Author: CCW

These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth

There is, perhaps, no feast more troubling than The Feast of the Holy Innocents. Yet it belongs to the Christmas mystery and helps to illumine the deeper realities of God’s intimate engagement with our world and our humanity in the child Christ.

The story simply shows us what is a continuing feature of our own world; the horrible sufferings and deaths of the little ones in so many parts of our world, the sufferings and deaths of the little ones because of war, the sufferings and deaths of the little ones because of what is expedient and useful for the interests of others. In other words, there are a myriad of innocent ones. Innocent simply means those who are not able to harm.

In the Christian story, the little ones of Bethlehem are destroyed by Herod in his attempt to get rid of a potential rival to his throne. The story, too, draws upon the Egyptian captivity of Israel and God deliverance of Israel by God. The Hebrews are drawn out of Egypt and learn to be defined by the Law in the wilderness. So, too, Christ with Joseph and Mary flees Bethlehem and goes into Egypt from which he will return. Fuga in Egyptum, “the Flight into Egypt,” as the Matthaean story is called has excited the imaginations of the artists. The angel of the Lord alerts Joseph in a dream about the danger the young child and his mother are in. They flee into Egypt.

Meanwhile back in Bethlehem, we have the slaughter of all the little ones just because they are little ones. It is a policy of infanticide enacted for a political purpose. Sadly, there is nothing new in that: think about the horrors of the Rwandan genocide or the present horrors of the Syrian civil war, of the flood of refugees, etc., etc.

What is the point? What is there to celebrate? What are we celebrating? The meaningless and cruel deaths of little children? Cruel deaths, yes, but The Feast of Holy Innocents makes the strong theological claim that such deaths are not meaningless, that such deaths actually participate in Christ’s coming, including his death. Their lives have their meaning entirely in Christ. It means, too, that the sufferings that arise so directly from human folly and wickedness in all its forms are known to and in God. The simple “givenness of things,” to use Marilynne Robinson’s phrase, embraces the suffering of all things, both gentle and violent. The suffering of all things belongs to the being of God.

The unspeakable grief of the mothers of the world at the loss of their little ones is part and parcel of the Christmas story, “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.” The only comfort is found in the comfort of the Christmas story. God himself becomes a little one so that he might redeem all the little ones of the world. Without guile, in other words, innocent, “they are without fault before the throne of God.”

Think about how poignant and powerful this story might be precisely for those who have lost little ones. I have had occasion in the priestly and pastoral ministry to deal with those who have lost a child at childbirth or shortly thereafter. What comfort can there be except to recall this feast which makes it clear that the little ones ultimately are those who “follow the Lamb,”a reference to Christ in his sacrifice for us, “whithersoever he goeth”? He goes ultimately to the Cross for us and for our salvation. The holy Innocents are “they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.” There can be no other comfort.

Fr. David Curry
Holy Innocents, 2018

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That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you

The Feast of St. John the Evangelist complements powerfully the essential Christian mystery of the Incarnation expressed in The Prologue of John’s Gospel on Christmas Eve. The reading from John’s first letter underscores the essential insight into the Incarnation. It is written to emphasize the reality of God being with us in the incarnate reality of Jesus Christ. It counters what will become the earliest Christian heresy, docetism, which argues that God could not become flesh, could not engage the world intimately; he only appears to have done so but not really. As such it plays into all the forms of gnosticism, ancient and modern, which see the world in largely dualist terms: spirit, good, matter, evil.

Our own culture is riven with dualisms of this sort both politically and environmentally. We have, I think, the hardest time understanding and appreciating the essential goodness of everything in the created order and end up attributing to the goodness of creation an evil which actually belongs to us and to our “thoughts, words and deeds”. How we use the created world is the real question. Christ’s Incarnation is the strongest possible affirmation of the goodness of the world, of matter, of the flesh, of the body. But even more, the Incarnation is the strongest possible affirmation of the truth of God in whom the truth and being of all things radically depends.

The Gospel too complements the point of the Epistle. Not only is Christ’s Incarnation and all that follows from it, such as the Resurrection, real and not merely an appearance, a kind of divine play-acting, as it were, but “the world itself could not contain the books that should be written,” John says, about the “many other things which Jesus did.” In other words, the Incarnation does not mean that God is collapsed into the world, rather the world is gathered into the radical truth of God. This affirms the goodness of the created order but only in relation to God.

Christ is “God and Man,” the creeds say, and that union contains a wonderful insight into God and to God with us. Christ, as the Athanasian Creed puts it, is “God and Man, yet he is not two, but One Christ, One, however, not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, but by taking Manhood into God.” Such an insight proclaims a deep truth that counters all the forms of our dualism. It is what Christmas proclaims and celebrates, the deep meaning of Emmanuel, God with us. John emphasizes in his Epistle what he shows in his Gospel. “That which was from the beginning” is the Word, “the Word [which] was with God and was God,” “the Word [which] was made flesh”, the Word “which we have heard, and seen, and looked upon and handled”. The Word of Life.

That Word “we declare unto you”, John says, “that you may have fellowship with us” in “our fellowship with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” This is our Christmas joy, and the fullness of joy. This is the light that overcomes all darkness. “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.” Such is the great and radical witness of the Christmas mystery. We celebrate the double mystery of God and of God with us only to realize that God with us is precisely the mystery of God himself.

That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you

Fr. David Curry
St. John the Evangelist, 2018

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Blessed in he that cometh in the Name of the Lord

The three holy days of Christmas illumine wonderfully the great mystery of God with us. It is a blessed time but we easily misconstrue the nature  of that blessedness. “Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord,” Jesus says in today’s extraordinary Gospel. Extraordinary because it is a lament over Jerusalem, a lament about the folly and blindness and wickedness of our humanity, and yet, at the same time, a powerful witness to the very reality of sacrificial love. That is what blessing means here in terms of “coming in the Name of the Lord.”

“Love is in the nature of a first gift through which all gifts are given,” Aquinas notes. We live for the one who gives himself for us. The Feast of St. Stephen reminds us with great clarity about the real meaning and purpose of Christ’s holy birth. He comes as Saviour. He comes as the Lamb of God. He comes as sacrifice. Such is the real and deep meaning of love. To come “in the Name of the Lord” is not to act in our own interest, in our own name. It is to bear witness to another; in short, to God in Christ. A martyr is essentially one who bears witness to the truth of God. In its extreme form that witness is even unto death.

St. Stephen is not only the first Christian martyr but the proto-martyr, the one who shows us the very pattern of witness and sacrifice which is really about nothing more than Christ living in us. Stephen, one of the early deacons of the early and emerging Church, shows us the nature of the diaconate, the nature of the ministry of service. It is about a witness to God in Christ even in the face of ridicule and animosity. He is stoned to death but prays in almost the exact words of Christ on the Cross. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” he says even as Christ had prayed, “Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit.” That last word from the Cross recalls Christ’s first word from the Cross which shapes Stephen’s last word. “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge,” echoing perfectly Christ’s first word, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

The celebration of The Feast of Stephen on the day immediately after Christmas is no accident of time. Nothing emphasises more completely the deeper meaning and wonder of the Christmas mystery and its application to us in our lives. “In his master’s feet he trod,” as the ancient medieval Carol, Good King Wenceslas puts it, and “on the feast of Stephen”. Christ comes to us so that we may come to him. Our blessedness lies in our coming, our doing and thinking all things “in the Name of the Lord.” This emphasizes yet again the radical meaning of Christmas. It is about the presence of God in our world now and always. It is about our witness to the truth that God is always God and always divinely like himself. Our good is found in him, in the one who comes, in the one who is Emmanuel, God with us.

Like St. Stephen, we seek the echoing of Christ’s words of sacrificial love in us. That is the blessing, the deep blessing of Christmas.

Blessed in he that cometh in the Name of the Lord

Fr. David Curry
The Feast of St. Stephen, 2018

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And the angel of the Lord came upon them

From the thunderous and majestic words of the great mystery of Christmas night of “the Word made flesh [who] dwelt among us”, we come to the quiet wonder of Christmas morning. A quiet time of contemplation, a time to think with the angels.

The logic of Christmas in the classical Common Prayer tradition, liturgically and theologically speaking, is quite instructive. We proceed from the eternal birth, Christ’s eternal Sonship, on Christmas Eve with its focus on the Incarnation as grounded in the life of God, God as Trinity, to the Christmas of the Angels, as it is sometimes called, who reveal to the shepherds the birth of a Saviour; “a multitude of the heavenly host praising God” in the ringing words of what will become the Gloria. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” This in turn leads to the Christmas of the Shepherds on The Octave Day of Christmas who say “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us,” words which follow directly upon this morning’s gospel. This logic is the reverse of an older and a modern more linear pattern of celebration but as such grounds everything in the life of God. That is the intriguing and important feature and one which redeems all the wonderful complexity of the images of Christmas, both religious and secular in all of their various forms.

Here we have some of the more familiar features of the Christmas story as told by Luke in a remarkable economy of expression. “A decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed” sets Joseph in motion “with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child” to Bethlehem. There “she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.” Such are the basic elements of the story. Matthew will also provide an account read on The Sunday after Christmas but no mention of a manger or ‘no vacancy’ signs at the inn. Only with the story of the coming of the kings after the birth do we even get the mention of Bethlehem. Joseph, though, is told that the Son “conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost” and that his name shall be called Jesus, “for he shall save his people from their sins,” and all this in fulfillment of a prophecy from Isaiah that “a Virgin shall conceive … a Son” who shall be called “Emmanuel” meaning “God with us.” Another layer of essential meaning to the basic story, we might say, without which it is not much of a story. Such things complement the real story of Christmas in John about “the Word made flesh.”

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When all things were in quiet silence
and the night was in the midst of her swift course,
then thy almighty word leapt down from heaven, from thy royal throne.

I have to confess that this lovely image from the Wisdom of Solomon (18.15) has always captivated my imagination. It captures wonderfully the special mystery of Christmas and complements the extraordinary readings we have already heard. The readings from Hebrews and from The Prologue of John’s Gospel challenge all our conceptions about Christmas. For where in those readings do we hear any mention of a babe born in a manger, any mention of little Bethlehem, any mention of Mary, the Virgin Mother, any mention of Joseph, any mention of ox and ass, of sheep and lambs, let alone camels and kangaroos; well, why not or at least a moose or two or maybe a beaver? And yet, all those images are profoundly shaped and governed by the great thunderous words of The Letter to the Hebrews and by what is, perhaps, the most profound passage of philosophy and theology that has ever been penned, The Prologue of John’s Gospel. It is the great Christmas Gospel.

“Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,” the poet George Herbert says, and he names them, “The Trinitie, and Incarnation;/ Thou hast unlockt them both,” he says,  “And made them jewels to betroth/ The work of thy creation/ Unto thy self in everlasting pleasure” (Ungratefulnesse). The mystery of Christmas enclosed in a poetic nutshell! But one worth cracking open. We behold simply a double mystery, the mystery of God and the mystery of our humanity. Both are locked up together and both are unlocked to view on this holy night.

What on earth am I talking about, you are asking yourselves or at least you should be. Well, I am talking exactly and precisely about the wonder and the mystery of this holy night, the wonder and the mystery of Christmas. Something has drawn you here. It certainly isn’t the pursuit of profit or prestige. Nothing so contemptible in the contemporary culture than religion, to say nothing of the institutional churches. Certainly no commercial or consumer benefit or gain to be found here; quite the opposite, it might seem that the Church is out for your money, more hands in your pocket than the banks. Just joking. Well, maybe.

No. Something speaks to our souls, it seems to me, that draws us towards the idea of ‘truths held sacred’ and all the more so in a culture of darkness and despair. Our culture, our world, our day. It is not that we are simply too much with ourselves, too much preoccupied with a multitude of worries and concerns, what Jesus names, at least in Tyndale’s early English translation, as our “being carefull,” meaning our being full of cares, our busyness, what has more recently been translated as our anxiety. Mightn’t we say Angst r’ us because we are too full of cares about all the wrong things and in all the wrong ways, especially, perhaps, at this time of year? I leave it to you to fill out the ledger in terms of your own lives. The stress of presents and meals, of travel and plans, of parents, of grandparents, of in-laws, of the neediness of children and childrens’ children; the neediness, let’s face it, of us all. No, the greater problem is that we are sceptical and unaware of what speaks to our darkness and despair.

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