Christmas 2017 -- Solemn Mass of the Nativity

“And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, and lying in a manger.” (Luke 2:12)

Earlier this evening, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ at Saint Catherine’s Basilica in Bethlehem. Some of the Palestinian Christian families present at the celebration claim to be descended from the first Christians in the vicinity, who in the first and second centuries kept alive the memory of the exact location where Christ was born—a cave among trees at the end of a ridge, so it was said.

Saint Justin Martyr wrote of this cave in the mid-second century, and Origen of Alexandria wrote of it in the third – even though the Emperor Hadrian had turned the site into a pagan shrine of Adonis in a vain effort to wipe out all vestiges of Judaism and Christianity in the region after the Bar Kochba revolt (of 132-135 AD). In the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine constructed a Christian basilica at the site, which was rebuilt by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, and has been restored and renovated many times in the years since.

To this day, one can descend a stone staircase to visit the Grotto of the Nativity, located directly underneath the basilica’s high altar. Set in the stone floor, a silver star marks the spot with the Latin inscription, Hic de Virgine Maria Iesus Christus natus est: “Here Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary.” Close by, a small side chapel marks the location of the manger.

Saint Luke’s Gospel tells us that Mary wrapped her newborn in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger “because there was no place for them in the inn.” Recent cultural-linguistic and archeological research suggests, however, that “inn” is a misleading translation. The Greek word kataluma is more accurately rendered “guest room.” And this translation invites us to re-imagine some of our traditional pictures of the Nativity.

When Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem, one of the villagers – perhaps a relative of Joseph’s – would have given them lodgings. The customs of hospitality demanded no less. But since many others had come to Bethlehem for the census, all the available guest rooms in the village were occupied. In that area, peasant dwellings were often built against hillsides in front of, next to, or above natural or man-made caves used for family activities during the day and to shelter animals during the night. So, Mary and Joseph probably stayed as guests in just such a cave, because there was no place for them in their host’s guest room. Most probably, they were among family; Mary likely gave birth surrounded by caring relatives, even if distant relatives of Joseph.

In Luke’s Gospel, the word translated “manger,” phatne, is derived from the Greek verb “to eat,” and denotes a feeding trough or stall for cattle or horse feed. In the Latin Vulgate, Saint Jerome translated this word as praesepium, whence we get the title of this evening’s choral Mass setting, George Malcolm’s Missa ad praesepio, or “Mass at the Crib.” Of course, the English word “manger” has a similar derivation, coming from the French verb manger, to eat. The cave in which Mary and Joseph received lodgings would have been furnished with a stone manger or feeding trough for the animals, ready to serve as a makeshift cradle for the newborn Jesus.

We don’t know at what time of year Jesus was born, but Mary’s bundling him up in swaddling cloths suggests that it was cold, even if not "the bleak midwinter." In any case, the sight of a newborn wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger was sufficiently unusual that it could serve as an effective sign confirming the truth of the angel’s announcement to the shepherds of the birth of a Savior, the Lord Messiah.

Some early Christian writers, such as Saints Ambrose and Augustine, noticed that the image of Jesus at his birth, wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a stone manger in a cave foreshadows Jesus at his death, taken down from the cross, wrapped in a linen shroud, and lying on a stone slab in another cave. The symbolism is that his death fulfills the purpose for which he was born into the world.

There was no place for them in the guest room. The word kataluma, translated “inn” or “guest room,” appears only three times in the New Testament: here, and in Mark’s and Luke’s Gospels where Jesus and his disciples have entered Jerusalem, and Jesus sends Peter and John to prepare the Passover meal, telling them: “When you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him into the house which he enters, and tell the householder, 'The Teacher says to you, Where is the guest room, where I am to eat the Passover with my disciples?' And he will show you a large upper room furnished; there make ready.”

It’s interesting and perhaps more than a coincidence that the same Lord who was denied the guest room at the time of his birth, occupies another guest room on the eve of his death, and there hosts the Passover meal where he institutes the Sacrament of his Body and Blood. But again, that is why he was born into the world in the first place. And that is why we’re here this evening: to celebrate the Holy Eucharist, where he promises to become sacramentally present with us, just has he became physically present with Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, and the wise men in Bethlehem.

Every December, we’re subjected to somewhat tiresome polemics about putting Christ back into Christmas, and Christmas back into “the holidays.” Various devotional commentators write columns and letters about how to discover the real meaning of Christmas, and where to find Christ amidst all the busyness and commercial glitz of the season: perhaps in quiet moments or quality time spent at home with gathered and reunited family members. I want to suggest, however, that this evening we’ve come to the right place; before we find Christ anywhere else, we find him here.

In Hebrew, the name Bethlehem means “House of Bread.” This evening, this church is “Bethlehem in Providence” – the house where Jesus the Bread of Life comes to us and feeds us. The manger, a feeding trough, signifies that he is our spiritual food and drink. By sharing in our life and death, he invites us to share in his Resurrection to eternal life, beginning here and now, in this sacred and sacrificial banquet.

I give the last word to Sir John Betjeman, who sums up far better than I can all that I’m trying to say:

  No love that in a family dwells,
    No caroling in frosty air,
  Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
    Can with this single truth compare –
  That God was man in Palestine
    And lives today in Bread and Wine.

Acknowledgment: some key ideas for this sermon came from Aidan Nichols, O.P., Year of the Lord's Favour: A Homiliary for the Roman Lectionary, Vol. 2, pp. 61-62.

Sermon for Epiphany 4, Year A

Fra Angelico, Sermon on the Mount, 1436-1443

Matthew 5:1-12

In my childhood, the comic strip Peanuts popularized the slogan beginning with the words, “Happiness is.” Happiness is a warm blanket. Happiness is a fresh pile of autumn leaves. Happiness is a home run. The craze soon spread to advertisements, T‑shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers. The point was that you could fill in the blank in an almost infinite variety of ways. Happiness is a new car. Happiness is a perfect golf game. Happiness is a vacation in the Bahamas. And so forth.

Throughout history, philosophers and other observers of the human condition have remarked on our natural desire to be happy. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our inalienable human rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The question is where true and lasting happiness is to be found. The Peanuts philosophy seemed to imply that each individual is free to define his or her own subjective meaning of happiness. But in the Church’s traditional teaching, happiness is something objective and given, more to be revealed and discovered than invented or constructed. And the paradigmatic Christian understanding of happiness is nowhere summed up more succinctly than in the collection of sayings from Saint Matthew’s Gospel known as the Beatitudes. The word beatitude means blessedness or happiness. And the beatitudes give us our Lord’s answer to the question of where true and lasting happiness is to be found.

Down through the centuries the Church has made use of easily memorized lists that sum up its teaching about the Christian life. The Ten Commandments give a basic set of do’s and don’ts. The Seven Deadly Sins give a comprehensive picture of the destructive patterns of behavior that separate us from God and one another. The four Cardinal Virtues and the three Theological Virtues portray the ideal of Christian character. The seven Gifts of the Spirit and the twelve Fruits of the Spirit describe God’s movement and action in the Christian life.

Entire books have been written on each of these catalogues of commandments, virtues, vices, and gifts. But the Church has always given pride of place to the nine Beatitudes as the clearest statement possible of the goal of Christian life as the blessedness and happiness of the Kingdom of heaven.

The Gospel readings for today and for the coming three Sundays are taken from the Sermon on the Mount, which opens with the Beatitudes. Jesus goes up on the mountain. When he sits down, his disciples come to him and he begins his discourse.

Notice that here Jesus is speaking to his disciples, who’ve left everything to follow him. They are the ones who are blessed because they’ve become—or are becoming or will become—poor in spirit, meek, merciful, and so forth. The ninth and last Beatitude makes this point clear, when our Lord shifts from the third person to the second person and declares, “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil falsely on my account.”

So, here we have Jesus beginning his most famous sermon by pronouncing a series of blessings upon his disciples. Each blessing has two parts: a present condition, and a future reward: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. In each case the present condition describes a quality of those who follow Christ, and the future reward describes some aspect of true happiness in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Notice that the people whom our Lord pronounces blessed are the very opposite of those whom the world thinks blessed. We tend not to think of the poor in spirit or those who mourn as being particularly happy. The wisdom of the world is that nice guys finish last. But here our Lord subverts the world’s values. It may seem so now, he says, but the time is coming when this-worldly fortunes shall be reversed. The meek shall inherit the earth. The kingdom of heaven belongs to those who now suffer persecution and exile—and no humanly constructed wall or humanly issued executive order will be able to keep them out.

We don’t have time to go through each of the Beatitudes in detail. Entire books have been written on the Beatitudes; each one of them alone could easily be the subject of an entire sermon. Not so long ago some preachers would give nine-week sermon series, taking each of Matthew’s beatitudes a Sunday at a time.

Suffice it to say that Jesus himself is the perfect fulfillment of everything he says here. He displays perfectly what it is to be poor in spirit, to mourn, to be meek, to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to be merciful, to be pure in heart, to make peace, and to be persecuted, reviled and spoken against for righteousness’ sake. First and foremost, the Beatitudes are a portrait of Christ.

And it’s only in Christ that we make the Beatitudes our own and enter into the happiness that they describe. A number of commentators point out that their wording is not, “If you want the kingdom of heaven, then be poor in spirit; if you want to be comforted, then mourn.” That is, they’re not so much prescriptive as descriptive. They’re not so much a how-to manual as a promise and reassurance of the divine reward held in store for those whom the world counts least blessed in this life.

But what we can’t achieve on our own our Lord can and will achieve in us. We’ve been baptized into his Body, the Church, and we receive his life in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood. If we persevere in making use of the means of grace he’s appointed for us, he will make us into the very people that he describes in the beatitudes, a people on the way to true and lasting happiness, the goal and end of human existence, a reward great in heaven.

Sermon for Epiphany 2, Year A

Jan van Eyck, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1432
(Click on image for larger view)

John 1:29-42

About thirty years ago, on a road trip in Belgium, we stopped in the city of Ghent—on the highway from Brussels to Bruges—for the express purpose of going into Saint Bavo’s Cathedral and seeing the treasure of late medieval religious art known as the Ghent Altarpiece.

Designed by Hubert van Eyck, the Altarpiece displays twenty panels painted by his younger brother Jan van Eyck between 1430 and 1432. (It was stolen and returned to Ghent twice in the twentieth century, once each during the two World Wars, but that’s another story.)

The largest and best-known panel is called the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. By any estimation it’s a magnificent painting. It’s also significant in art history not only for its unprecedented realism and attention to detail, but also for being one of the earliest Western European paintings executed in oils rather than egg tempera.

At the center of the painting an altar stands in a verdant meadow bordered by lush foliage. On the altar stands a Lamb. From a wound in his breast a stream of blood pours into a chalice, also on the altar. Yet the Lamb is serene, showing no signs of pain or suffering.

Above the altar, at the top of the painting, the Holy Spirit hovers in the form of a dove, radiating beams of supernatural light that illuminate the entire landscape without casting any shadows. In the foreground, at the bottom of the painting, stands the well of the water of life. Visible on the horizon are the towers and spires of the heavenly Jerusalem.

A group of angels surrounds the altar, worshiping the Lamb. Two are swinging censers; others bear the instruments of the Lord’s Passion: the Cross, the Crown of Thorns, the spear that pierced his side, and the pillar where he was scourged.

Four groups of human worshipers approach the altar from different directions: in the foreground, contemporary monks and bishops to the right, Old Testament prophets and virtuous pagans to the left; in the background, virgin martyrs and holy women to the right, and martyrs and saints of past centuries to the left.

An inscription on the altar identifies the painting as a visual commentary on the words of John the Baptist in today’s Gospel: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” It also has a mystical visionary quality, affording a glimpse of worship in heaven as described in the Book of Revelation, where the Risen and Ascended Christ appears as a Lamb who has been slain and yet lives.

The first part of today’s Gospel reading from John comprises John the Baptist’s reflections on the Baptism of Christ, which we commemorated last Sunday. Here John speaks of what appears to be a mystical vision that he himself experienced at the Baptism of Jesus: “I saw the Spirit descend as a dove from heaven and it remained on him.”

Interestingly enough, in the parallel passages in the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it is not John but Jesus who sees the Spirit descending in the form of a dove and alighting on him. But just before that, the Synoptics include another detail missing from John’s account: “[Jesus] saw the heavens opened...”

It’s easy to skip over that little detail: he saw the heavens opened. But that’s the stuff of mystical visions. At the risk of doing what we were told in seminary never to do—namely, conflating John’s Gospel with the Synoptics—we may well ask: did John the Baptist also see the heavens opened? And, if so, what did he see?

Following this line of questioning, theologian and preacher Aidan Nichols OP speculates that at the Baptism both Jesus and John the Baptist received a glimpse into heaven, where Jesus saw himself, and John saw Jesus, as the Lamb of God on the heavenly altar. This is admittedly just speculation, but if true it would definitely account for John’s subsequent identification of Jesus as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

This motif of seeing the heavens opened recurs in the New Testament. Almost immediately after the events related in today’s Gospel, Jesus himself declares to Nathanael, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” And at the moment of his martyrdom, our patron, Saint Stephen, gazes into heaven and testifies to his accusers, “Behold I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God.”

The image of the Lamb in the Old Testament is multilayered. It could refer to the lambs sacrificed twice daily in the Jerusalem Temple, morning and evening, or to the lambs that individual Israelites could bring to the Temple to offer as sacrifices for their sins. It could refer to the Passover Lamb, sacrificed every year to commemorate the Exodus from Egypt when the blood of the lamb on the Israelites’ doorposts caused the angel of death to pass over their houses. And it could refer to the Suffering Servant in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, who “opened not his mouth, like a lamb that is led to the slaughter …"

Another possible meaning is the Apocalyptic Lamb. In certain Jewish writings dating to between the Old and New Testaments, the figure of a lamb represents Israel’s Messiah, opposed by an array of ferocious wild beasts representing the nations of the earth. Against all odds, the lamb defeats and subdues these wild beasts, inaugurating the arrival of God’s kingdom and the messianic age.

Some scholars have thus argued that when John the Baptist proclaims that Jesus is the Lamb of God, his meaning is simply that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, God’s anointed one. It seems to me, however, that when John adds that this Lamb takes away the sin of the world, he is signifying something more: namely that Jesus has come to shed his blood in a sacrificial offering that will reconcile a fallen world to God.

At every Mass, we sing or say the threefold hymn Agnus Dei: “O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.” Then the priest shows the consecrated host and chalice to the people, repeating the words of John the Baptist: “Behold the Lamb of God; behold him that taketh away the sins of the world.”

These words invite us to look beneath surface appearances, and see into the heart of a deeper reality. Visual artists like Jan van Eyck communicate something of this reality in their paintings. Music can also be its vehicle, as can various forms of prayer, meditation, and silent contemplation. Whatever the vehicle, if we’re faithful, persistent, and attentive, it just may be granted us also to see the heavens opened, and the Lamb standing at the throne of God.