Christ Church

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

They are familiar words from the liturgy known as the Benedictus. It follows immediately upon the Sanctus and then carries us into the Anaphora, the prayer of consecration in our modern Canadian Book of Common Prayer, which begins with the words “blessing and glory and thanksgiving.” Here words which echo the Gospel of the First Sunday in Advent (and Christ’s triumphal Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of his Passion), are equally the words that end the Gospel for the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr. Such words illuminate for us the radical meaning of Christmas, the radical meaning of Christ’s holy and blessed birth.

What is always God, always with God, and always of God, is with us. Such is the meaning of Christmas. God’s Word and Son is the Word made flesh. The God who ever is is God with us. We are being gathered together under the wings of Christ’s mothering love in spite of our sins and its destructive follies. The Gospel thus complements the powerful and disturbing lesson from Acts about the martyrdom of Stephen.

He is the proto-martyr, the prototype of all martyrdom or witness to Christ, not by being stoned to death, but as revealing the qualities of loving sacrifice which are at the heart of Christmas and at the heart of the meaning of Christ as Saviour. For centuries upon centuries, this feast followed immediately upon Christmas Day, memorialized in the carol, Good King Wenceslas, “on the Feast of Stephen”. Yet in our contemporary culture, the Feast of Stephen is better known as Boxing Day. The contrast is striking. It is the contrast between endless acquisition and loving sacrifice.

What began as a tradition of care for the servants of the aristocrats who were allowed to take the left-overs of the Christmas feast in boxes for themselves on the day following Christmas has become a day of special sales, a day of getting and spending which contrasts with the idea of sacrificial giving symbolized in the reversal of roles in the carol. The king goes out into the winter snows to bring Christmas cheer to the peasant in the woods. Christmas is for all, omnipopulo, and not just for the rich.

It means the sacrifice of oneself to the good of others and it signals a change in attitude. Stephen’s death imitates Christ’s death; thus his life, the life of Christ. “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”, he says even as Christ prays on the Cross, “Father, forgive them.” The blessings of Christmas are about the qualities of Christ’s life in us; he in us and we in him, just as at Communion we pray “that we may evermore dwell in him, And he in us,” not on the presumption of our own righteousness “but in thy manifold and great mercies.” We come in the name of the Lord and not on our own. That is the blessing.

Stephen as the first martyr and proto-type of every form of Christian witness points us to the one in whom we live in the face of the world’s enmities and disorders. He shows us a new and better way, the way of endless love. Such is the love of God. With Stephen, we may say as Perpetua, a later saint, puts it, “another lives in me.”

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

Fr. David Curry
Feast of Stephen, Christmastide 2020

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

So the Angel says unto the shepherds. Two things stand out for us on Christmas morn, the words, “fear not” and “good tidings of great joy”. We are much in need of both, to be not fearful and to hear good news. This is Christmas.

In the lovely quiet of Christmas morning, we hear the classic and familiar Christmas story about Christ’s holy birth in Bethlehem. The details are intriguing. In the turn and churn of worldly powers, of Joseph taking Mary being great with child to Bethlehem in obedience to the civil powers of that day to be numbered, enrolled, taxed, something else of greater meaning is accomplished. “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”. The story touches us with the realities of the poor and the displaced in our own times, of those who are caught in the machinations of our global world. And yet, that sad commonplace of human hardship and suffering is eclipsed by a sense of wonder. Something else is being set in motion and among the little ones of our world and day, the shepherds.

They are not the great ones in executive power and will. Indeed, the shepherds contrast completely with the elites of every age. They care for the sheep, “keeping watch over their flock by night”, we are told. It is an image of care and one with a deep resonance of meaning about the real nature of political leadership. Thrasymachus, in Plato’s Republic, argues that justice is only “the interest of the stronger”, that might equals right because they can get away with it, that shepherds are really only business men driven solely by profit, only in it for themselves. But Socrates points out that no leader can simply be in it for himself, that political order radically depends upon the common good, that justice is for all and not simply for the few. This ancient insight and idea continues to challenge us in our own world and day. The care of the sheep is the shepherd’s primary and defining task or vocation to which everything else is but secondary.

And so it is fitting, if I may use a term beloved by medieval theologians, that the news of Christ’s holy birth, the birth of Mary’s son, should be made known to the little ones of the world and not to the magnificoes, the great ones. The shepherds are a standing criticism of political misrule and injustice by leaders in every age. They are especially receptive, we might say, to the higher form of justice that Christ’s birth portends and establishes. Such is the wonder of the Gloria which the angels sing and teach to the shepherds and through them to us. Peace on earth and good will toward men is the opposite of a world of abusive power and the domination of the few over the many.

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“In him was life, and the life was the light of men”

The words of life and light counter our world of death and darkness. This is Christmas. God is life and we have no life apart from God in himself and God in us. God is light, the light which “shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not”, cannot overcome nor overwhelm the light. Darkness and death are overcome and understood only in the life and light of God. This is Christmas. The mystery of God is the mystery of God with us.

This is Christmas, the counter to our fears and hatreds masked as care and compassion or, vice versa, care and compassion masking our fears and hatreds of one another. In the mystery of Christmas we behold one another in a new and deeper way. We behold one another in God and that makes all the difference.

Christmas makes known to us with a kind of simple clarity the abiding and eternal truth of God as life and light. Word, life, and light all spiral down to the nativity or birth-day of Christ, to the making known in the world of time and space the eternal nature of God as life, light and love. God gives himself and is none the lesser for it. God’s life and God’s light belong to the self-diffusive nature of the Good. “In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him.” This is Christmas. It counters not only the fears and anxieties of our world but also our enmities and divisions that separate us from one another in our fear of the other. Herein is love, the love which bestows dignity and meaning upon our lives in the embrace of one another in the light of God’s love.

Christmas is a rich collage of images both in terms of Church and culture. It is easy to reduce it all to sentiment and emotion, the feelings of the season. The greater challenge is about the lifting up of our hearts and minds to the light and truth that the story of Christmas presents to us. That is, perhaps, why on Christmas Eve we have such thundering and magnificent words in the Epistle reading from Hebrews and in the Prologue of John’s Gospel. Nothing about the babe in the manger, nothing even about Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. The entire focus is on the life and light of God made known in the Word made flesh and upon what we behold in that eternal word dwelling with us. “We beheld his glory”, we are told in parenthesis, “the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth”. The Word which was in the beginning, which was God and which was with God is the creative Word without which nothing was made that was made. The Word which is the life and light of God is Christ Jesus, unnamed but proclaimed in parenthesis, almost as an aside, as “the only-begotten of the Father”, as the eternally begotten of the Father. There was not when he was not.

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“My Lord, and my God”

The Collect for the Feast of St. Thomas in the week of the Fourth Sunday in Advent reveals the significance of Thomas for our approach to Christmas. It is about doubt leading to certainty. As such it helps us to think about doubt in a more positive and even metaphysical way that belongs to the larger traditions of philosophy and religion. The doubt of so-called doubting Thomas is really about the forms of intellectual inquiry, about wanting to know and in ways which challenge our assumptions about what we think we know. Thomas, the Collect observes, was “doubtful” about Christ’s Resurrection. No body, no incarnation, therefore no resurrection, we might say. Hence the reason for this feast and Gospel in the days leading to Christmas, to the Incarnation. Resurrection and Incarnation are indubitably and necessarily connected, it seems.

Descartes in the early seventeenth century uses doubt in an hyperbolical way in the quest for certainty. He highlights the uncertainties or the doubtfulness about what we can know simply through our senses in order to bring us to realize that our knowing anything at all depends upon the knowledge of ourselves as thinking things which in turn depends upon the knowledge of God as good and not a deceiver if we are to have any knowledge whatsoever whether of mental or physical things. Calling into question what we ordinarily take for granted leads us to a deeper understanding of the metaphysical principles upon which thought and being depend. Perhaps we can see the biblical Thomas as a kind of precursor of such forms of philosophical inquiry.

For the doubt of Thomas is really a kind of questioning about the reality of God’s intimate engagement with our humanity, an engagement which opens us out to the reality of the mystery of God who cannot be contained to the limits of human knowing, on the one hand, and to the spiritual truth about our humanity and its differing capacities to apprehend truth and meaning, on the other hand. The so-called doubting of Thomas provides “the greater confirmation of our faith,” as another Thomas, Thomas Aquinas, reminds us and which the Collect seems to suggest. The doubt of Thomas is “for the more confirmation of the faith”.

That “greater” or “more confirmation of [our] faith” is captured in Thomas’ words to Christ, “my Lord, and my God.” We are not told whether he reached out with fingers and hands to touch; we are only told what he says. Yet his words are testimony enough. They convey the reality of the encounter with the risen Christ. He can only be risen if he first was dead and he can only have died if he had a body. Christmas is all about the wonder and marvel of God becoming man, the Word made flesh. “Without forsaking what he was, he became what he was not,” as St. Athanasius puts the essential mystery of the Incarnation. With The Feast of St. Thomas we glimpse something of the larger nature of that mystery. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ is not just about Christmas; it embraces the entire life and work of Jesus Christ, the work of the redemption of our humanity.

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