Christ Church

One thing is necessary and Mary hath chosen the better part

The rich fullness of Christmas is often matched by a frantic busyness like Martha in the story of Mary and Martha, “anxious and troubled by a multitude of things” (Luke 10.41). The anxiety of Martha is literally about being too careful, too full of cares and worries. Not that there aren’t care and worries, to be sure, especially in the confusion and nonsense of the disordered world of the past two decades. But there is a wonderful counter to our fears and anxieties, of busyness and worries in Jesus’ gentle response. One thing is necessary.

What is that unum necessarium, the one thing necessary? What is “the better part” chosen by Mary? It is another Mary who shows us what is the unum necessarium, the one thing necessary, the Mary of the Christmas story, the Virgin Mary through whom God becomes man and dwells among us. This is the Mary of the Gospel reading today on what is the Second Sunday of Christmas and the Eve of the Epiphany. The one thing necessary is our contemplation of the wonder of Christ’s holy birth. We contemplate the wonder of God and of God with us just as the Magi-Kings will fall down and worship offering gifts which teach the wonder they acknowledge. Christ is God, and King, and Sacrifice.

Both stories of the Marys are told to us by Luke. “Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” What are all these things? They are “those things which were told them by the shepherds who went “unto Bethlehem” to “see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.” The Mary of the Christmas story shows us what belongs to the true response of our humanity to what is made known to us by God with us. God speaks to us in human vesture even through the unspeaking Word and Son of God in the infant Christ. What is said about him belongs to who he is for us even as the unspeaking babe of Bethlehem. An infant is one who cannot speak. Mary’s attitude is the essential attitude of faith. It is contemplative wonder at all that is said about the child Christ.

This does not deny or diminish the importance of human actions and busyness. It does however challenge us about our busyness and our practical activities by reminding us that ultimately they are grounded and have their real truth and meaning in the activity of contemplation which is the highest activity of our humanity. This redeems our everyday busyness from its frantic mindlessness and frightening emptiness.

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His name was called JESUS

The descriptive titles for today are a bit of a mouthful: “The Octave Day of Christmas and the Circumcision of Christ being New Year’s Day,” and, as if to underline the titles, we have not one, not two, but three Collects! All this belongs to the rich fullness of the Christmas mystery and yet that rich fullness, so theologically significant and doctrinally suggestive, centers on the name of Jesus, literally highlighted for us in Luke’s account by being printed in capital letters. JESUS. In the digital culture, it is a shout-out.

We learned via St. Matthew’s Gospel on Sunday that his name means ‘saviour’; “for he shall save his people from their sins.” Yeshua – Joshua – Jesus, saviour. It is a compelling and intriguing term, a name with an explicit meaning, a name signifying the divine purpose of Christ’s holy birth, a name named by the angel, named by Joseph, and now named by Mary herself. It is a name worth pondering upon, in the manner of Mary and Joseph, in contemplative wonder.

The rich fullness of images which belong to the crowded cluster of things in the Bethlehem scene all center on Jesus and on who he is for us. Emmanuel means God with us and that, too, is said, of the Son brought forth of a Virgin. But what God with us actually means takes on a much fuller meaning with the actual name, Jesus, saviour. It speaks of redemption and of what God seeks for our humanity which is nothing less, it seems, than our actual incorporation into the life of God through God speaking divine things to us in human ways. Such is the incarnation. The deeper reality of this divine speaking humanly, and resoundingly, we might say, is seen in the particular feature of Christ’s circumcision. At once a required ritual belonging to Jewish religious identity, it also signals the reality of Christ’s humanity. It belongs to the rituals of the Jewish Law and yet speaks universally to the redemption of the whole of our humanity.

That is salvation. It is accomplished in and through the sacrifice of Christ, in and through his taking our sins upon him and saving us from all that diminishes and destroys the real truth of our humanity which is found in Christ. God with us means God giving himself for us.

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When the fullness of the time was come,
God sent forth his Son, made of a woman

There is a rich fullness to Christmas, a fullness of images seen and heard, in crècheand carol, in sacrament and word. It highlights an important feature of the Christian faith. It is about the fullness of images rather than an emptying of images. But the images of Christmas are not nothing. They are not mere images, empty signs; rather they are signs that signify a fullness of meaning. They have, as it were, a sacramental quality to them. They point to the reality of Emmanuel, “which being interpreted, is,” as Matthew states, “God with us.” All of the images of Christmas dance and swirl around the mystery of God and of God with us; the idea of the sign and the thing signified have very much to do with our incorporation into the life of God through Christ’s incarnation. Such is “the fullness of the time.”

This has a profound significance for how we think about what it means to be human. God’s intimate engagement with our humanity in Christ’s holy nativity signals something profound about our humanity. It signals that our humanity finds its truth and fullness in God. As the reading from Galatians indicates, this means a certain preparation and readiness through God’s will at work in time and, more importantly, in the intersection between time and eternity captured, I think,  in Paul’s rich phrase “the fullness of the time.” It suggests a certain moment of rightness, of the making adequate of our humanity for this realization in time that gives time and our humanity its truth and meaning. The concept of “the fullness of the time” also applies to humankind historically in terms of cultures and individual lives.

“There came,” T.S. Eliot says in ‘Choruses from “The Rock,”’ “at a predetermined moment, a moment in time /and of time,/ A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history:/ transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time,/ A moment in time but time was made through that moment:/ for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment/ of time gave the meaning.” As he explains, “it seem[s] as if men must proceed from light to light, in the/ light of the Word,/ through the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative being; /Bestial as always before, carnal, self-seeking as always before,/ selfish and purblind as ever before,/ Yet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their/march on the way that was lit by the light; /Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet following no other way.”

For there is no other way than the way of God despite our “negative being” and our wandering ways of deceit and confusion, of certainty and uncertainty, of sin and folly. God makes our way to him through the way of his coming to us at “the fulness of the time.” This is the wondrous mystery which we behold in the Christmas scene of the Word made flesh, of the babe of Bethlehem wrapped in the swaddling bands of our humanity, “incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary.” Christ is “that pure one,” as Irenaeus so beautifully puts it, “opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.” “Made of a woman,” says Paul, “made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”

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These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth

If the reality of the stoning of St. Stephen was more than we can bear, how shall we ever bear the heart-rending story of the Holy Innocents? And how shall we possibly make sense of it in relation to the sentiments of the Christmas season. How is this joy and peace and goodwill? How is this truth and love, mercy and grace? And yet it is.

No feast of Christmas week speaks more profoundly, albeit disturbingly, to the reality of Christ’s holy birth. Here is a story which disturbs or should disturb us and yet belongs to the tragic realities of our world and day, a world which witnesses to the endless sufferings and death of countless little ones. They are, as in Matthew’s account, the innocent ones, those who are unable to harm and yet are harmed themselves. They are the victims of the convenience of others, the victims of the machinations of individuals and nations. They are those whose deaths seem so utterly pointless and meaningless.

There are the sad realities of abortion, of the slaughter of children in the war zones of the world, of the deaths of the little ones through famine and pestilence. These are some of the inescapable realities of our world; complicated and complex, to be sure, but also terrifying and heart-rending. How amazing that during the Christmas season which celebrates the birth of God as a child we are asked to contemplate the deaths of the little ones!

Christ is God’s “great little one.” He takes his humanity from the blessed Virgin Mary. There is a sense of wonder in his birth, a sense of joy and an awakening to hope and peace, good will and harmony. Yet the Christmas story is very much about the dark realities of the human condition, about the stark realities of sin and evil. “He came unto his own and his own received him not,” you might remember from Christmas Eve. “There was no room for them in the inn,” you might recall from Christmas  Day.

Christmas does not hide from view such realities. It gives us a way to face them and to do so in the paradox of God’s grace signalled in the lesson from Revelation. The Holy Innocents are seen as the pure and innocent ones who “follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.” Yet the Holy Innocents are the little children of Bethlehem whom Herod, seeking to remove a potential rival to his throne, has killed. His violent act recalls the ancient policy of infanticide inaugurated by Pharaoh to contain and control the Hebrews. The phrase “out of Egypt have I called my Son” references the story of the Exodus. In every way, these lessons seek to connect the deaths of the little ones to Christ and to the purpose of his coming.

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