JESUS - THE BEST GIFT OF ALL
by Bishop David Chislett SSC
During the season of Advent we look forward with excitement to the night when the angels sang, the night when the shepherds stumbled through the darkness to behold the Word made Flesh, Jesus, lying in the animals' feeding trough, the night when we, too, will go down to Bethlehem to behold him, worship and adore him . . .
'the King of Angels and Lord of heaven and earth who in marvellous humility and astounding poverty lies in a manger' (S. Clare of Assisi).
"But" as Luigi Santucci wrote,
"Bethlehem is a long way off; a forest of centuries stands between our births and his. The shepherds were lucky - they only needed to cross a hillside, perhaps a river-bed, a quarter-of-an-hour's walk or so. Whereas we have to leap over history, a journey lasting nearly two thousand years, a pilgrimage through the ashes of the ages". (In Wrestling With Christ)
Sometimes we don't quite make it. We remain trapped in the tinsel, artificiality and affluence of what has come to be called merely "the festive season", and we miss out on seeing the real Jesus - the only Jesus there is! - God lying in the manger with the flies buzzing around, the dung and stench of the cave where the animals were kept, and, of course, a Mother's love. There he lies, not in a king's palace, though that would be fitting, but in the bleak poverty only too familiar to most people who have ever lived.
IT REALLY HAPPENED
In his book, Jesus - Who he is and How we Know Him, Eric Mascall, the great 20th century Anglican theologian, describes these lines from a well-known Christmas hymn as the most profound theological statement in the English language:
"The Word in the bliss of the Godhead remains,
yet in flesh comes to suffer the keenest of pains;
he is that he was and for ever shall be,
but becomes that he was not, for you and for me".
(H. R. Bramley [1833-1917])
This is a startling affirmation of that key Gospel text:
"The Word became Flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).
As it has been for Christians down through the centuries, our breath is taken away by the concreteness of God's coming. This is no pseudo-mystical affair - something that just happens "spiritually". Nor is it a quaint story made up by the early Christians to communicate the impact made on them by the "man" Jesus, - a story that "today's thinking people" can safely discard as secondary to Christianity!
This is actually God enveloped in the grit and grime of human history - REAL history, the real world in which you and I live.
Understandably those re-ductionist theologians who accept by faith an antisupernaturalistic world view take great offence at orthodox Christians when we affirm that Jesus is actually "God in the flesh"; in other words, when we allow the historical evidence to propel us to the conviction that the "Jesus of history" is, in fact, the "Christ of faith".
CONCRETENESS OF THE INCARNATION
Mascall deals with that kind of thinking in The Secularisation of Christianity:
"Enough has . . . been said to show that the impoverished secularized versions of Christianity which are being urged upon us for our acceptance today rest not upon a serious application of the methods of scientific scholarship nor upon a serious intuitive appreciation of the Gospels as a whole in their natural context, but upon a radical distaste for the supernatural."
In the same work, Mascall replies to those who underplay the Virgin Birth:
" . . . whatever aspects of the Incarnation outstrip the descriptive power of ordinary language, this at least is plainly statable in it. It means that Jesus was conceived in his mother's womb without previous sexual intercourse on her part with any male human being, and this is a straightforward statement which is either true or false. To say that the birth . . . of Jesus Christ cannot simply be thought of as a biological event, and to add that this is [not] what the Virgin Birth means, is a plain misuse of language; and no amount of talk about the appealing character of the "Christmas myth" can validly gloss this over."
In contrast to the "spiritualisers", the New Testament is at pains to emphasis the concreteness of the Incarnation:
"Something that has existed from the beginning,
that we have heard,
and that we have seen with our own eyes;
that we have watched
and touched with our own hands:
the Word, who is life - this is our subject.
That life was made visible:
we saw it and we are giving our testimony,
telling you of the eternal life
which was with the Father
and has been made visible to us."
(1 John 1:1-2)
This "enfleshing" of the eternal Son was necessary in order to effect a re-integration of all that had been fractured through our rebellion against the Father's love. The Bible's "prologue" - the first eleven chapters of Genesis - paints a convincing picture of the human condition, and sets the scene for the long process of salvation history that culminates in Jesus.
In fact, it tells us what we already know - that we are alienated from God, from each other, and even from the created order. Our attempts to cross these divides produced religious systems which themselves often increased the sense of dreadful alienation, emphasising the 'apartness' of God and man, spirit and matter, heaven and earth, the natural and the supernatural.
But "in the fulness of time" (Galatians 4:7) God was "enfleshed" into his creation, a real human being, so that "in him might be reconciled all things whether in heaven or on earth, by the blood of his cross" (Colossians 1:20). In Jesus, God and man, spirit and matter, the natural and the supernatural, the secular and the sacred, heaven and earth, are joined in a union that cannot be broken.
DEIFICATION OF HUMAN NATURE
The teachers of the early Church loved to dwell theologically and poetically on this theme. St Ambrose, the great Bishop of Milan from 374 to 397, wrote:
" He is little and weak, that you may be great and strong;
He is bound in swaddling clothes, that you may be unbound from the fetters of death;
He is on earth, that you may be in heaven."
St Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria from 328 to his death in 373, who suffered many years of exile for his determination to guard the truth about Jesus, said that:
"The Word was made man in order that we might be made divine."
and
". . . he deified what he put on; and more than that,
he bestowed this gift on the race of men."
This echoes St Paul's remark to the Corinthians:
"For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich". (2 Corinthians 8:9)
THE IMMORTAL DIES
Two Christmases ago I was taking a photograph of the Crib at All Saints'. Moving around, trying to get a good angle and the right lighting, I stood near the outside aisle on the gospel side of the church. In a split second I was overwhelmed by what I saw through the gentle, prayerful gloom: Mary, Joseph, Jesus and the shepherds, with the spot-lit pulpit crucifix appearing to "hover", dominating the scene, and, not too far off in the background, the High Altar with the the Tabernacle also bathed in light. Bethlehem, Calvary, and the Blessed Sacrament of his Presence!
I just stood there, transfixed, and these verses of Charles Wesley's hymn, "And can it be" came to mind:
"'Tis mystery all: th'Immortal dies:
Who can explore His strange design?
In vain the firstborn seraph tries
To sound the depths of love divine.
'Tis mercy all! Let earth adore,
Let angel minds inquire no more.
"He left His Father's throne above
So free, so infinite His grace -
Emptied Himself of all but love,
And bled for Adam's helpless race:
'Tis mercy all, immense and free,
For O my God, it found out me!
The Word became what we are in order to transform us into all that he is. And, according to S. Paul, the early Fathers and Charles Wesley, the DEATH of God-in-the-flesh is a crucial part of the process.
St Leo the Great, who was Pope from 440 until his death in 461, has left us some powerful teaching on what God achieved in the Incarnation. In fact, he shows how the "wonderful exchange" effected on Calvary is the link between Incarnation and Redemption:
". . . the great mystery of the Incarnation is that true man is in the God whom no suffering can touch, and true God in the human flesh that is subject to pain and sorrow. By this wonderful exchange man gains glory through shame, immortality through chastisement, life through death. For unless the Word of God were so firmly joined to our flesh that the two natures could not be parted even in death, we mortals would never be able to return to life. But when the Lord became man and died for our sake, death lost its everlasting hold over us; through the nature that was undying in Jesus Christ, the nature that was mortal was raised to life."
MATTER MATTERS
At Christmass we need to proclaim loud and clear that the body of Jesus, taken from that of the Blessed Virgin Mary, belongs to the created order - the physical world of matter and things - that which God said was "good" at the original creation. Such a proclamation is an antidote to the many religious traditions that recognise the existence of unseen realities (the "spiritual world", if you like) alongside the physical dimension of being, but which regard the material universe, the visible things of creation either as "evil" and to be avoided, or temporary necessities to be transcended.
In these traditions, the created universe is erroneously seen as 'a mine-field through which we must pick our way with anxious care, never pausing to gaze about and enjoy ourselves lest we stumble upon some explosive evil' (Holloway). Whole cultures and religions (including perversions of Christianity) have been built on this perspective.
Coming to us in real flesh, in a body made up of the stuff, the cells, atoms and molecules of the physical universe, God shows us that we can never again think like that.
In fact, in his book "In the Fullness of Faith" the Swiss theologian, Hans Urs Von Balthasar says:
"In Jesus Christ, God has engraved his name upon matter; he has inscribed it so deeply that it cannot be erased, for matter took him into its innermost self."
SALVATION
You and I are being saved, yes, but not away from and out of the created order. Our salvation is part of the salvation and renewal of creation itself, which will one day be completely freed from its bondage to decay, and enjoy "the liberty of the children of God" (Romans 8:22-23). God's will is for ALL THINGS to be reconciled and renewed in Christ.
With the "enfleshing" of God that first Christmas, the redemption of creation has begun. For, mysteriously, in heaven, Jesus is still part of the created order; by way of his cross and resurrection he took the glorified materiality of his earthly body into heaven as the first-fruits of the glorification of you and me and of the whole of creation.
"He has put all things under his feet, and has made him, as the ruler of all things, the head of the Church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills the whole creation". (Ephesians 1:22-23)
Everything, though, does not yet appear to be experiencing redemption. With the theologians we have to say that God's new world is "now, but not yet"; it is "here, and still coming"; Jesus is present in the folds of history, and he will come again in glory. The incarnation has happened, yet the liberating redemption is still coming to pass. And:
"The whole creation is eagerly waiting for God to reveal his sons . . . the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay . . ." (Romans 8:19-21)
We who have this great vision are "at home" in this world. Hence the catholic tradition of enjoyment often missing from traditions that play down the incarnation.
Hence also the catholic instinct to care deeply about the mindless destruction of the environment, the smash-and-grab attitude of our culture towards the earth's resources, the pillaging of our national heritage, and the pollution that fills the rivers, lakes and air - the consequence of our insatiable lust for higher and ever more luxurious standards of living.
Hence our compulsion to try and address the social injustices experienced daily by the vast majority of the world's population.
RESPONDING TO HIS LOVE
At Christmas we are faced with the intrusion of the Word made Flesh into the real world to redeem us, to heal us, to save us, and to set us free. Jesus himself said in John 10:10,
"I have come that you might have life, life in all its fulness".
The challenge for us is to ask ourselves whether or not we have become so hum-drum in our faith that we no longer expect to receive anything from God.
Maybe the condition of our world with the renewed threat of terrorism and war, as well as the personal sorrows and tragedies we bear, has caused us to doubt God's love and to rely just on our own strength to get through. No wonder we are stressed! No wonder we feel overwhelmed by it all.
Let's go back to Bethlehem this Christmass . . .
. . . down to that littleness, down to all that
Crying and hunger, all that tiny flesh
And flickering spirit - down the great stars fall,
Here the huge kings bow.
Here the farmer sees his fragile lambs,
Here the wise man throws his books away.
This manger is the universe's cradle,
This singing mother has the words of truth.
Here the ox and ass and sparrow stop,
Here the hopeless man breaks into trust.
God, you have made a victory for the lost.
Give us this daily Bread, this little Host.
(Elizabeth Jennings)
This Christmas let's find time to ponder the connection between the Crib and the Cross and the Blessed Sacrament. Let's open our hearts and minds to Jesus, rededicating ourselves to him in love, receiving forgiveness for our sins, healing for our souls and the grace to follow him into the New Year loaded up with blessings for those around us.
Published in ALL SAINTS' GAZETTE, December 2001 |
