Christ Church

“When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son,
made of a woman, made under the law”

Some can’t wait for Christmas to be over; others want it to last forever. Yet however much Christmas has been co-opted, if not hijacked to every other agenda imaginable, it has an undeniable hold on our imaginations and our lives to one degree or another. It has a global reach and presence in very different cultures in our world and even among non-Christians. Why? Because of its catholicity, dare I say, meaning something universal and in its fullness. The word, fullness, is a repeated feature of the Christmas mystery.

There is a fullness of things in heaven and earth, a double fullness, we might say, but one which is captured in the central mystery. For in “the Word made flesh”, as John puts it “(we beheld the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth”; a fullness contained in a parenthesis. In the readings for The Sunday after Christmas we have “the fullness of the time” which is just as much “the time of fullness”. The twelve days of Christmas are unique, not just an octave such as at Easter, but an octave and a half, ultimately culminating in Epiphany on Tuesday of this week. With Epiphany, Christmas goes global. What is proclaimed as “good tidings of great joy for all people” reaches far, far beyond a tiny corner of the world. With the coming of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem, Christmas is omni populo, literally for all people, itself a kind of fullness.

But what does all this fullness mean? Quite simply, fullness belongs to God and to our being gathered into the life of God. Fullness speaks to the highest truth and dignity of our humanity; it cannot be constrained to ethnic, cultural, political, social, economic, and linguistic communities and cultures. This sense of the fullness of things is theological, not merely sociological. In a radical sense, the Christmas mystery at Bethlehem never goes away but signals the whole purpose of God’s revelation in the gathering of all things into unity in God. Like the Magi-Kings, we may leave Bethlehem and return to our own places, but, perhaps, as T.S. Eliot suggests, “no longer at ease” because the Christmas mystery at Bethlehem always remains with us. The point is that we are changed by what we have been given to see.

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“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 horrors of the 20th and 21st 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 giving of the Law. 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.

This story is captured rather movingly and paradoxically in one of the loveliest of the carols of the season. It reminds us of how substantial and serious the Christmas story is and not just sentimental. Puer Nobis Nascitur is a 15th century carol, though probably of much earlier origins, which highlights 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 was he with sleepy cows and asses”, suggesting that the beasts “could see” what the evil of man sees but rejects, namely “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 accentuates 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 pretensions 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 the mindless Herods of our times. Their innocence lies simply in their powerlessness, in their inability to harm, the true meaning of innocence. The Feast of Holy Innocents 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 and economic power and are destroyed. Most of them are unnamed and unknown by us, yet known to God.

The point is that the unnamed victims are known and named in God. The whole theological thrust of the Feast within the Festival of Christmas is to gather us into the embrace of Christ’s grace. The lesson from Revelation places all such holy innocents in the vision of the redeemed, the proverbial “one hundred and forty-four thousand” who have “his Name, and the Name of the Father written on their forehead”. In other words the Holy Innocents participate in the world’s redemption accomplished in Christ. In that sense the Collect suggests, albeit disturbingly, to be sure, that God “madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths”. Yet this is the idea of redemptive suffering from the perspective of those who are the innocent victims of the machinations of worldly powers.

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