Christ Church

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

What does it mean to celebrate Christmas in a post-Christian culture? Is it simply nostalgia? Is it our longing for an imaginary golden age which, of course, never was? Is it our holding to traditions and customs simply out of sentiment and feeling? George Steiner’s 1974 Massey Lecture, Nostalgia for the Absolute, points to a deeper kind of longing, one which belongs more profoundly to the mystery of Christmas. It is the human longing for God in whom is the life and the light of our humanity.

He examines three nineteenth century substitutes for the Christian religion in terms of Freudian psychology, Marxist economics, and the social anthropology of Claude Leví-Strauss, all of which sought to take the place of religion, especially the Christian religion, as the overarching narrative or story that embraces and explains our lives. All failed, he notes, but left in their wake a vacuum into which all manner of fancies and fantasies have rushed in. Their legacy is very much with us in the various pseudo-religions of contemporary secular culture, even within and without the churches, despite the postmodernist claim of “incredulity towards all metanarratives”(Lyotard). They are all the parodies of true religion and liturgy, especially of the Christian liturgy, and belong to the competing claims and confusions about the self. But as parodies, they point us to the deeper mystery of Christmas which they presuppose.

Dame P.D. James, the great British mystery writer, in her novel The Children of Men, written in 1992, speaks with great insight about our current world. The novel is set in the future; 2021, in fact, and thus speaks very much to our present. “Western science has been our God,” she notes. This we know only too well in our techno-utopian optimism which thinks that salvation lies in technology and in our technocratic culture, utterly unaware of how this way of thinking is itself a problem. In the novel, this dominant scientific outlook finds itself utterly confounded by a barren world of universal infertility. There are no children, no prospect of life, only a world of the terminally ill. Such is the culture of death, a culture which is anti-life. Our culture.

The entire novel touches upon almost every moral and social issue of our time: from reproductive technology to euthanasia, from immigration to health care. The impotence of the human race humiliates “the very heart of our faith in ourselves.” Confidence in science and belief in the endless progress of humanity is shattered by the encounter with the stark reality of an absolute limit; mortality in the form of the empty womb. The womb has become a tomb. But the real barrenness is the emptiness of our souls.

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“I am not the Christ”

The season and doctrine of Advent reaches a crescendo of intensity and expectation on the Fourth Sunday in Advent and illumines already for us the radical meaning of the Advent of God coming to us in Christ. It does so by the dance of negation and affirmation at once about ourselves and about God.

The Epistle reading from Philippians is at once an affirmation of what comes to us: “the Lord is at hand;” but it is also a negation of our anxieties and fears and worries as we scuttle around busily trying to do more with less in our preparations for Christmas. “In nothing be anxious,” Paul bids us, calling us to moderation or temperance in a time of excess and to prayer with thanksgiving “in everything,” highlighting the radical meaning of Christ’s coming as “the peace of God which passeth all understanding,” for it is not and cannot be of our making, nor is it about what is coming so much as it is about what has already happened and which is the absolute cause and reason of our rejoicing, regardless of the circumstances and events in our world of darkness and despair, of the distress of nations and the sorrows of so many broken hearts. Here is the peace and the healing of God: “Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, rejoice.” The Advent of God to us is the Lord himself; Christ Jesus is Saviour. That and that alone is the counter to our fears and anxieties. It is the greater affirmation that overthrows the empty nothingness of our hearts and world. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

The Gospel makes this wonderfully clear in the dance of negation and affirmation in terms of the figure of John the Baptist. We don’t pay enough attention to this Gospel known as the witness of John. Yet it heightens the deeper meaning of the mystery of Christmas, transforming the emotions and sentiments of this time of year into a deeper understanding. “The Jews,” John the Evangelist, the theologian par excellence as the early Church recognized and which we forget, tells us “sent Priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou?” It is the first time in John’s Gospel that Jerusalem is mentioned, alerting us already to the trajectory of Christian contemplation around the two centers of Bethlehem and Jerusalem in a kind of ellipse. There is, it seems, a questioning, a seeking among the world of Israel, that focuses here on the strange and compelling figure of John the Baptist. It is as if they have a sense of something important and impending that sends them out of the city and into the wilderness in a kind of holy questioning.

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