Christ Church

“His name was called JESUS”

Christmas is more than a three-day or even a nine-day wonder. There are the proverbial twelve days of Christmas, an octave and a half, as it were. Only so, it seems, can we begin to unpack the mystery of the Incarnation and its radical meaning of human redemption. The blood of the Holy Innocents on Monday past anticipates and participates in the blood of this day. The Octave Day of Christmas locates the story of Jesus and his sacred humanity concretely within the cultic and cultural realities of ancient Judaism. The Octave marks the Circumcision of Christ, the first blood-letting of Christ in the Christian understanding, circumcision is the Old Testament ritual that has its Christian counterpart in baptism.

We are apt to be squeamish about such a direct and emphatic insistence on the physical reality of the body and that of a male, to boot. But it belongs to the logic of the Incarnation itself that Christ is “made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law” as Paul in Galatians puts it. Only so might we receive the adoption of sons, our being made partakers of God through God’s Word and Son made man. Circumcision was the ritual of Jewish identity signifying a bond with the God who is beyond all nature as its principle and signifying that in the most particular aspects of the human male. Yet such is the logic of redemption. “Christ was man born of woman to redeem both sexes,” as John Hackett (17th c.) wonderfully notes.

The readings for the Octave focus on a further signifier in this ritual, the idea of naming. In Christian contexts, baptism is sometimes called Christening. It has entirely to do with our being incorporated individually into the body of Christ. More significantly, Christian baptism has to do with our being named individually in the giving of God’s own name as Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Here on the Octave Day of Christmas, the theme of naming is emphasized by way of Isaiah and Luke. Isaiah in a lovely passage which highlights the various titles or names of the expected one who comes as child and son and whose “name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, the everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” All of these connect to Luke’s Gospel reading where Jesus at his circumcision “was called JESUS”. The name Jesus is all in capital letters, thus screaming out to us the meaning of Jesus as saviour, on the one hand, and then reminding us, on the other hand, that he was “so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” He is JESUS from eternity. This name conveyed by God to the Angels is conveyed in turn to Joseph who “called his name JESUS,” as Matthew notes.

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“Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not”

The aggressive atheist and neo-Darwinist, Richard Dawkins, argues that the God of the Old Testament is a most horrible character, to which the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks replied, much to Dawkins’ discomfort, “Ah, I see you are a Christian atheist.” The use of the term Old Testament for the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures is characteristic of the Christian understanding because of the New Testament writings.

Dawkins’ view of the Old Testament is not new and belongs to a common misconception of the relation between the Old and New Testament which overstates the differences and overplays the contrast. This is seen, for instance, in the idea of the Law versus Grace, forgetting that the Law as given by God is therefore also grace; or the similar idea of justice versus mercy or love, forgetting that mercy is just as intrinsic to the Hebrew Scriptures as it is to the New Testament. Overstating the contrasts between the two testaments belongs to a conflict narrative which pits Jew against Christian. In turn, the aggressive and naive atheism of Dawkins assumes the same conflict narrative between modern science and religion. Such is a profound distortion and misconception.

Dawkins has his precursors, ranging from Marcion in the 2nd century to Thomas Jefferson in the late 18th century. Marcion could not reconcile the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament and so conveniently edited out large swaths of the Old Testament and as well great chunks of the New Testament. For him the contrast was between love and judgement. It is a tendency that has infected many over the centuries. In the case of the 3rd President of America, Thomas Jefferson, the concern was about reason versus revelation, particularly the miracle stories of the Christian Gospels. Jefferson took his scissors to the New Testament to excise all such things leaving merely the husk of a kind of moralizing Jesus in accommodation to the precepts of human reason.

All such things reveal an attitude and a set of assumptions about God and human good. But surely, Dawkins could just have easily found the ‘Christian’ God of the New Testament equally repulsive simply in terms of this disturbing and disquieting story that is an essential part of the mystery of Christmas. If the martyrdom of St. Stephen was not enough of a wake-up call and shock to our thinking about the wondrous birth of Christ, we have the very shocking story of the slaughter to the little ones of Bethlehem, whom Herod slew in his fury, as the carol, puer nobis nascitur puts it.

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“The world itself could not contain the books that should be written”

The three holy days of Christmas illuminate our understanding of the Christmas mystery in wonderful ways. The Feast of St. Stephen on the day after Christmas reminds us that love is sacrificial and nothing less than the love which is God moves in us even in and through the sad realities of human suffering and evil. The Feast of the Holy Innocents tomorrow teaches us about innocence and purity as properties which ultimately belong to the Incarnate Christ and to the forms of our participation in his holy life, even by way of anticipation such as in the disturbing yet profound story of the slaughter of the little ones of Bethlehem. It is a hard but deep and radical saying that “thou madest infants to glory thee by their deaths” – yet how else to think about human life without its ground in God? How else to conceive the radical nature of the goodness of God who alone can make something good out of our evil?

But in between the martyrdom of Stephen and the slaughter of the Holy Innocents there is the Feast of St. John the Evangelist. With it we have the divine ground of human lives in all of their complexity. With it we are returned to the wonder of Christmas Eve in the pageant of God’s Word and Son in the Letter to the Hebrews and in John’s Prologue. With it we contemplate the radical mystery of the Incarnation by way of John’s first letter and the ending of the very last chapter of his Gospel. These endings and beginnings are nothing more than the ways in which we are enfolded in eternity, enfolded and embraced in the love of God toward us.

Our Parish tradition on the Sunday after Christmas at the 10:30am service is to have the Christmas Service of Nine Lessons. It is a glorious parade of words, of words written and proclaimed. It complements the Feast of St. John the Evangelist with its emphasis on the witness of John by way of his Gospel and letters, and perhaps his Revelation. Certainly the life of the Church and the doctrine of the Christian Faith is greatly influenced and shaped by “the doctrine of thy blessed Apostle and Evangelist Saint John”. Once again, the Divine Word signals life and light communicated to us through what has been seen, looked upon, touched and handled concerning the Word of life, and heard and declared, but importantly, “these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.”

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