Month: January 2007

Your light has come, Nations shall come to your light… Lift up your eyes and look around; they all gather together, they come to you.

This is Isaiah 60. God’s coming to man represents the re-gathering of Israel, and with them all the lost, forgotten, abandoned of the world. Christ is the light and the star that guides these foreign kings into Israel, that very lowly nation, and lower, to this town, and lower still, to the cowshed out back, where the lowest of the low huddle. This is because

The LORD has remembered His mercy and His faithfulness to the house of Israel.

and because

All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.

God has remembered all Israel, and all the utterly forgotten – this is Psalm 98, which we just sang.

This was well trailed by Advent – remember, the king is coming, but for us it is not clear whether this good news or a warning. Are we with the magi, these foreign kings who come to cast their crowns before this unprepossessing, almost unnoticed unit of humanity?

Or are we with Herod? ‘Bring back word to me, that I may come and worship Him, or patronise and co-opt him, or sneer, deride and perhaps crush those who put their hopes in him…’

At Christmas it turns out that the arrival of the king is the birth of this child. The king seems to have put himself in no position to help us. He appears as just another little voice among the many voices in Israel and the world that have to cry for what they want. The king has replied to the complainants by becoming just another petitioner, who prays to us for justice. God help us if we do not hear them. We must become petitioners too – who pray to God, for ourselves but even more from those who petition God against us. For

he has exalted the lowly – the rich He has sent away empty.

We are Mary’s people of course, we have just sung her song, the Magnificat, and this is Mary’s time of year. Her line is

Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word.

Maybe it is easier to understand Mary by comparing her with Abraham, who having heard God, listened out for him again and again, to find out what it was that God was promising. Abraham made no demands about delivery dates, apparently content to see what would unfold in its own time. He listens, waits and so represents all the people of the Old Testament, the named and the unnamed, all to way up to Mary. It was for us that they heard God, suffered and waited, and this makes them little intimations of Christ.

For Christ has listened to the Father, and heard him. And he has heard the cries of every last human being. And he now enables us to hear God, and to hear these cries too, and to hear one another as the creatures of God.

Now Epiphany, the slow week by week revelation of this gift who is the future of all humanity – this boy who is circumcised, bar mitzvah-ed and baptised. The gospel for this evensong is the wedding of Cana, which also appears in our morning eucharist in two Sunday’s time. Mary’s line at Cana, to the servants, is

Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.

He said to them,

Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine…

Now about this wine. Christ is this wine. He is wine and he has made himself water for us. The water is our humanity, in its present not entirely functional state. Of course it is only when this act is deliberately reversed, water into wine, that we notice it. But it reveals the miracle in which God becomes man, and it points towards the coming miracle in which we become humans with God.

Christ is humanity. He is the truth of us. God has defined human as being in relation, through Christ, with all other humans. So we are human to the extent that we admit all others and concede them the status as ourselves, and so are with them. On this definition Christ is the real future humanity.

Call me Herod. Left to myself I would fight this to the end. I resist being credited with only the same status as everyone else. I want to be king, and I will grant you only the status I have to concede in order that I can remain king, exclusively. But there is no way to say Yes to Christ without this being a Yes to anyone, everyone, he brings with him. Christ warns us that if we open the gate just a crack to let him in, he will bring in John, Judith, Jeremy and Jonathan, and not only those we like but those we don’t, uncle Tom Cobbley and all, stomping past our fortifications and into our well-defended courtyard.

Christ is the full measure of humankind, not as it is now, but as it will be, stretched open to the uttermost. But he does not will to be human without us. He does not consider himself to be entirely himself without us, all of us, the arrogant and smug, and the meek and broken together.

The project of God is to make human beings – that is, those freely able to hear one another without limit, to speak back to God, and thank him for one another. Week by week, in a huge gamble God, is attaching his name and reputation to us. He makes us human, or rather he invites and he enables to become human – by being with him. By the long slow process of sanctification we are being turned into humans on this definition, no longer in-turned, defending ourselves against the world and dictating terms to it, but able to receive every other human creature as the kindness of God to us, and so to take them for our own.

By the weekly addition of the wine of Christ, humanity-with-God, we are being turned from water into wine. This water has no other purpose than that it become wine, but holiness has to be added to us, externally, week by week, by eucharistic dosing. The Holy Spirit adds himself to virgin humanity, drop by drop. So each week one of the servants draws some wine out and brings it to us, as though we were chief steward. Shall we send tell him this water tastes funny, or that it is not what we ordered? Or shall we say that we can definitely taste the wine in this water? Shall we catch on, and get him and all the servants of God to bring us more, because we know that each ladleful will be more wine than the last?

When the wine becomes perceptible we are getting a foretaste of the future, and of our own future reality, when humanity is joined with God, the mortal with the eternal. Then each of us will be joined to all others – and so we will be human at last. So the birth of Jesus is the beginning, of the beginning, of the whole human race. Let us attach our name and reputation to Christ, and declare publicly, hearts in mouth, that we are his holy-people-in-process. There is nothing for it but to become this holy, catholic people. Let us join Christ in hearing God, and saying Amen, Come Lord Jesus.

One of the great things about my church is that they don’t ever let lay people preach in the main Sunday morning eucharist. One or two lay people are allowed to conduct the very much smaller Evensong, which is from the Book of Common Prayer. You lead the service, sing a couple of bits (O Lord, open thou our lips – And our mouths shall shew forth thy praise), read the collects, then provide intercessions and a sermon.

It is my turn this Sunday, so I am having to get to grips with Epiphany. So I have been wondering about the odd transitions – lurches back and forth – between the Magi, the wedding at Cana, the presentation of Jesus in the temple and baptism which appear in the readings for different services between Christmas and Epiphany in the Revised Common Lectionary (The Anglican version of the RCL is only sometimes the same as the RCL for the rest of you).

So, Epiphany.

I have taken a look at the wonderful Dennis Bratcher on Epiphany

In traditional Christian churches Christmas, as well as Easter, is celebrated as a period of time, a season of the church year, rather than just a day. The Season of Christmas begins with the First Sunday of Advent, marked by expectation and anticipation, and concludes with Epiphany, which looks ahead to the mission of the church to the world in light of the Nativity.

I have read the splendid Ken Collins on Epiphany

There was a common belief, which ancient Christians inherited, that the prophets of Israel died on the on the same date as their birth or conception. According to ancient western calculations, Jesus was crucified on 25 March, so they assumed that 25 March was the date of Jesus’ conception. The Annunciation is still commemorated on that date to this day. Nine months after 25 March leads to 25 December, which would be the birthday of Jesus Christ if all those assumptions and calculations were correct. They aren’t correct, but the fact remains that the date has a Christian origin.

Meanwhile, back in the east, Christians calculated the date of the crucifixion independently and came up with 6 April. Nine months after April 6 is January 6. So the birth of Christ was celebrated on that day.

Christmas spread to the east and Epiphany spread to the west and the two days became differentiated. Today, Christmas is the celebration of the Nativy and the Epiphany is the celebration of Jesus’ ministry to the Gentiles.

The purpose of the liturgical calendar is to relive the major events in Jesus’ life in real time. If Jesus were born on 25 December, then He would have been circumcised and given His name on 1 January, the eighth day of His life on earth. Therefore, 1 January is known in the historic church as The Circumcision of Our Lord (See Luke 2:21 and Leviticus 12:3.)

Of course I have looked back to see what Benedict (no epithet required) said at Epiphany last year

The light that shone in the night at Christmas illuminating the Bethlehem Grotto, where Mary, Joseph and the shepherds remained in silent adoration, shines out today and is manifested to all. The Epiphany is a mystery of light, symbolically suggested by the star that guided the Magi on their journey. The true source of light, however, the “sun that rises from on high” (cf. Lk 1: 78), is Christ.

In the mystery of Christmas, Christ’s light shines on the earth, spreading, as it were, in concentric circles. First of all, it shines on the Holy Family of Nazareth: the Virgin Mary and Joseph are illuminated by the divine presence of the Infant Jesus. The light of the Redeemer is then manifested to the shepherds of Bethlehem, who, informed by an Angel, hasten immediately to the grotto and find there the “sign” that had been foretold to them: the Child, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger (cf. Lk 2: 12).

The shepherds, together with Mary and Joseph, represent that “remnant of Israel”, the poor, the anawim, to whom the Good News was proclaimed.

Finally, Christ’s brightness shines out, reaching the Magi who are the first-fruits of the pagan peoples…

In the mystery of the Epiphany, therefore, alongside an expanding outward movement, a movement of attraction toward the centre is expressed which brings to completion the movement already written in the Old Covenant. The source of this dynamism is God, One in Three Persons, who draws all things and all people to himself. The Incarnate Person of the Word is presented in this way as the beginning of universal reconciliation and recapitulation (cf. Eph 1: 9-10).

He is the ultimate destination of history, the point of arrival of an “exodus”, of a providential journey of redemption that culminates in his death and Resurrection. Therefore, on the Solemnity of the Epiphany, the liturgy foresees the so-called “Announcement of Easter”: indeed, the liturgical year sums up the entire parable of the history of salvation, whose centre is “the Triduum of the Crucified Lord, buried and risen”.

In the liturgy of the Christmas season this verse of Psalm 98 frequently recurs as a refrain: “The Lord has made his salvation known: in the sight of the nations he has revealed his justice”.

But I might just lift Kim Fabricius’ list of Ten Propositions on Worship, from Ben Myers’ Faith and Theology.

1. Why worship God? Because God is to be worshipped. Worship is a holy tautology.

2. Does worship make God present? No, worship presupposes God’s presence.

3. Is worship necessary? Not for God it isn’t. God does not need our worship – because God is worship, the perichoretic adoration of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Worship is, however, necessary for us, for it is only as homo adorans, participating in the very life of the Holy Trinity, that we become truly human.

Not bad, not bad at all.

Now you see why we Anglicans don’t try to improvise. We collect the best of what the whole church offers and simply read it out in public.

We are meeting just before Christmas, which is the feast of gifts, as I recalled last Sunday when I visited the new Roman parish dedicated to Our Lady Star of Evangelization. Christmas gifts evoke the gift par excellence which the Son of God made of himself and offered to us in the Incarnation.

For this reason, Christmas is appropriately emphasized by the many gifts that people give to one another in these days. But it is important that the principal Gift of which all other gifts are a symbol not be forgotten. Christmas is the day on which God gave himself to humanity, and in the Eucharist this gift of his becomes, so to speak, perfect.

Under the appearance of a little piece of bread, as I said to the children of the above-mentioned Roman parish who are preparing for First Communion and Confirmation, it is really Jesus who gives himself and wishes to enter our hearts.

Dear young people, this year you are reflecting precisely on the theme of the Eucharist, as you follow the spiritual and pastoral programme prepared by the Diocese of Rome.

The Eucharistic mystery is the privileged point of convergence between the various contexts of Christian life, including that of intellectual research.

Encountered in the liturgy and contemplated in adoration, Jesus in the Eucharist is like a “prism” through which one can penetrate further into reality, in the ascetic and mystical, the intellectual and speculative, as well as the historical and moral perspectives.

In the Eucharist, Christ is really present and Holy Mass is a living memorial of his Pasch. The Blessed Sacrament is the qualitative centre of the cosmos and of history. Therefore, it constitutes an inexhaustible source of thought and action for anyone who sets out to seek the truth and desires to cooperate with it.

It is, so to speak, a “concentrate” of truth and love. It not only illumines human knowledge, but also and above all human action and human life, in accordance with “the truth in love” (Eph 4: 15), as St Paul said, in the daily task of acting as Jesus himself did.

Thus, the Eucharist fosters in those who nourish themselves on it with perseverance and faith a fruitful unity between contemplation and action.

Dear friends, let us enter into the mystery of Christmas, now approaching, through the “door” of the Eucharist; in the grotto of Bethlehem let us adore the Lord himself who, in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, desired to make himself our spiritual food to transform the world from within, starting with the human heart.

Pope Benedict To the teachers and students of Roman universities

We have just heard in the Gospel the message given by the angels to the shepherds during that Holy Night, a message which the Church now proclaims to us: “To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” (Lk 2:11-12).

God’s sign is simplicity. God’s sign is the baby. God’s sign is that he makes himself small for us. This is how he reigns. He does not come with power and outward splendour. He comes as a baby – defenceless and in need of our help. He does not want to overwhelm us with his strength. He takes away our fear of his greatness. He asks for our love: so he makes himself a child. He wants nothing other from us than our love, through which we spontaneously learn to enter into his feelings, his thoughts and his will – we learn to live with him and to practise with him that humility of renunciation that belongs to the very essence of love. God made himself small so that we could understand him, welcome him, and love him. The Fathers of the Church, in their Greek translation of the Old Testament, found a passage from the prophet Isaiah that Paul also quotes in order to show how God’s new ways had already been foretold in the Old Testament. There we read: “God made his Word short, he abbreviated it” (Is 10:23; Rom 9:28). The Fathers interpreted this in two ways. The Son himself is the Word, the Logos; the eternal Word became small – small enough to fit into a manger. He became a child, so that the Word could be grasped by us…

Yet now further questions arise: how are we to love God with all our mind, when our intellect can barely reach him? How are we to love him with all our heart and soul, when our heart can only catch a glimpse of him from afar, when there are so many contradictions in the world that would hide his face from us? This is where the two ways in which God has “abbreviated” his Word come together. He is no longer distant. He is no longer unknown. He is no longer beyond the reach of our heart. He has become a child for us, and in so doing he has dispelled all doubt. He has become our neighbour, restoring in this way the image of man, whom we often find so hard to love. For us, God has become a gift. He has given himself. He has entered time for us. He who is the Eternal One, above time, he has assumed our time and raised it to himself on high. Christmas has become the Feast of gifts in imitation of God who has given himself to us. Let us allow our heart, our soul and our mind to be touched by this fact! Among the many gifts that we buy and receive, let us not forget the true gift: to give each other something of ourselves, to give each other something of our time, to open our time to God. In this way anxiety disappears, joy is born, and the feast is created…

And so, finally, we find yet a third meaning in the saying that the Word became “brief” and “small”. The shepherds were told that they would find the child in a manger for animals, who were the rightful occupants of the stable. Reading Isaiah (1:3), the Fathers concluded that beside the manger of Bethlehem there stood an ox and an ass. At the same time they interpreted the text as symbolizing the Jews and the pagans – and thus all humanity – who each in their own way have need of a Saviour: the God who became a child. Man, in order to live, needs bread, the fruit of the earth and of his labour. But he does not live by bread alone. He needs nourishment for his soul: he needs meaning that can fill his life. Thus, for the Fathers, the manger of the animals became the symbol of the altar, on which lies the Bread which is Christ himself: the true food for our hearts. Once again we see how he became small: in the humble appearance of the host, in a small piece of bread, he gives us himself.

All this is conveyed by the sign that was given to the shepherds and is given also to us: the child born for us, the child in whom God became small for us.

Pope Benedict XVI Christmas Eve