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An Icon of Grace: The Baptism of Our Lord

Today we observe the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, and so on the last day of the Christmas Season we celebrate the first event in the Public Ministry of Jesus.

  All four Gospels tell of John’s baptism of Jesus, but all present a slightly different view.  Mark’s account is the sparest, except that he gives us the most vivid picture of the Baptist himself: "Now John was clothed with camel's hair, and had a leather girdle around his waist, and ate locusts and wild honey" (Mark 1:6).  Luke's account starts with the people "filled with expectation", eagerly anticipating the Messiah, whom they take John to be.  John’s Gospel recounts John the Baptist hailing Jesus with the title "Lamb of God".  They all tell of John’s recognition of himself as a merely the forerunner to Jesus, to whom he is inferior, but only Matthew records his reluctance to baptize the Lord:

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him.  John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”  But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. (Matthew 3:13-15)

John knows that Jesus, being sinless, requires no Baptism, but Jesus seeks it out in order to show his commitment to being one of us, and to demonstrate to us the path which we should follow.  In this account we see Jesus acting out what St. Paul tells the Phillipians:

. . . though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. (Phillipians 2:6-7)

    In all the Gospels, we see the Holy Spirit descend upon Jesus and the voice of the Father proclaim him to be the beloved Son in whom the Father is well pleased.  And so Christ’s Public Ministry begins with an icon of all three Persons of the Trinity working together, and an image of Grace in action.  This scene sums up the meaning of the Nativity we have just celebrated, and tells us something about the agenda for the ministry that is begun.

    As always, there is more, which we see with particular emphasis in Matthew’s Gospel.  We are reminded that it is all Grace, a word for which the Latin root gratia means not just favor, but favor freely bestowed (hence related English words “gratuity” and “gratis”); Grace is completely, absolutely, free. God needs nothing, nothing is necessary for Him: He does it all for us, He gives us a share in His own life, as a completely unnecessary gift . . . simply because He loves us.

12th Day of Christmas: The Spirit Lives On

 Merry Christmas, for the Twelfth time this Christmas Season!

    Today is the 12th Day since Christmas Day. The formal liturgical Christmas Season will go on until the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord on Sunday the 10th, which brings us back to Ordinary Time (for a more extensive discussion of the Liturgical Calendar and Christmas, go HERE).  Some of us, however, will stubbornly keep the decorations up until the Feast of the Presentation on February 2nd . . . and shouldn't all of us carry at least a little Christmas Joy with us throughout the year?

    In that spirit (so to speak), I’d the like to quote the Spirit of Christmas Present from the 1951 film version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (a speech not found, alas, in Dickens' book itself):

We spirits of Christmas do not live

only one day of our year.

We live the whole 365.

So is it true of the child

born in Bethlehem.

He does not live in men's hearts only

one day of the year,

but in all the days of the year.

    And so I think it’s apt, one more time, to hear one of my favorite Christmas songs, “O Holy Night”. This lovely rendition is by the Irish group Affiniti:

11th Day of Christmas: I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day

 Merry Christmas!  This is the Eleventh Day of Christmas, with still more Christmas to come.  

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1868

Today I’d like to take a look at a particularly moving Christmas song. There's a story behind the creation of every song, and sometimes knowing the story can make the song all the more meaningful.  This is one of my favorites. 

The story begins on Christmas Day, 1863, when the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem called “Christmas Bells”.

Wadsworth starts his poem with church bells ringing out the joy of Christmas:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
and wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Henry, Charles, Ernest, and Frances Longfellow

The poet, however, was not filled with unmixed good cheer.  His wife had recently died a tragic death in a house fire, and he had just received news that his son Charles, who had left without his knowledge or consent to fight in the bitter Civil War that was then embroiling the United States, had been wounded in battle.  Longfellow, himself struggling with sorrow in the midst of our most festive season,  juxtaposes the joyful ringing of bells in “The belfries of all Christendom” with the manifest lack of peace among men:

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

These images of war and shattered homes seem to give the lie to the joyful promise of the Christmas Bells:

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Christ did not come, of course, simply to bring joy: he came to free us from the power of sin.  Our Faith is grounded in Christian Hope, which is the confidence that the Power of God is greater than the power of hate, and stronger than hate's master.  Longfellow's closing stanza resolves the conflict between Christmas joy and the sin and violence of this world with a ringing assertion of Christian Hope:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

"My Friend, The Enemy" by Mort Kunstler

Longfellow, who had very powerful incentives to turn to despair, instead created a poem that shows us that the joy of Christmas is not a denial of the brokenness of this world, but God's answer to it.
Longfellow’s poem has been put to music numerous times over the past century and a half (usually under the title, “I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day”); my favorite is Johnny Cash’s rendition.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a good video of Cash performing the song, so the clip below will have to do (good recording, no video).
One curious note: all the musical adaptations that I have found have left out Longfellow’s 4th and 5th stanzas, with their references to thundering cannon and forlorn households.  The version below also moves stanza 3 (“Till ringing, singing . . .”) behind Longfellow’s concluding stanza (“God is not dead . . .”), and then repeats the “God is not dead” stanza.  The effect is to de-emphasize the reasons for the speaker’s cry of despair, and give greater emphasis to the redemptive conclusion.  It seems to me that the change robs the song of some of it’s narrative coherence (why should the speaker “bow his head in despair” after hearing "peace on earth, good will to men"?), and, by replacing those concrete examples of suffering with the abstraction "hate", deprive it of much of its dramatic power.  I suppose the song-makers thought those images too heavy for a Christmas song, but in fact they are a stark reminder of why the coming of the Messiah is "Good tidings of great joy" (Luke 2:10).
For all that, the sense of Longfellow’s poem still comes through in the song: the joyful celebration of Christmas seems to be mocked by the all-too-evident evil in the world (and is there any one of us who is not, right now, directly aware of some reason for anger or sorrow?).  The conclusion reminds us that the Child lying in the wooden manger will one day hang upon a wooden cross, precisely so that he might carry us through those evils to the feet of His Father. When we learn about the real suffering that the author of those words was experiencing as he wrote them, we can experience the song, not as sentimentality or empty platitude, but as a true triumph of Christian Hope. Let the bells peal loud and deep!

10th Day of Christmas: Epiphany

 Happy Epiphany . . . and a Merry Christmas!

 

Epiphany, by Fernando Gallego

  Yes, it is still the Christmas Season: the season officially ends next Sunday with the celebration of the Baptism of the Lord.  Today we celebrate the Great Feast of Epiphany (this year we formally observe the feast a few days before its traditional date of January 6th). In the Western Church today Epiphany commemorates the visit of the Magi, whom we often call “The Three Kings”, Balthasar, Melchior, and Gaspar by name.  Scripture, however, neither crowns, nor numbers, nor names them, but simply describes them as “wise men from the East”.  The word Epiphany means “a manifestation” or “a revealing”.  In this context the name of the Feast refers to the fact that the gifts and adoration of the Magi make manifest that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God.  This ancient feast (which Christians were celebrating even before there was a formal observance of Christmas) has at times also been connected  to the Nativity, the Baptism of Jesus and other manifestations of his Divinity.

It is interesting how many epiphanies of “God With Us” can be found in Scripture, how many different ways he reveals himself: the examples above barely scratch the surface. And yet it’s still so hard for us to accept (a theme I touched on in yesterday's post as well). Mary and Joseph themselves, after visits from Angels, and even after what they knew full well was a Virgin Birth, “marveled at what was said about him (Luke 2:33)”  when they hear the old man Simeon prophesy over Jesus as he is presented in the Temple. A full dozen years later, they still seem to have a hard time taking it all in:

After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions; and all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. And when they saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, "Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously." And he said to them, "How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" And they did not understand the saying which he spoke to them.  (Luke 2:46-50)

   It is so difficult for all of us to grasp the reality of the Incarnation. Even the human parents of The Lord seem to struggle with it – and who could hope to have faith equal to theirs?  

    But even here, as always, the Blessed Mother is the model disciple: “His mother”, the Evangelist tells us, “kept all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51).  She doesn’t let her initial human reactions have the last word, but patiently waits for the meaning of all these events to become manifest.  One might even say that she demonstrates the classic definition of theology: faith seeking understanding.

"We Three Kings of Orient Are"

performed by the Robert Shaw Chorale

9th Day of Christmas: God's Ways Are Not Our Ways

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
     so are my ways higher than your ways
     and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

       Merry Ninth Day of Christmas!  We hear a lot of Isaiah through the seasons of Advent and Christmas, but this passage expresses with particular clarity one of the most striking and curious things about Christmas. Who would expect the Infinite, Almighty Deity to manifest himself as a tiny baby, born in a cattle stall with the beasts? Who would have thought that wise and exalted visitors would come to this baby from strange lands many miles away with their rich gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, as we will commemorate in tomorrow’s liturgical celebration of Epiphany? Ours is a God indeed whose thoughts are not our thoughts, whose ways are not our  ways: he constantly confounds our expectations. This is not the Grand Entrance any of us would have devised for God Made Manifest.

The Nativity by Jacopo Tintoretto

  Nor did the child grow up to be the sort of Messiah that people expected, not even his own disciples: he rebukes Peter, his chief Apostle, with “Get behind me, Satan!” (Matthew 16:23) because the man who will become the first Pope can’t accept that the Christ must suffer and die in order to save humanity.  And nobody at all was really expecting what happened on Easter Sunday.

  Of course, none of the above should have been a surprise: it was all foretold by the Prophets, as we saw over and over again in the Advent readings and prayers.  In other words, he’s a God of the unexpected mostly because we insist on setting ourselves up to be surprised. But that’s the way we imperfect, broken human beings are: we think we can simply force reality to be what we want it to be . . . but God usually has other plans. 

  We can glimpse something of this stubborn arrogance in the story of two of tomorrow’s Ssaints (who are graciously yielding their feast day to the celebration of Epiphany in many dioceses):

Zosimus and Athanasius (n.b. – he is not the more well-known Athanasius of Alexandria) d.303 + Martyrs in Cilicia (modern Turkey). They were executed during the persecutions of Emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305). According to one account, Zosimus was tortured and Athanasius, a witness, was so moved that he converted to the faith. Both were then tortured but survived and died in peace after being released. They became hermits. (from www.Catholic.org )

The Roman authorities thought that, if they were brutal enough, they would discourage people from embracing Christianity, but – surprise! – seeing the torture of Zosimus instead drew Athanasius to the Faith.  And his is not an isolated incident: “The blood of the martyrs”, wrote Tertullian, “is the seed of the Church.” Up to the present day, we see that Christianity is strongest when it is under attack.

  We would do well to remember these things when we contemplate the Child in the manger.  However bad, even disastrous, things may seem (and in a world insistently moving further away from God, well, what do you expect?), we should remember that the same child grows up to promise that the Gates of Hell will not prevail against his Church (Matthew 16:18).  

Prepare yourself to be surprised.

A beautiful version of Silent Night by the Winchester Cathedral Choir:

8th Day of Christmas: The Scandal of Mary, Mother of God

 

Bellini Jacopo, Virgin and Child

 Today, the Eighth Day of Christmas, is known out in The World as New Year’s Day; in the Church it is the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, the final day in the Octave of Christmas.  The secular observance celebrates no more than another turning of a calendar page, but in the Church we look at time with an eye on eternity: the Nativity of Christ turns around all of human history (which is why we eventually adopted the BC/AD arrangement of the centuries with its mirror-image numbering of years, placing the Nativity at the center of time).  Jesus’s mother, Mary, plays an essential part in that unique and astonishing event.

     We must start with the fact that Mary was fully human; as Charles Dickens says in the opening lines of A Christmas Carol, “This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”  Just as Marley’s death is an essential element in Dickens’ tale, the Incarnation’s meaning for mankind is directly connected to the Blessed Mother’s humanity, because if Christ isn’t born of a human woman, He’s not fully human himself, in which case how can He die and redeem humankind? Mary is the guarantor that Jesus, while He truly is God, is truly one of us as well.

Theotokos of the Life-Giving Spring

     Both truly God, and truly one of us . . . it’s hard for us to reconcile both of those things in our finite minds, but both must be true if Christianity is true.  At the same time, the title “Mother of God” is alarming: some people claim that it seems to say that a mortal woman has brought God into existence, but it doesn't really mean that at all: after all, we don’t think that ordinary mothers actually create their ordinary human babies, body and soul.  Mothers and Fathers are agents in a larger process, and the soul, of course, comes from God.  The original Greek term Theotokos, literally “God-bearer”, while a little less difficult, still challenges us. It tells us that, just as the original Arc of the Covenant carried Manna from Heaven, along with Tablets of the Decalogue and Aaron’s staff, Mary carried the Second Person of the Trinity in her womb, and so she is called the Arc of the New Covenant (see Revelation 11:19-12:1).

     But the first Arc was merely a container, it contributed nothing to its contents; even before anyone knew anything of genetics, however, it would have been obvious that, in some way, Jesus’s fleshly body owed something, at least, to his mother.  In his face, the color of his eyes, the shape of his nose, or some other physical feature, the familial relationship would be manifest. Through the Motherhood of Mary Jesus, that is to say God, takes on our humanity in an utterly tangible, direct and personal way.

     The Motherhood of Mary, like the Incarnation itself, is a mystery.  It is something that we can really understand (although never fully understand) only through experience.  As the last day in the Octave of Christmas, the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God it invites us to start looking not only at the Child lying in the manger, but to start looking further at what that Child means for us as men and women.

            O God,

            Who through the fruitful virginity 
                of Blessed Mary

            Bestowed on the Human race the grace of         
                eternal salvation,

            Grant, we pray, that we may experience the 
                 intercession of her,

            Through whom we were found worthy to 
                 receive the author of life,

            Our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son.

            Who lives and reigns with You in the unity of 
                  the Holy Spirit,

            One God, for ever and ever.

                        -Amen

"Gabriel's Message" performed by Christmas Choir: