Eric Doyle OFM, The Tablet (25 Dec. 1982).
Lullay, lullay little child, child reste thee a throwe.
Fro heyze hider art thou sent with us to wone lowe;
Pore and litel art tou made, unkut & unknowe...
Lullay, lullay litel child, softe slep and faste,
In sorwe endet everi love but thine at the laste.
These are the opening and closing lines of a lullaby to Christ in the crib, contained in a compilation of preaching material made in 1372 by a Franciscan friar, John Grimestone, who may well have hailed from Yorkshire.
I begin with them because they express in the form proper to Christmastide – a carol – the very teaching of the prologue to the fourth gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.’ This is the heart and substance of the Christian message, the article of faith by which the Church stands or falls.
So, we have come once more to the mystery of the silent and holy night. The universe is full of mystery. Light is a mystery and now, after Einstein, even more so than ever; the atom is a mystery; a snowflake, a spider’s web, a goldcrest, are mysteries. We know so much about these and many things, yet our vast knowledge has done nothing to dispel the mystery of life or the mystery of love. Rather, the truth is, the more we discover in all the sciences, the greater becomes the mystery of the universe.
Mystery means never being able to say the final word on anything; there is always more to discover, always more to say. That itself seems to point to a source beyond the universe, to a beginning that has no beginning, to a meaning which was in the beginning, containing in itself all grace and truth forever.
This understanding of mystery explains why people do things like dancing around a totem pole or genuflecting before a tiny host in a monstrance – things which at first send ‘pure’ reason reeling and throw logic into chaos. It also lies behind such questions as ‘What does it all mean?’ and ‘Why are we here?’ There is a drive in us towards further intelligibility and deeper reality, towards final meaning and absolute truth. The human mind seeks to answer the question about the question, that is, the question as to why questions about meaning and truth arise. Yes, there seems to be more to the universe than meets the eye, or the ear for that matter, and people celebrate or investigate it.
Religions, certain philosophies and schools of wisdom focus on the mystery of the universe. As a matter of experience people have discovered some of the contours of the mystery which provide answers to fundamental questions and which evidently bring satisfaction and peace. We learn of the Unmoved Mover, the Ideal, the Absolute, the Primal Truth, the Great Architect, the Universal Mind, the Power behind it all; we know of Yahweh, Brahman and Allah.
The Christian Church leads us to the mystery of Christmas, to the Baby Jesus, God’s Word made flesh, through whom we have learned to pray ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’. We are not brought to an inspired prophet, however much endowed with the authority of God’s Word, but to the enfleshed Word of God. There have been and indeed are many great prophets, holy men and women on whom God’s Spirit has descended and to whom God’s Word has been entrusted. As St. Athanasius insisted against the Arians: ‘He became man, and did not come into a man. We must be clear about this, to avoid the notion… that the Word dwelt in a man, hallowing him and displaying himself in him, as in earlier times the Word came to each of the saints. In that case there would have been no paradox….’ Thus ‘endowed’ or ‘entrusted’ will not do here. We must say ‘en-humaned’ or ‘enfleshed’: ‘The Word became flesh.’
Whoever would have imagined that a little baby would be the real, true presence of God in time and space? Yet this is the realism of the doctrine of the incarnation. It cannot be made respectable, it cannot be explained away, as Theodotus of Byzantium, Paul of Samosata, Sabellius, Arius and a host of others throughout Christian history have tried to do. Nothing less than realism is sufficient, because anything less than that simply fails to meet the experiences recorded in the New Testament, the witness of Tradition and the instinct of faith today.
However did it enter anybody’s mind to write: ‘For to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger?’ The Mighty and Holy One of Israel is this little child. Here is the revelation, the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things. Had we been Mary or Joseph, one of the shepherds or magi, we would have found a baby in swaddling cloths, a baby poor and little, unknown and unrecognised, as Grimstone’s lullaby says.
We would have seen the downy hair, the small, toothless mouth, the flaccid limbs stroking the air aimlessly, the tiny nails on the little fingers; we would have heard the cries, the gurgles and the splutters. And in all this the Image of the invisible God, the Word of the Ineffable God; the Firstborn of all creation, the Radiance of divine glory, the Alpha and the Omega. We may recall Jesus’ answer to Philip: ‘He who has seen me, has seen the Father.’ That was as true at Bethlehem as it was when Jesus spoke to Philip.
The New Testament and all the ecumenical councils from Nicaea to Chalcedon – covering more than four and a half centuries – proclaim the same truth. This baby is, so to speak, on the inside of God. In and through this baby we come to know God in his innermost being. Who God is in himself as Word, is the one incarnate, Jesus the Baby. Here already is the utmost intelligibility, the deepest reality of the universe, final meaning and absolute truth. The truth of the enfleshment of the Word reveals that babyhood and childhood, as well as adulthood, belong equally to God, as God’s very own. That is either sheer absurdity or else it is the literal truth. This baby is the Eternal Word made one of us. It is too fantastic to be false.
We are brought then face to face with a baby, not horizontally, but vertically. We have to look downwards. Generally speaking one has to look down to see newly-born babies: their cots or cradles are not usually on high shelves. Till then people spoke of God in the highest heavens, and we still do so in the Sanctus at Mass; they were convinced they had to look upwards to get God’s direction. But at Bethlehem they had to look down, and that teaches us to proclaim also: ‘Hosanna in the lowest’ or at least ‘Hosanna in the lower’.
To see a baby we have to stoop; we have bend our proud, stiff necks to see the baby Jesus. It is as though God found one sure way to teach us humility. At the other end of Jesus’ life the people had to look up, to raise their heads and eyes, to see a broken, naked criminal on the cross. At Mass, when the priest lifts up the host and chalice, we see horizontally the same humility of God’s Word in the silence and lowliness of the bread and wine. Bethlehem, Calvary and the Eucharist are the best commentaries to be found on St. Paul’s words in Philippians: ‘Though he was in the form of God (Christ Jesus) did not think equality with God a thing to be grasped’.
I have often wondered what is the precise difference between looking down at the Baby Jesus and looking up at the Crucified Lord, on the one hand, and gazing at the host at Mass, on the other. While certain theological nuances have to be made, it seems in the end there are hardly any differences at all. These are variations on the theme of God’s humility. The Word of God was helpless as a baby, defenceless as a crucified criminal, and is made so very silent in the bread and wine.
Christmas compels us to ask ourselves what the Baby Jesus reveals about the inner side of God. Once we ask this, we find ourselves using words like love, tenderness, gentleness – in one word, humanitas. These blend perfectly with omnipotence, eternity, immutability – in one word, divinitas. The first set is just as disclosive or revelatory of God as the second set. God’s divinity has to be reckoned with in terms of God’s humanity, and vice versa. His love is all powerful, eternal, infinite, immutable; his omnipotence is loving, tender and gentle. The Baby Jesus is the way God’s everlasting love begins to overthrow the powers of evil. This is the love, as Grimestone says, that does not finally end in sorrow.