Christmas
Dec. 25, 2012
Mass during the Day
Heb 1: 1-6
Collect
Ursulines, Willow Drive, New Rochelle
“He
has spoken to us thru the Son” (Heb 1: 2).
Structurally,
the Letter to the Hebrews isn’t an epistle but a sermon, or perhaps a series of
sermons. So the scholars tell us. (Aren’t you glad you didn’t have to sit thru
such a sermon?) Not that that changes
its content.
It’s
a challenge, of course, to come up with appropriate readings for a feast like
Christmas. The Scriptures don’t give us
much to work with that deals directly or prophetically with the birth of
Christ. And when you have 4 distinct
Mass to find texts for, the challenge gets daunting. So we have a highly theological passage from
Hebrews and a highly theological passage from John at this final Mass of
Christmas, rather than the beloved poetry and narratives of the earlier
liturgies.
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| Looks like Giotto's work--but I can't say for sure! |
The
opening verses of the Letter to the Hebrews speak of the meaning of what we
call the Incarnation, without using that term; they place the time-changing historical
event within the context of the history of divine revelation to Israel. All of that series of revelations—to Noah, to
Abraham, to David, to the classical prophets—were partial, fragmentary,
incomplete. Today, we might add a note
about other religions in addition to Judaism, which contain a share of divine
truth—but “partial and various” (1:1).
In
the Jewish Scriptures, many revelations come thru angels, e.g., the three
visitors who come to Abraham, the angel who wrestles with Jacob, the angels who
appear to Gideon and to the woman who will become Samson’s mother, the angel
who passes over Egypt on the nite of Passover.
All these revelations to the patriarchs and
prophets, whatever form they took, don’t measure up to the revelation made to
us “in these last days,” in this final period of human history (1:2). Now we have heard God’s ultimate revelation,
his eschatological revelation. It has
been voiced to us by God’s Son (1:2,5), his first-born (1:6).
This final revelation, the cause of our
celebration today, comes thru no mere prophet, no mere angel. The bearer of God’s ultimate Word is “the
refulgence of God’s glory, the very imprint of his being” (1:3), a bearer of
the full glory of God, the living image of God.
This is none other than God’s Son, who shares the divine nature, God’s
“heir in all things thru whom he created the universe” (1:2). To use the
language of the psalms, “God spoke, and it—the world—was made” (33:9); that’s a
form of revelation. In the words of St.
John’s prolog, our gospel today, now
that “Word has become flesh”; God’s Word is incarnate (1:14).
To what purpose?
Why such joyful celebration today?
This bearer of God’s final revelation “accomplished purification from
sins” (1:3). God speaks to us thru his
Son to effect our purification. The
letter will go on to explain how the Son did that—which you and I know. Christmas always points us toward Easter, as
the Collects of Advent bring out repeatedly.
As does today’s Collect: God, who originally “created the dignity of
human nature,” which fell into death (Saturday’s Collect said[1])—God
has now, thru his Son, “wonderfully restored” that dignity thru the human
nature that the Son took on and shared with us.
Created as images of God (Gen 1:27), we have now been made anew in his
image, in the image of the Son—if not quite “the refulgence of his glory, the
very imprint of his being,” then something like it. For we aspire, the Collect reminds us, to
“share in the divinity of Christ.” (In
fact, we make that prayer, silently, at every Mass as the celebrant pours water
into the wine at the preparation of the gifts.)
“To share in the divinity of Christ” in Latin is eius divinitatis esse
consortes,
“to be sharers in his divinity”; consortes
suggests a union with God like that of a wife with her husband, the two
becoming one.[2]
This mystical union to which we aspire
individually has been effected already with the Church collectively by Christ’s
“sharing in our humanity,” humanitatis nostrae fieri dignatus est particeps.” In this case, “sharer” is particeps, meaning that he has
become a participant in our human nature, has become a member of our race, not
a “consort.” “The Word became flesh and
made his dwelling among us,” but not to be a tourist, a journalist, a 1st-century
Tocqueville or Margaret Mead, living among us and recording what he observes. No, he has made his dwelling among us as an
equal participant (particeps), and he has gone
further yet, taken us as his bride, his consort, so as to restore the dignity we
had lost and make us whole again.
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