For
your edification the ninth Day of Christmas, something from French theologian,
Jean Daniélou (1905-1974):
Jesus is the action of God coming towards man
to save him and lead him to the Father. In Him, therefore, is revealed the
fullness of the mystery of God’s love. But He is also the Man who, raised up by
God, mounts towards the Father and thus fulfills the vocation of man. He is at
once – let us repeat – the movement of God towards man and the movement of man
towards God.
For
the eighth day of Christmas, the Feast of the Holy Name, something from St.
Hesychios (8th or 9th century) whose writing can be found in the Philokalia:
The more the rain falls on the earth, the
softer it makes it; similarly, the holy name of Jesus gladdens the earth of our
heart the more we call upon it.
On
the seventh day of Christmas, something from another great theologian/Archbishop
of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey (1904-1988):
It is because we believe God has an answer to
man’s predicament, the answer of the Word-Made-Flesh at Bethlehem, that we have
hope, and, having hope, are rejoicing once again at Christmas.
Christians for whom this hope is a reality have
been able to rejoice even when they have been in the word’s darkest places. It
is It was in prison in Rome with the prospect of death awaiting him that St.
Paul wrote, “Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say, rejoice . . . In
nothing be anxious, the Lord is at hand.”
The proof of our Christian hope is the
existence of men and women who have lived by it, and have radiated its joy even
in dark and heartbreaking circumstances.
Our rejoicing at Christmas is not an escape
from life’s grim realities into a fancy realm of religion and festivity. Rather
it is a joy that, as we face and feel the world’s tragedy, we know that God has
an answer, an answer for mankind to receive. In a word, this is a time of hope.
Christmas says: Christ has taken humanity to
himself, and so every man and woman and child in the world is loveable and infinitely
precious. And, in response, men and women can treat each other–whatever their
race or color–in the light of Bethlehem; or they can, in rejecting the human
dignity of their fellows, reject their own dignity too.
This year, the sixth day of Christmas falls on the first Sunday of Christmas. The lessons of the lectionary appointed for Episcopalian churches this Sunday include John1:1-18. Here is a video reflection on that pasage by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury (the text is below as well):
It's a slightly strange way to start a
Gospel you might think. We expect something a bit more like the
beginning of the other Gospels: the story of Jesus's birth perhaps or
his ancestry, or the story of Jesus's arrival on the public scene. But at the beginning of St John's Gospel
what St John does is to frame his whole story against an eternal
background. And what he's saying there is this: as you read this Gospel,
as you read the stories about what Jesus does, be aware that whatever
he does in the stories you're about to read is something that's going on
eternally, not just something that happens to be going on in Palestine
at a particular date. So when Jesus brings an overflow of joy
at a wedding, when Jesus reaches out to a foreign woman to speak words
of forgiveness and reconciliation to her, when Jesus opens the eyes of a
blind man or raises the dead, all of this is part of something that is
going on forever. The welcome of God, the joy of God, the light of God,
the life of God - all of this is eternal. What Jesus is showing on Earth is somehow mysteriously part of what is always true about God. And that's why it's central to this
beginning of John's Gospel - that he says the light shines in the
darkness and the darkness doesn't swallow it up. How could the darkness
swallow it up? If these works of welcome and forgiveness, of light and
life and joy, are always going on, then actually nothing can ever make a
difference to them. And that's why at the climax of this
wonderful passage, St John says, the Word of God, the outpouring of
God's life, actually became flesh and blood. And we saw it - we saw in
this human life the eternal truth about God. We saw an eternal love, an
eternal relationship; we saw an eternal joy and a light and a life.
So as we read these stories we know that
nothing at all can make a difference to the truth, the reality, they
bring into the world. This is indeed the truth; this is where life is to
be found. And this explains why at the end of St John's Gospel, he
famously says that if we tried to spell out all that this means, there
would be no end of the books that could be written.
So in the light of that overflowing joy
and everlasting truth, I wish you every blessing and happiness for this
Christmas and the year ahead.
For
the fifth day of Christmas, I have another quote from William Temple who I
quoted on the third day of Christmas. There he said that Jesus, as the
incarnation of the eternal Word, is the self-utterance of God. Here he offers more of what that means:
The life of Christ is a momentary
manifestation of eternal truth; and it is God for us as a devotional exercise
to sometimes to read the Gospels, turning all the past tenses into the present,
and to remember that what we read there is an expression, quite strictly, under
all conditions of the time and place in which the expression took place, of
what is always true. And the culmination of this utterance is the Passion. The
ultimate truth about God and His relation to the finite spirits is this, that
‘when He is reviled He revilesnot
again, and when He suffers, He threatens not’.
(About
Christ, SCM Press LTD, London, 1962, p. 63)
The
fourth day of Christmas is the Feast of Holy Innocents rooted in the story of
Herod’s slaughter of baby boys of Bethlehem in an attempt to annihilate the infant
Jesus as recounted in the second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. It is also a reminder that many little ones continue to suffer and die
due to hunger, disease, neglect, abuse, and violence.
Fleming
Rutledge is an Episcopalian priest and renowned preacher and author. Her blog, GenerousOrthodoxy, is a fine resource. The following is taken from one of her sermons, Monsters at the Manger. In the sermon she
refers to a sermon preached by a Roman Catholic priest, Father Lucic, at a
church in Sarajevo during the siege and bombardment there in the 1990’s:
The priest’s final words were, “Jesus teaches
us that human judgments are not the last judgments, that human justice is not
the last justice, and that power that humans exercise over one another is not
the final power”
How can we believe this? How can we go on
singing “Joy to the world, the Savior reigns,” in view of the fact that the
monsters continue to devour our children with undiminished ferocity?
The Christmas story is anchored to our lives
and to the wickedness of this world by the grief of Rachel, “weeping for her
children, refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” The authors of
Scripture did not turn away from the unimaginable suffering of children. God
the Father did not turn away. Jesus did not turn away. We see in his death on
the Cross and Resurrection from the dead the source of our conviction that
“human judgments are not the final judgments, that human justice is not the
final justice, and the power that humans exercise over one another is not the
final power.” But we must keep Ivan Karamazov’s protest in our minds every day.
The nativity story might as well be about reindeer and snowmen for sure, if it
has nothing to say about the small victims. I believe that by putting Rachel’s
lament at the heart of the Christmas story, Matthew has shown us how to hold onto
faith and hope until the Second Coming. Only as we share in the prayers and the
laments of bereaved families, not looking away, can we continue to believe that
the savior reigns even now in the faith and tenacity of Father Lucic and all
those who continue to stand for humanity in the face of barbarity. Only by
attending to the horrors of this world can we continue tossing the words of
that great eighteenth-century hymn-writer Isaac Watts;
For only a faith forged out of suffering can
say with conviction that the angels and monsters will not coexist forever, that
Muslims and agnostics and Christians and Jews will be drawn together in ways we
cannot yet imagine, that the agonies of victims will some day be rectified, and
that the unconditional love of God in Jesus Christ will be the Last Word.
The
third day of Christmas is the Feast of Saint John the Evangelist. In the magisterial
prologue to the Gospel of John, we are given a cosmic background to the Christmas
story:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God.He was in the beginning with God; all
things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was
made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines
in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent
from God, whose name was John. He came for testimony, to bear witness to the
light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to
bear witness to the light. The true light that enlightens every man was
coming into the world. 1He was in the world, and the world was made through
him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people
received him not. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he
gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the
will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became
flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory,
glory as of the only Son from the Father. John bore witness to him, and
cried, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me ranks before
me, for he was before me.'") And from his fulness have we all received,
grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came
through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the
bosom of the Father, he has made him known.
Here
is a brief reflection from Archbishop William Temple (1881-1944):
The
Word became flesh.
The Word did not merely indwell a human being. Absolute identity is asserted.
The Word is Jesus; Jesus is the Word. And it is said that the Word became flesh because “flesh is that part of
human nature commonly associated with frailty and evil; commonly, but not
necessarily. In Jesus the flesh is the completely responsive vehicle of the
spirit. The whole of Him, flesh included, is the Word, the self-utterance of
God.
I grew up on a farm in northern Indiana, taught high school in a city school in California, and am now an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Chicago. Mysterious ways indeed.
Justin Martyr, the 2nd century theologian, wrote this in his defense of the Christian Church:
We who ourselves used to have pleasure in impure things now cling to chastity alone. We who dabbled in arts of magic now consecrate ourselves to the good and unbegotten God. We who formerly treasured money and possessions more than anything else now hand everything over to the treasury for all, and share it with everyone who needs. We who formerly cheated and murdered one another and did not even share our home with those who were different or from a different tribe, because of their customs, now, after Christ's appearance, live together and share the same table. Now we pray for our enemies and try to win who hate us unjustly so that they too may live in accordance with Christ's wonderful teachings, that they too might enter into the expectation.
I like the whole passage and its vision of the Church. But, I am particularly fond of the expression of Christian faith and hope as "entering into the expectation". Thus, in 1 Peter 3:15, Christians are encouraged to "always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the expectation that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence." One way or another, that is what I want to do.
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