the Christmas story is substantial and serious and not just sentimental. Puer Nobis Nascitur is a fifteenth century carol, though probably of much earlier origins, which emphasizes the sense of Christ’s birth as deliverance from evil in the form of the political. “Came he to a world forlorn, the Lord of every nation”. “Cradled in a stall … with sleepy cows and asses”, the carol suggests that the beasts “could see” what evil of man sees but rejects “that he of all men surpasses”.

Herod then with fear was filled:
‘A prince’, he said, ‘in Jewry!’
All the little boys he killed
At Bethlem in his fury.

The story deepens the theological idea of the Word made flesh coming to a world which “knew him not” and “unto his own who received him not”. It is the attempt to annihilate and destroy the one whose very coming and being as truth and goodness challenges all the pretenses of worldly power. It is an old story and one which sadly recurs over and over again in our world. The Holy Innocents are the nameless victims of the power games of those in authority. Their innocence lies simply in their powerlessness, in their inability to harm. In a way, the feast highlights a sad feature of ‘the city of man’ historically and in the global present; a world of many, many victims who are caught up in the machinations of political economic power and are destroyed. Most of them are unnamed by us.

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“His witness is true”

The intellectual and the sensual are not set in opposition but reconciled in the truth and light of God. Such, we might say, is the witness of John the Evangelist, whose feast day is one of the feasts of Christmas, along with St. Stephen’s Day and Holy Innocents. All three are placed in the Prayer Book with the Christmas season thus inescapably integrated into the doctrine of the Incarnation and its meaning for us in our lives.

With John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and who, in a lovely image of intimacy,  “leaned on his breast” at the last supper, we have love-in-contemplation. But this contemplation is not a flight from creation and the world but the highest form of its redemption. Once again, as the Feast of Thomas at the end of Advent, and with yesterday’s feast of Stephen on the day after Christmas, we see the inseparable connection between Christmas and Easter.

The Epistle for today is from 1 John 1 and acts as a commentary on the great Christmas Gospel from the Prologue of John’s Gospel, itself a commentary and further extension of Genesis 1. “In the beginning God … in the beginning was the Word”, the Word which is God and is προς τον θεον, always towards God, the eternal Word in eternal motion, going forth and returning into the principle of its eternal repose. That Word is Christ incarnate “which was from the beginning”, from the principle, and which “we have heard”, “seen and looked upon”, and “handled”. That Word is “the Word of life”. Such is John’s witness signaled in the Gospel reading today from the last chapter of John’s Gospel which concerns the life of the Church following the Resurrection. His witness to the Resurrection is a further attestation of the Incarnation. The themes are inseparably connected.

In the darkness of nature’s year and in the darkness of the uncertainties and fears of our own world and day, John teaches us “that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” His witness is a profound insight into the radical nature of God as light and life, the twin themes which belong to the pageant of Christmas and Easter and which illuminate, shape, and inform the Christian understanding. It is a reflective, meditative, indeed, contemplative understanding of the mystery of God in himself and with us. That mystery, and this is John’s great witness, transcends and counters any and all forms of gnostic dualism; at once aware of the immensity of God in Christ whose words and deeds “even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written,” (the word is βιβλια, biblia), and yet intimately with us. To anticipate a later creedal statement, the Incarnation is “not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, but by taking of Manhood into God … not by confusion of substance, but by unity of Person” (Athanasian Creed). Such is the legacy of the witness of John in a kind of direct succession of thought. It is revealed in a parentheses: “(for the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us)”. It is something made known which changes how we think about everything.

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“How often would I have gathered thy children together,
even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!”

Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Feast of St. Stephen.

The Feast of St. Stephen marks the first day after Christmas and inaugurates the three Holy Days of Christmas which are a profound commentary on the radical meaning of Christmas. Christ would gather us into his love. If the Feast of St. Thomas affirms the radical nature of the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Christ by way of holy questioning about the intrinsic goodness of creation and of the body, then St. Stephen’s Day highlights love as sacrifice in forgiveness in the face of persecution. He is the first martyr and prototype of martyrdom in the Christian Church even before its coming to be. But the Feast of St. Stephen signals the deeper meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. God’s engagement with our world is in the face of its animosities and evils, but they are our animosities and evils. It means love as service and sacrifice in forgiveness.

“I send unto you prophets and wise men and scribes,” Jesus says, ”and some of them you shall kill and crucify”. It is a strong critique of those in power and authority. While Stephen is the proto-martyr of the Church, his feast is equally a commentary on all institutions of power whether sacred or secular, to use a later terminology. More importantly, it is about the transforming power of forgiveness, the central point which Collect and Lesson explicitly reference and which is implicit in the Gospel.

Philosophy as learning to die is an ancient theme without which we cannot know how to live. Gilgamesh, in the great Epic which bears his name, is catapulted into the quest for wisdom by the death of his friend, Enkidu. “As my brother is, so shall I be”. He confronts his own mortality in Enkidu’s death which leads him upon the journey to see Utnapishtim “to question him concerning life and death”. It marks the beginning of a long, long journey of the understanding in human culture; in short, of philosophy as a way of life. But only by way of learning to die.

The Feast of St. Stephen, too, is about learning to die in order to live. His death, as the lesson from Acts makes clear, follows explicitly the pattern of Christ’s Crucifixion. As with St. Thomas, once again, we see the integral connection between Christmas and Easter, a connection which so many of the carols of Christmas also make. “Now ye need not fear the grave”, “Christ was born for this”, to cite but one example.

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“Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy,
which shall be to all people”

Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Mattins & Ante-Communion for Christmas Morn

Wonderful words. It has been a kind of challenge for me to think about how various scriptural passages in themselves might be understood to lead us into the whole mystery of Christ. This is a counter to the kinds of literal and fundamentalist readings of Scripture which overlook the deeper logic of the understanding. It is about what is in principle universal revealed in and through the conditions of the finite and the particular.

Christmas is the greatest expression of this idea though not in a triumphal way. It is enough to say that the Gospel simply makes explicit in a certain way what is present and moves in the great ethical traditions of the world’s religions and philosophies; things about which technocratic culture knows nothing and has nothing to say. There is no wisdom in technology, in the technocratic culture which we all inhabit. This does not and cannot mean denying or fleeing from the techno-world which we have created. It means finding ways to overcome the idolatries of the human imagination and the will to power which bring before us such a confusion of good  things and evil  things. The question is about us and about what defines us.

The whole of the Christmas mystery speaks to this concern. In the celebration of the Word and Son of God made flesh, something powerful and profound is being said about our humanity. It is captured quite movingly in the Christmas readings such as those for Christmas morning. This year, owing to the restraints imposed by Public Health, and, then, even more, the complete suspension of ‘in-person worship’ by the Bishop, Christmas Eve was, sadly, a ‘silent night’ in empty churches; so, too, the quiet of Christmas morn is the almost unbearable  silence of empty churches from which I am speaking to you. All we can do is to ponder the readings and pray the liturgy; we are reduced to reading and thinking about the great meaning of Christmas in our isolation and remove from one another. It is quite paradoxical that the celebration of Christ coming to us in the body of our humanity should take the form of our being disembodied and apart from one another. Does that mean a separation from the body of Christ?

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