Fifth Day in the Octave of Christmas - 29 December

Readings: 1 John 2:3-11; Psalm 96; Luke 2:22-35

In celebrating the birth of the Word as a man, we are celebrating a new kind of knowledge, a new light, a new understanding of human life that has come into the world with him. He is God's eternal wisdom.

But this is not just an intellectual change, a new piece of information, it is a new praxis, a new possibility for living, for this new light is a new life and a new love. In some ways, as the first reading from 1 John puts it, it is an old commandment, the original commandment, since the law given through Moses is already a revelation of this same wisdom. But in other ways this is a new commandment because of Christ's birth, since now, as 1 John puts it again, the true light is already shining.

It is not just that God gives us a new and more attractive example of good living, it is not just that God gives us a more compelling motive for good living. God has done a new deed, acted in a new way and thereby given himself to the world as never before, establishing in a moment of the world's history a new beginning and a new destination for humanity. The presentation of Jesus in the temple shows very clearly how this change comes about.

Everything is done in accordance with the law of the Lord, this is stressed more than once, but everything is done also by the prompting of the Spirit who rests on Simeon, reveals new things to Simeon and prompts him to come to the temple to meet God's new act, the salvation that will enlighten the pagans and the glory of Israel, a glory long promised to Israel but whose fulfilment is in a way nobody could ever have anticipated. So the Spirit manages the change from the old to the new, working in these good people, Elizabeth, Anna, Simeon and above all Mary, so the new commandment, that we can only be sure of understanding things truly if we love our brother, is planted in a soil well prepared by fidelity to the original commandment. The Word made flesh is, as Thomas Aquinas puts it, the Word that breathes love.

It is not just that love is the meaning of this Word, love is the power and the life of this Word, love is the reality of this Word. He is a Word that is only understood and only received where there is love and people are living the same kind of life as Christ lived. This new light, the Word of life, the Word breathing love, is destined to encounter opposition, difficulty and rejection.

All who follow Him must be ready for a struggle, but where they have received Him and given the Word a home, they can walk without fear of stumbling. These are people who have come to know Christ and so live as He did, they live in the light, their lives are established on the Word of life, they love their brothers and sisters. These are the people we call saints and it is in them that we see that knowing God and loving humanity are the same reality.

Feast of the Holy Family (Year A)

Readings: Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14: Psalm 128; Colossians 3:12-21; Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23

When we think of the family of Jesus we tend to think first and perhaps exclusively of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the trinity that makes up the Holy Family. This trinity is at the heart of the Christmas story and has often been proposed in the Church as the model for the Christian family. Today’s first reading from Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) seems consistent with this, and quite modern also in its emphasis on the nuclear family. Honour your father and your mother: it is a way of ensuring your wellbeing and will help you to earn a corresponding respect and affection from your own children.

The gospel reading however expands the vision and obliges us to think of the family of Jesus in much broader terms. We are taken, with the Holy Family, out of Bethlehem, even out of Palestine, in order to fulfill prophecies that speak of the Messiah’s relationships with Egypt and with Nazareth. Being called out of Egypt evokes the entire history of the exodus, the great deed done by the Lord, the God of Israel, in choosing a people to be his own people, in saving that people from slavery, and in establishing them in the land the Lord had chosen for them.

Jesus thus re-traces the journey of the Hebrew slaves. Like Moses and the other male children of the Hebrews, Jesus must be protected from the wicked designs of a despotic king who would kill this son of the Hebrews. Then returning across the same wilderness he re-enters the Promised Land and with his parents settles in some kind of relative peace and security in the north of the country, in Galilee, specifically in Nazareth.

He was to be called a Nazarene, one who comes from Nazareth. Or perhaps it is a reference to his consecration to God, as in the case of John the Baptist and Samson, who were ‘Nazirites’, men set apart as prophets and teachers of the people, dedicated from their infancy to a particular and peculiar service of the Lord and his people.

There is therefore this level of the fulfillment of prophecies in the early experiences of the Holy Family.  The dreaming of Joseph is another link with the early history of the people, and thus with the wider family to which Jesus belongs. Like his namesake in the Book of Genesis, Joseph is guided by God through dreams. He is the protector and guardian of the Virgin and the Child, a good and just man, docile to the promptings of the Holy Spirit that he receives in his dreams.  Behind Joseph we glimpse not just the shadow of his distant namesake but the presence of the Eternal Father guiding the first steps of his Son as the work of salvation begins to unfold.

So the family of Jesus is the people of Israel, the people chosen long ago in Abraham, Moses and David, so that through God’s work with that people all the nations of the earth might be blessed.

And so a final extension of the family of Jesus is indicated, one that includes all of humanity since he is to be the Saviour and Redeemer of all. The level of ‘secular history’ or of ordinary historical events operates as well, then, in determining these early experiences of the Holy Family.  There is the presence of tyrannical political power and the need to be prudent in relation to it. There is Joseph’s need for work and the practical reasons why Nazareth would have been an obvious place for a man of his skills to seek employment. The requirement of the census ensures that this family, probably from Galilee, finds itself in Bethlehem when the child is born. The Holy Family experienced migration and exile as so many families have experienced those things during the past year.

The family of Jesus is as extensive as the human race and so his work can only be ‘catholic’, all embracing and universal. At the same time he is not an idea or a theory about universal brotherhood. He belongs to particular people in a particular place at a particular time. This is what makes the Christian hope of universal brotherhood realistic. It springs from a root that is incarnate in the real history of humanity. It grows from a seed sown when this Child was buried in the earth. It is founded on a life flowing since this Nazarene, King of the Jews and Saviour of all people, was called out of Egypt, ‘Egypt’ which is now the kingdom of death. He is called from there in his resurrection from the dead and now leads his people, his family, into a kingdom of life, a heavenly Nazareth where we will be at home with Him, with Mary and Joseph, with the Eternal Father and the Holy Spirit, with all our brothers and sisters, in a communion of eternal life and infinite love. This is the family life of the Son of God and He came to ensure that we could be part of it.

St John the Evangelist - 27 December

Readings: 1 John 1:1-4; Psalm 97; John 20:1-8

The apostles are the witnesses on whose testimony the Church is built. As witnesses, they speak of what they have seen, heard, and touched. This is what qualifies a person to be a witness: they have experienced something immediately, they have personal knowledge of it, and so they can speak about it with authority. Not only have we seen the Word of life, says John in his first letter, we have touched him with our hands. And now we speak about him so that you might have fellowship with us in our knowledge of the Word and experience the joy that comes with that fellowship.

The claim of these witnesses is unique. They say that they have seen, heard and touched the Word of life. In their experiences with Jesus of Nazareth they have seen the eternal life that was with the Father and has now been made visible in the world. 'Come and see' is a Christmas invitation. The shepherds respond to it and so too do the Magi. So also do all of us who make our way to the Christmas crib to pray and to worship the Child who has been born, to gaze upon him in the simplicity and wonder of his birth.

'Come and see' is the invitation of Jesus to the first disciples. After their years of formation with him - listening to his teaching, learning from him how to pray, seeing the miraculous things that happened through him, seeing especially the glory of his death and the evidence of his resurrection - through all of this the disciples who saw, heard and touched him came to believe that they had seen, heard and touched the Word of life. They came to believe that they had seen the eternal life made visible in Jesus of Nazareth.

Unless I see and touch, said doubting Thomas, I will not believe. So he did see and he was invited to touch. We remain forever dependent on the testimony of these first witnesses. The Church is not only one, holy and catholic, it is also apostolic. It is not just a spiritual phenomenon but an embodied human community spread out across time so that our fellowship with the apostles is a physical one. The Irish poet Sean O'Riordain has on his tombstone the epitaph 'all I am is a part of the body that is my people'. We can apply this to our fellowship in the Church: 'all I am is a part of the body of Christ that is my people'. I belong in the same body as John and Peter, as Mary Magdalen and John the Baptist, as Mary his mother and Elisabeth, and all who saw, and heard, and touched the Word of life during the course of his earthly existence.

We need not be afraid of considering the evidence for the Catholic faith. Evidence and the testimony of reliable witnesses: these are our ways to knowing what is true. Even if that evidence and testimony does not bring everybody to faith, it brings many people to believe. And there is no other route for us except to see and hear and touch the body of Christ alive in the world. Of course the Spirit moves our hearts to realise the deeper meaning in what we are seeing and hearing and touching: Thomas sees the man but believes in his Lord and God.

At the level of sentiment and emotion we feel again the draw of the Christian faith as we listen to the scripture readings and sing the songs of Christmas. Would that it were true that the Prince of Peace has been born for us. Would that it were true that the Child we honour is the Saviour of the world. Would that it were true that all captivity and oppression, all darkness and imprisonment, are dissolved and enlightened by his coming. Would that it were true ....

The witness of the apostles is that it is true. What we have seen and heard, what we have touched with our hands, is the Word of life, the eternal life that was with the Father and is now made visible. Would that we could translate this faith more effectively and more powerfully into the way we live, into our relationships, into the structures of our communities, into our service of the poor. For others now must also see and hear, they must touch and experience, if they are to have any hope of coming to faith. We are to be the witnesses, to give testimony by our words and by our lives, to the fellowship and joy that come with our faith in Christ.

The Christmas liturgy does not dwell on the sentimental aspect of the baby's birth. We are straight down to business, with the feast of Stephen, one kind of witness, and the feast of John, another kind of witness. May our faith grow strong through our celebration of Christmas this year so that we might, in the year to come, be more effective and more powerful instruments of Christ in the world. May we, by our words and the testimony of our lives, welcome those who wish to share our fellowship, attract those who wish to understand our joy, introduce to Christ those who hunger and thirst for the Word of life.

St Stephen -- 26 December

Readings: Acts 6:8-10, 7:54-59; Psalm 31; Matthew 10:17-22

 In The Stolen Child, one of the early poems of W.B.Yeats, we find the following refrain:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

It is a sinister poem, beautiful and evocative. It is about the seductiveness of the mystical and the draw of the preternatural. The angelic, the philosophical, any natural religion: these things are powerful and attractive. As a young man Yeats himself was very involved in esoteric, pseudo-mystical, spiritualism. The human child stolen by the fairies, seduced into their world, will live forever but it will not be a human life. The price he must pay is to give up all properly human experience of the world. No more will he enjoy sensual pleasures in the way human beings do. Nor will he suffer in the way human beings do. Leaving ordinary pain, sorrow and desolation, in pursuit of excitement, distraction and company, he finds himself rather in a twilight world, disembodied, free from the bind of time and space, but empty, drifting, pointless. The world loses its colours and its smells, its taste, and feel, and sounds.

The commercialisation of Christmas is so vulgar and explicit that it poses no serious threat to the real meaning of the Christian feast. It is clearly not it. More dangerous is the sentimentalisation of Christmas, turning it into something sweet and emotional that can be mistaken for the real thing. Is this not what it is about, the birth of a baby in the darkness of winter? Ahh! Yes, provided we say a lot more about the baby and the darkness he has come to scatter. The celebration of St Stephen's martyrdom hot on the heels of Christmas saves us from too much sentimentality.

The Infant Christ is born into this real world with its troubles and anxieties, its weeping and fighting, its depressions and disappointments and betrayals, with its talk of wars and its aggression, with its forgetfulness of God and of the poor, with its worship of idols and its peddling of myths. Come away, human children, to the waters and the wild, with the fairies, hand in hand. There is too much weeping, too much sorrow, too much pain. Is this not what religion is supposed to be about, comfort in sorrow, consolation in distress, security for the psychologically needy? The great escape.

Jesus prepares his disciples for situations where they will be hated by all. Stephen is faced with people infuriated and grinding their teeth. Those who seek to be faithful to Jesus and to his teaching will be handed over to courts, scourged in synagogues, dragged before governments and rulers. They will be courted and dismissed, rejected and disliked, played with and feared. In such circumstances it is tempting to translate the whole thing into something 'spiritual', perhaps even 'mystical'. Not political, or physical, or historical. Nice, elevated, stepping back from murky stuff, rather than ugly, immersed, and involved in the nitty-gritty. People criticise the Church for being too detached from the 'real' world and they criticise it for being too involved in the 'real' world. It needs to be more relevant. It needs to keep its nose out of things.

The death of Stephen, hot on the heels of Christmas, saves us from the faery worlds of sentimentality, fake spirituality, and pseudo-mysticism. The Prince of Peace has been born into a world that is forever at war. His presence shifts the terms of that war onto another plane for he has come with a sword, bringing fire. The fire is the Spirit possessing the human child and leading him, not away to fairyland, but deeper into the human world, further into its complexities and distress, to the bottom of the cup drained by the Son of Man, the place of bitterness and tears, the place of love and of the fulness of human life. For the Spirit is the Spirit of truth and so of life, justice and dignity.

You will find here another homily for today's feast.

Christmas - Mass during the Day

Day Mass - Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98; Hebrews 1:1-6; John 1:1-18

These are among the most beautiful readings one could choose from anywhere in the scriptures. 'How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news', the watchmen who announce the return of the Lord. 'In many and various ways God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets but now he has spoken to us through the Son'. 'In the beginning was the Word, through whom all things were made, who was the life and the light of human beings': being, life, understanding. And 'though the law was given through Moses, grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ'. 'The Word was made flesh and pitched his tent among us and we have seen his glory'.

Like pearls or precious diamonds one can allow the radiance of these phrases to illuminate our minds and slowly nourish our thoughts. The public reading of them must surely touch our hearts as well. Perhaps they have the power they do not just because they are beautiful texts in themselves but because of the place they have in the centuries long tradition of the Church. As we hear them we know that our ancestors too have listened to these words, have wondered at their meaning, have been encouraged and enlivened by what they reveal.

We can experience similar responses to great literature of any kind, a sonnet or soliloquy of Shakespeare, a passage from Dante or Milton, in modern times a poem of Seamus Heaney, or some pages of Sebastian Faulks, or the resolution of a wonderful film ... literature has this power, to evoke feelings and identifications, to put to us questions of meaning and purpose. All words of value, words that carry truth, or are beautiful, or speak of goodness, are sparks of the Word. They come from and point towards the original uncreated Word that was with God in the beginning and was God. All truth, all beauty, all goodness arise in the uttering of that Word. All being, all life, all knowledge and understanding, are established in the uttering of that Word.

Some might have a problem with that, wonderful as it seems. If there is no God, for example, then neither can there be God's original uncreated Word. Philosophers and writers are today again raising the question of the purpose of things, describing the distinctively human level in our experience and the way in which the world seems to need a destiny, a forming and guiding principle that evokes, shapes, and draws things onwards. People speak of the spirituality there is in art, music, and poetry, what it evokes and draws out in them, the sense of something mysterious at the heart of our experience.

Some might have problems from another direction: what can 'the Word became flesh' mean, this identification of the original uncreated Word with one human being, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus who is called the Christ? That name appearing in the great prologue of John's gospel ought to unsettle and disturb us. We know it is coming: John prepares us for it by speaking about his namesake, John the Baptist, who bears witness to the light that is to come after him. In one sense, then, we are not surprised when the dwelling of God with us is identified with Jesus Christ. In another sense how can the fulness of the deity be found, be held, in a single human individual?

This is the question Jesus himself puts to his disciples later on: who do you say that I am? Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ, John tells us. 'Grace and truth' is steadfast love and faithfulness so well established in the Old Testament as the character of the Lord, the God of Israel. We have come a long way from the time when the Lord was understood as a tribal God fighting for his chosen people and pushing out other peoples and their gods. We have come a long way even from the universalism of the prophet Isaiah who foresaw the coming of all people to Zion to worship the God of Israel. We have here a fulfillment of the prophecies of Ezekiel, that God would come himself to shepherd his people, to seek them out, to heal them, to care for them, and to win them back through his tenderness and love. 'Grace and truth', the divine nature in other words, have come into the world through Jesus Christ.

Our faith is not just a spirituality, then. Ours is a physical religion, asking us to believe in events and persons of flesh and blood, living and acting within our space and time. In one sense spirituality is easy. Paradoxically, it is closer to hand. We can move easily from sentiment, to emotion, to deep feeling and compassion, to a sense of something mysterious opening up through this: it is what music, poetry, and great art does to us.

More difficult to believe is the presence of God the Creator in the helplessness of a newborn child. Not just a sense that every newborn child is, as we rightly believe, a gift of God. But a conviction that in this particular newborn, son of Mary and as it was supposed also of Joseph, the original uncreated Word, abiding with the Father in eternity, becomes one of us. 

A quick moment's reflection assures us that this is the only thing worth believing. All other interpretations of readings such as those we hear today - more rationalist, more intellectual, more spiritual, more literary interpretations - all of these leave us exactly where we were before. With admirable feelings and questions, yes. But the conviction that in Jesus Christ God becomes visible, that the mystery at the heart of reality has revealed Himself in human form: this is something worth believing and it has immediate implications for how we value ourselves, our own flesh, our own animality, our own bodies, our own dignity as what we are. He is not an angelic visitor from another plane just as we are not angelic visitors trapped in animal bodies. He is a human being like us, in fact more human than we are.

Here is a poem that expresses it well. It is by Edwin Muir. It can be heard as a beautiful description of the experience of meeting another person and falling in love. But let us interpret it today, Christmas Day, in the register of the scripture readings we have just heard. Let us hear this poem as speaking of Jesus Christ, of our experience of encountering Him, of the fact that He is the Word or Wisdom of God through whom all things are made:

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face.
I in my mind had waited for this long,
Seeing the false and searching for the true,
Then found you as a traveller finds a place
Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong
Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry,
Or anything that's honest and good, an eye
That makes the whole world seem bright. Your open heart,
Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,
The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,
The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea.
Not beautiful or rare in every part.
But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

Christmas - Mass at Dawn

Readings: Isaiah  62:11-12; Psalm 96/97; Titus 3:4-7; Luke 2:15-20

The most beautiful of the Christmas carols evoke the night in which the Christ Child was born, in particular those two favourites, 'Silent Night' and 'O Holy Night'. It adds to the romance of the event that it happens in the stillness and darkness of the night, but it is also deeply theological. The glory of the Lord shines in the midst of this world's night. Into the night of people's lives, the Lord has come. In the dark nights of the soul, when it seems God is absent, the light of faith is as a star guiding the searcher to where the Lord may be found.

Saint John of the Cross speaks about this light of faith that leads us through the darkest night to our encounter with the Lord who awaits us:

It lit and led me through
More certain than the light of noonday clear
To where One waited near
Whose presence well I knew,
There where no other presence might appear.

Oh night that was my guide!
Oh darkness dearer than the morning's pride,
Oh night that joined the lover
To the beloved bride
Transfiguring them each into the other.

No matter what our night, no matter what its cause, no matter how dark it becomes, even the night of sin, it is enlightened by the birth of the Saviour. The shepherds represent all of us as they find their way to the place in which He is born. No human being remains a stranger to the joy of this birth.  No human being who enters into its mystery remains unchanged.

John of the Cross speaks about the transfiguring brought about through the encounter with Christ. Another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, also speaks in these terms about the power of the mystery of Christ's birth:

Moonless darkness stands between.
Past, the Past, no more be seen!
But the Bethlehem star may lead me
To the sight of Him Who freed me
From the self that I have been.
Make me pure, Lord; Thou art holy;
Make me meek, Lord; Thou were lowly;
Now beginning, and alway;
Now begin, on Christmas day.

Christmas - Mass during the Night

Readings: Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14

The gospels, especially Luke, place the birth of Jesus in the wider context of what was happening in the world at the time. We are told that these events happened in the days of Herod, King of Judea (Luke 1:5). This was Herod the Great who, forty years before the birth of Jesus, had been declared ‘King of the Jews’ by the Roman Senate. A paranoid and ruthless man, he became renowned for his building projects, especially his restoration of the Temple at Jerusalem.

In relation to what was happening in Rome, Luke tells us that Jesus was born while Augustus was emperor (Luke 2:1). He was described as the prince of peace because under him war ceased, and there came about the pax romana also called pax augustana. It was Caesar Augustus who initiated this peace and so was called ‘saviour of the world’.

This is the background in Judaism and in Rome. We might be tempted to ask what was happening in other significant places in the world at the time of Jesus’ birth. What about Athens and philosophy, for example? That seems like an interesting question for us, who might be interested in philosophy, science and wisdom. The gospels do not tell us who Plato’s successor in the Academy at Athens was at the time of Jesus’ birth. It is likely that in fact there was no successor, the Academy having been destroyed, by a Roman general, about eighty years before the birth of Jesus.

But following Luke’s example in relation to Palestine and Rome, it seems like a legitimate thing for us at least to speculate about wisdom, knowledge, and philosophy, and to wonder how the birth of Jesus is to be related to those things, and how they were faring in the world. There are some hints about wisdom in the gospel passage that has just been sung (Luke 2:1-14). They are hidden in that simple statement by the angels to the shepherds, the sign they give to the shepherds, ‘you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger’ (1:12).

There is only one other place in the Bible where swaddling clothes are mentioned. It is in the Book of Wisdom, a text attributed to Solomon but actually written at Alexandria about a century and a half before the birth of Jesus. The passage in which swaddling clothes are mentioned is not really all that significant: the author is speaking about kings and how they are subject to the ordinary experiences of birth and aging and death. A new born king is placed in swaddling clothes and needs to be cared for in exactly the same ways as any other human infant (Wisdom 7:4). So not much about philosophy or wisdom but it establishes at least a tenuous link for us.

This link is strengthened in the reference to the manger. This was a feeding trough, a place where animals might find food. In Luke’s gospel there is a clear link between the manger at Bethlehem and the last supper. Bethlehem is the ‘house of bread’. The inn that had no room for the Holy Family (Luke 2:7) is named with the same term as is used for the room or boarding house where Jesus instructs his disciples to prepare the Passover (Luke 22:11). The last supper then becomes our Eucharist, in which we receive Jesus as the bread of life and the living bread. All of this links very strongly with wisdom, with the ways in which the Old Testament speaks about Lady Wisdom, going about the streets, inviting people to find shelter and sustenance with her, to come to her banquet of wine and eat her bread. That bread is the knowledge, understanding and wisdom that she has to offer, guidance for human lives, a true teaching, and so on. In the child who is born we see the fulfillment of such promises for he is God’s wisdom, feeding us with the Word of God and nourishing us with his Body and Blood.

There is another link between Bethlehem and philosophy: we can say that western philosophy began in a cave and that the Christian story also began in a cave (or a stable: in any case the shelter in which Jesus was born). Everybody who studies philosophy is told very quickly about Plato’s cave, his allegory about people sitting chained looking at images and shadows on a wall, thinking it is reality, then somehow one of them breaks free, turns around, finds his way back through the cave towards the light and out into the world. It is about reality and truth and the quest of philosophy to find truth and to live in the light.

With the birth of Jesus, we can say that Christian philosophy also begins in a ‘cave’, at Bethlehem. There are two striking contrasts, however, between Plato’s cave and the place of Jesus’ birth. One is that in Plato’s story the sun is outside and the one who seeks wisdom and truth must turn away from where he is and go searching for that light beyond or behind his immediate experience. With the birth of Christ, however, the Sun of Justice is found inside, in the cave. The Word is born for us in the midst of our darkness, in the place of our confusion and uncertainty and unreality. Wisdom has come to us to enlighten our darkness and lead us into truth.

The other contrast between Plato’s story and the Christian event is that the energy that moves Plato’s philosopher to search for truth is, as Plato says elsewhere, eros, a being captivated by beauty that stimulates and attracts and leads us on. For Judaism and Christianity it is God’s eros that originates things, takes the initiative and is the moving power of revelation and salvation. This may seem like a risky thing to say, to speak about God’s eros, but there is plenty of support for it in the Scripture readings we hear these days. On Christmas Eve we heard Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, proclaiming that it is ‘the tender mercy’ of our God that has brought about these events (Luke 1:78). And in the second reading at the Dawn Mass of Christmas Day, Isaiah re-assures us that we are a people ‘sought after, a city not forsaken’ (Isaiah 62:12).

The eros in us about which Plato speaks is also always at work, our desire for knowledge, understanding and truth, but its final destination is unclear. As Christians we believe that our desire is met by God’s eros, God’s love of humanity that has not only come to meet our desire but has also created it in the first place and sustains it. 

The final part of the sign given by the angels to the shepherds is that they will find a baby. That this infant is our Creator is the wonder of Christmas often stressed by preachers and teachers. It has this significance also: that the Creator has entered into our way of growing in knowledge, understanding and wisdom. He is not just a visitor, a kind of otherworldly being who decides to spend some time with us and then returns to where he properly belongs. No, the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. God became human, taking on our nature, entering into our situation, and experiencing what an earlier generation of philosophers would have referred to as ‘the human condition’. He entered into our way of growing in knowledge, understanding and wisdom, and he grew up in our flesh. Luke later tells us this: that the child grew in strength, wisdom and grace (Luke 2:40, 52). He did this so that we might enter into his way of knowing, understanding and being wise. He came to establish this communion with us, sharing our way of growing in wisdom and grace and thereby introducing us to His wisdom and grace. Our love of wisdom, our philosophy, terminates in him, he is the destination of our desire for truth, and he is the knowledge we seek.

So just as we know that it is not Herod, but Jesus of Nazareth, who is really the King of the Jews, restorer of the Temple, and messiah of Israel, and just as we know that it is not Caesar Augustus, but Jesus Christ, who is really the saviour of the world and the prince of peace, so we know that knowledge, understanding and truth are ultimately found only in Him who is wisdom and the way to wisdom, the wisdom that comes from God to order all things sweetly, come to teach us the way of prudence.

This homily was preached at Blackfriars, Oxford in 2009