Author: CCW

“These were redeemed from among men,
being the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb”

It is a compelling and yet a most disturbing Christmas story but, like the other festal days of Christmas, it reflects upon the deeper meaning of Christ’s holy birth. Unlike the commemorations of St. Stephen and St. John, however, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, as this day has come to be called, actually belongs to the narratives of the nativity.

Like so many biblical passages, the story is multi-layered. It is, on the one hand, an account of the fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy about the Messiah. “Out of Egypt have I called my son,” locating the Flight into Egypt in terms of a New Testament riff on the Exodus story of Pharaoh’s policy of infanticide as a way of controlling the minority worker population of the Hebrews within Egypt. Here it takes on a further political aspect: Herod’s fear of a child-king who would be a rival to his throne.

Joseph takes Mary and the child Christ into Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath and fury but “out of Egypt” Jesus the Son will return to Nazareth and beyond to bring redemption to all people just as Moses led the people of the Hebrews out of the Pharonic captivity and into the wilderness to become the people of God, the people of the Law. On that score alone it is a powerful narrative and unfolds before our eyes something of the Christian understanding of divine Providence at work in and through the Scriptures.

It is, on the other hand, a powerful story about the meaning of redemption in the face of the most horrible sufferings and loss that is imaginable; the slaughter of little children. The Collect takes our breath away with its incredible insight that “thou madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths.” It is for many utterly unthinkable, a most disturbing claim that unsettles us and makes us most uncomfortable. I fear that for some this story and the theological idea expressed in the Collect is so revolting that they become atheists. The scene, even as told in the restrained language of Matthew, is such an affront to our conceptions of justice, especially divine justice. How revolting and impossible to say, at least at first glance, that children were made to die for Christ’s glory!

(more…)

Print this entry

“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you”

No one more fully conveys the deep wonder and mystery of Christmas than John the Evangelist commemorated on the second day after Christmas. The Prologue of his Gospel has been the great Christmas gospel for more than a millennium and a half; his epistles, too, provide the most theological apologia for the essential doctrine that Christmas celebrates, namely, the doctrine of the Incarnation.

From the blood-soaked ground of Stephen’s martyrdom we rise on eagles’ wings to the contemplative vision of John. It is his insight into what we see and hear that makes the Christmas mystery. The theological insight of John informs most profoundly what comes to be the Church’s creedal proclamation. This child is “the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light; Very God of Very God; Begotten not made.” Such creedal statements echo the words of John at Christmas. Without doubt such statements are the fruit of a theological reflection upon John’s witness. “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you,” he says. And that which has been seen and declared to us is “that which was from the beginning,” a phrase which captures at once the opening phrase of his Gospel, itself a commentary on the opening statement of The Book of Genesis. “In the beginning God”… “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

In the epistle reading for his Christmas feast day, “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life” is the essential revelation of the Word made flesh. And like the Christmas gospel, the purpose of this holy understanding is also revealed, namely, “that ye also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” The essential Christmas message is about God with us.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. … Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.”

Nothing concentrates the meaning of Christmas more directly and more disturbingly, perhaps, than the Feast of St. Stephen celebrated on the day after Christmas. He is commemorated as the first martyr, the proto-martyr, whose witness, for that is the proper meaning of martyr, namely, witness, is the prototype, the model of all martyrdom. As the lesson from The Book of the Acts of the Apostles makes abundantly clear, Stephen achieves his eponymous crown (stephanos in Greek means crown) by losing his life not simply at the stone-throwing hands of a vicious mob but by losing himself in Jesus Christ. He has taken the Christ whose holy birth we have just celebrated as the model of life itself, the life of forgiveness. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit… Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” Suddenly, the Christmas mystery illumines the mystery of the Passion of Christ and vice versa.

Following Christ is our Christian vocation. The Feast of Stephen opens out to us the radical nature of that following. It is to let the life of Christ define your outlook and being. More poignantly, it is to let the essential element of sacrifice and forgiveness have complete rule and sway. The Feast of Stephen is one of the three holy days of Christmas that open out to us the radical meaning of Christ’s holy birth. Human redemption comes with a price, the heart-blood of the Son of God become the Son of Man. Our witness, too, necessarily means sacrifice … and forgiveness.

(more…)

Print this entry

“And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city”

Nothing is more certain in this world than death and taxes, it is commonly said, a saying attributed to Daniel Defoe and Benjamin Franklin. How intriguing that death and taxes should be the features of the two centers of Christian contemplation: Bethlehem and the mystery of Christmas; Jerusalem and the mystery of Easter! Somehow God uses the matter of our common mortality, death, and the matter of our social and political lives, taxes, to teach us about his grace and goodness. Easter is the overcoming of death by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the mystery which is centered on Jerusalem. Christmas is the birth of Child Christ, which is centered on Bethlehem, where Christ is born because of the decree of Caesar Augustus “that all the world should be taxed.”

It is, I think, a pleasing overstatement which captures the power and the extent of the Roman Empire into which world Christ is born. Somehow all of the mechanisms of Empire and Government become, in spite of themselves, the instruments of divine and heavenly providence. In a way, it is the logic of the Incarnation itself; God embraces and redeems his Creation to himself. Even by way of taxation!

(more…)

Print this entry

“Of his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace”

Christmas, it seems, is all about excess, about fullness. At least, in our material culture we want it to be about more and more, whether it will be or not is our contemporary anxiety and worry. Christmas sometimes seems to be altogether too much of a muchness, whether it is gifts or food (or books!) or drink or parties or more and more anxieties. The pressures can be altogether too much; the pressures are great to get it all just right, whatever that means.

The paradoxes are even greater. Christ is born in a lowly stable. We want the glitter and glitz, the dazzling brightness of gold and silver, of rich silks and perfumes, of gadgets that whirl and whizz, of wine and chocolate, of all manner of sensual delights. We want the more and more of all that delights the senses only to find that it is, perhaps, really all too much, a sensory overload, and yet empty and nothing. We are caught up too much with ourselves only to find that we have missed the real meaning of Christmas. We have missed the real paradox of God’s great little one who brings us so much and more than we can ever embrace and comprehend, so much and more spiritually.

It is not about the stuff. It is about God with us, “the Word made flesh,” the mystery of Emmanuel, the great blessing which is the extravagance of God’s grace, even “grace upon grace.” “Of his fullness have we all received.”

Lost in the desire for ‘stuff & things’ (sounds like the name of a new chain of stores), we forget the greater mystery. It is not the mystery of matter, an endless succession of stuff and things; no, Christmas is the mystery of God’s embrace of our world and humanity. It is the mystery of human redemption and the redemption of creation itself. The extravagance of Christmas is God’s embrace of the material world, its redemption, we might say, that allows the world of our material pleasures to become the greater vehicles of heavenly grace, if only we will behold and see.

(more…)

Print this entry