In an effort to avoid pontificating, here is a true story.
When I was a boy my Father used to take the whole family to work on Christmas morning.
Work was on the children’s wards, and in between the paintings of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, I could tell Dad was admired. Seeing young patients on this special day was odd, but it was good to see that sick children also had presents.
A hospital Santa would have one for us too. There was a drink and a mince pie. The nurses had tinsel on their hats and smiles on their faces. To this day I find the smell of disinfectant in a hospital welcoming, and Jesus can appear on the wards.
But what fascinated me as a boy was the special care baby unit, SCBU as the nurses called it. Christmas morning would find us peering at the premature babies. Their lives were as transparent as their incubators. Of course they weren’t generally awake but each near naked baby had transparent tubes leading into its nostrils or veins. Their bodies were no bigger than my own hands.
Purple feet and hands had toes and fingers so tiny that all of them might cover your fingernails. Wrists or ankles were tagged, which made the babies look so fragile they were like little birds without feathers.
Except these were humans. They might suddenly yawn or reveal a tiny tongue. There was a kind of interconnected interdependent relationship with the staff. Their very lives were open. In my mind these babies would become associated with the openness of the infant Jesus.
The word was made flesh, we say, and the fact Jesus was born means God is much more than a word, because he relates to me in the most intimate way possible, without words, he loves me through a human body as helpless as my own, and as helpless as the tiny babies.
Here is no tyrant God demanding a sacrifice, no fearful guilty conscience needing reassurance. Original goodness floods the world as perfect love drives out fear, fear which has to do with punishment.
Here God empties himself into human nature and identifies with my plight. We identify with one another. I am free to worship without fear, as we say in the Benedictus. God is lover. Two become One.
If I can get highfollutin' just for a paragraph, St Gregory of Nazianzus put it like this: “The very Son of God, older than the ages, invisible, incomprehensible, incorporeal, beginning of beginning, light of light, fountain of life and immortality … perfect likeness … he it is who comes to his own image and takes our nature for the good of our nature, and unites himself to an intelligent soul for the good of my soul, to purify like by like ... He takes on the poverty of my flesh, that I may gain the riches of his divinity. He who is full is made empty … that I may share in his fullness ... What is this mystery that surrounds us?”
But our society does away with mystery, the hospital wards have managers. Not just the hospital wards of course. Everything is measured and assessed. But the mystery of Being still surrounds us, unmeasurable.
Jesus related openly and intimately to this mystery in a very practical way. He spoke of Abba, which translates more like Daddy than like Father. And no true Dad wants his child to be dependent. To be open to the mystery is to be emptied, and to become part of something much much greater.
The incarnation of God means not just that God empties himself into a human being, but that a human being can reciprocate.
Yet often, instead of emptiness we find mundane thoughts. I might think: Am I going off message? Am I too clever? Am I not clever enough? Am I loved? Am I unloving? What do I do with these feelings? Does my backside look too big in this? We need to let this go gracefully.
It is hard to imagine Jesus asking these sorts of questions, because he is unself-conscious, which is why he commands us to lose ourselves. He relates openly and learns acceptance. He fully suffers our nature along with us, yet nature cannot be forced to fully explain Jesus, OR our own awareness.
Earlier I said that no true Dad wants his child to be dependent. But our saviour wasn’t independent either. “No man is an island entire of itself”, wrote John Donne, a Christian. And not even the Son of God, God who is a self existing being. He didn’t announce himself in physical might or temporal power. As a baby, God is interdependent, like reality itself.
That revolutionary non-violent Christian Martin Luther King once captured this: "For some strange reason” he said, “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of all reality".
Martin Luther King would talk about being beholden to half the world over his breakfast - his tea from India, his marmalade from Europe. Everything is interconnected.
And so our sustainer is born not only in a stable in the Middle East 2,000 years ago, not in the Bible, but in this body. We cannot divorce ourselves from incarnate reality. We are spiritual beings in communion.
Christmas is not just about buying presents we can afford, but accepting the presence which we cannot escape.
Being IS communion.
Our society talks of self-fulfillment and self-potential, of valuing ourselves, but preoccupation with the self cripples relationships and replaces true communion with mere politics and religion. The flesh becomes word again. This might just be a feeling of unease or it might be something much more tragic.
A child born in Bethlehem today is literally walled in by an unholy trinity of political military and religious apartheid.
God knows we are in communion, for better or worse. Interconnected. But we turn away and put our energy into keeping things constant when all the evidence is that in communion everything is in flux. The seasons change, our bodies change, people die and are born. We try to halt happy moments, we yearn for when we were younger, when so-and-so was here, when we will finally be able to relax on holiday. We pretend we are not going to die. Our first reaction to change is to ask how it might affect us, so we waste creative energy, resisting or reacting.
Our preoccupation with the self does not lead to compassion, which is why Jesus is unselfconscious and commands us to lose ourselves, and why the gospels affirm this message. It is why a rich man is sent away unable to cope with Jesus’ suggestions. It is why St Peter is rebuked for resisting rejection. It is why the disciples squabble over their own importance. It is all just so impossible to grasp.
But that’s exactly the point.
In verses 6 & 7 of Philippians 2 we read, ‘though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited - grasped - but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant … and God exalted him."
The crib in which our saviour is born is like an incubator, because Life is a gift which is impossible for an individual to measure. Life is a gift to be opened, not valued. It is priceless. Interconnected. Life is a gift to be shared, because it cannot be grasped. And life does not end.
William Blake once wrote: “He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself.”
So, a very, very, very Happy Christmas to you all, and not only for today, but forever.
