Christ Church

And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were
told them by the shepherds.

I hope that we are among those who having heard it, wonder at those things told to us by the shepherds. Even more, I hope and pray that we will be like Mary and “keep all these things, and ponder them in [our] hearts.” Such is, I think, the radical meaning of the Christmas of the Shepherds.

Things told to them by angels set them in motion to “see this thing which is come to pass,” they say, and with a proper theological sophistication of the kind which belongs to the little ones of the world, they know that this is something “which the Lord hath made known unto us.” They come and find it so. Splendid. Good on them but even better, even a greater good is that they do not keep this to themselves. It is not “good tidings of great joy”, just for themselves. No, it concerns us all. “They made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.” We know that saying. We heard it on Christmas morn. The “good tidings of great joy” is that “unto you is born this day in the city of David, who is Christ the Lord.” And as a sign of this truth, “ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”

All this has remained with them and belongs to their conversation among themselves. It sets them in motion, moved by more than what they or we can possibly conceive. They come and see and it is as they had been told. They wonder at what they behold and made it known abroad and others wonder too. But how many keep all these things and ponder them in their hearts? The shepherds “returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.” There is the constant emphasis upon the idea of what has been told and seen and then told to others.

All of this belongs to the sweet wonder of the Christmas mystery. On The Octave Day of Christmas it all comes to a kind of crescendo, paradoxically enough not with the Angels nor with insight of John but with the lowliness and humility of the shepherds. They have the kind of rural honesty that used to be part of our communities. A way of simple directness and humble honesty. It is much needed in our age of smug arrogance and ignorant assertions. The Octave Day gathers up the fullness of images that Christmas presents and concentrates them on our thinking about Jesus, especially about his being named Jesus by angels, by Joseph, and now, wonderfully by Mary.

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The birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise

This is how it happened? Well, at least in Matthew’s account. But more importantly what Matthew and Luke and John offer us is a way to think about the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. We might say that how it happened and how we think about what happened are inescapably intertwined. In fact, we really don’t have any other way to think about the mystery of Christmas than what we are presented with in the Gospels.

To be sure, there are the traditions of representation and reflection upon these mysteries that belong to our thinking. But what is most striking and most important about the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation is the idea of God being with us which is simply another way of thinking about the radical nature of God as the principle upon which the being and the knowing of things utterly depends. From such a view, God is always with us. Christ’s Incarnation is the instantiation of that idea simply in its most radical guise. No cause for Christian triumphalism however; only for humility and wonder.

Matthew’s account complements John’s outstanding theological vision more than it does Luke’s economical and bare bones story which at face value has nothing really extraordinary about it other than that in the light of John’s Christmas Gospel we are made aware that is what is extraordinary. The ordinariness of the extraordinary event, if you will. Matthew offers us an insight into something he shares with Luke. It has entirely do with angelic sight, the raising of our minds from the linear and divisive thinking of ratio to the unitive reasoning of intellectus into which everything is gathered together.

Matthew’s account focuses wonderfully, I think, on the role of the angels in directing the conscience of Joseph. He confronts a conundrum, a social scandal. Espoused to Mary, yes, but lo, and behold, she is with child and not by him! Something of the character of Joseph is suggested to us in Matthew’s equally laconic account, equal to Luke’s concision. “Joseph her husband, being  a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily,” discreetly arrange for things, as it were, and not go viral on twitter in the manner of Trudeau and Trump. There is in Joseph’s thoughts – something which we are allowed to see – a question, a sense of mystery, that has to do, perhaps, with his sense of the character of Mary. Simply put, he is perplexed about what exactly is going on. There are, to say the least, questions.

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These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth

There is, perhaps, no feast more troubling than The Feast of the Holy Innocents. Yet it belongs to the Christmas mystery and helps to illumine the deeper realities of God’s intimate engagement with our world and our humanity in the child Christ.

The story simply shows us what is a continuing feature of our own world; the horrible sufferings and deaths of the little ones in so many parts of our world, the sufferings and deaths of the little ones because of war, the sufferings and deaths of the little ones because of what is expedient and useful for the interests of others. In other words, there are a myriad of innocent ones. Innocent simply means those who are not able to harm.

In the Christian story, the little ones of Bethlehem are destroyed by Herod in his attempt to get rid of a potential rival to his throne. The story, too, draws upon the Egyptian captivity of Israel and God deliverance of Israel by God. The Hebrews are drawn out of Egypt and learn to be defined by the Law in the wilderness. So, too, Christ with Joseph and Mary flees Bethlehem and goes into Egypt from which he will return. Fuga in Egyptum, “the Flight into Egypt,” as the Matthaean story is called has excited the imaginations of the artists. The angel of the Lord alerts Joseph in a dream about the danger the young child and his mother are in. They flee into Egypt.

Meanwhile back in Bethlehem, we have the slaughter of all the little ones just because they are little ones. It is a policy of infanticide enacted for a political purpose. Sadly, there is nothing new in that: think about the horrors of the Rwandan genocide or the present horrors of the Syrian civil war, of the flood of refugees, etc., etc.

What is the point? What is there to celebrate? What are we celebrating? The meaningless and cruel deaths of little children? Cruel deaths, yes, but The Feast of Holy Innocents makes the strong theological claim that such deaths are not meaningless, that such deaths actually participate in Christ’s coming, including his death. Their lives have their meaning entirely in Christ. It means, too, that the sufferings that arise so directly from human folly and wickedness in all its forms are known to and in God. The simple “givenness of things,” to use Marilynne Robinson’s phrase, embraces the suffering of all things, both gentle and violent. The suffering of all things belongs to the being of God.

The unspeakable grief of the mothers of the world at the loss of their little ones is part and parcel of the Christmas story, “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.” The only comfort is found in the comfort of the Christmas story. God himself becomes a little one so that he might redeem all the little ones of the world. Without guile, in other words, innocent, “they are without fault before the throne of God.”

Think about how poignant and powerful this story might be precisely for those who have lost little ones. I have had occasion in the priestly and pastoral ministry to deal with those who have lost a child at childbirth or shortly thereafter. What comfort can there be except to recall this feast which makes it clear that the little ones ultimately are those who “follow the Lamb,”a reference to Christ in his sacrifice for us, “whithersoever he goeth”? He goes ultimately to the Cross for us and for our salvation. The holy Innocents are “they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.” There can be no other comfort.

Fr. David Curry
Holy Innocents, 2018

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That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you

The Feast of St. John the Evangelist complements powerfully the essential Christian mystery of the Incarnation expressed in The Prologue of John’s Gospel on Christmas Eve. The reading from John’s first letter underscores the essential insight into the Incarnation. It is written to emphasize the reality of God being with us in the incarnate reality of Jesus Christ. It counters what will become the earliest Christian heresy, docetism, which argues that God could not become flesh, could not engage the world intimately; he only appears to have done so but not really. As such it plays into all the forms of gnosticism, ancient and modern, which see the world in largely dualist terms: spirit, good, matter, evil.

Our own culture is riven with dualisms of this sort both politically and environmentally. We have, I think, the hardest time understanding and appreciating the essential goodness of everything in the created order and end up attributing to the goodness of creation an evil which actually belongs to us and to our “thoughts, words and deeds”. How we use the created world is the real question. Christ’s Incarnation is the strongest possible affirmation of the goodness of the world, of matter, of the flesh, of the body. But even more, the Incarnation is the strongest possible affirmation of the truth of God in whom the truth and being of all things radically depends.

The Gospel too complements the point of the Epistle. Not only is Christ’s Incarnation and all that follows from it, such as the Resurrection, real and not merely an appearance, a kind of divine play-acting, as it were, but “the world itself could not contain the books that should be written,” John says, about the “many other things which Jesus did.” In other words, the Incarnation does not mean that God is collapsed into the world, rather the world is gathered into the radical truth of God. This affirms the goodness of the created order but only in relation to God.

Christ is “God and Man,” the creeds say, and that union contains a wonderful insight into God and to God with us. Christ, as the Athanasian Creed puts it, is “God and Man, yet he is not two, but One Christ, One, however, not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, but by taking Manhood into God.” Such an insight proclaims a deep truth that counters all the forms of our dualism. It is what Christmas proclaims and celebrates, the deep meaning of Emmanuel, God with us. John emphasizes in his Epistle what he shows in his Gospel. “That which was from the beginning” is the Word, “the Word [which] was with God and was God,” “the Word [which] was made flesh”, the Word “which we have heard, and seen, and looked upon and handled”. The Word of Life.

That Word “we declare unto you”, John says, “that you may have fellowship with us” in “our fellowship with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” This is our Christmas joy, and the fullness of joy. This is the light that overcomes all darkness. “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.” Such is the great and radical witness of the Christmas mystery. We celebrate the double mystery of God and of God with us only to realize that God with us is precisely the mystery of God himself.

That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you

Fr. David Curry
St. John the Evangelist, 2018

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