Celebrating the Seasons. Robert Atwell
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the world to delight us, and kindled our eyes with a divine intelligence? Yet all his dear and infinite kindness is lost behind the mask of power. Overwhelmed by omnipotence, we miss the heart of love. How can I matter to him? we say. It makes no sense; he has the world, and even that he does not need. It is folly even to imagine him like myself, to credit him with eyes into which I could ever look, a heart that could ever beat for my sorrows or joys, a hand he could hold out to me. For even if the childish picture be allowed, that hand must be cupped to hold the universe, and I am a speck of dust on the star-dust of the world.
Yet Mary holds her finger out, and a divine hand closes on it. The maker of the world is born a begging child; he begs for milk, and does not know that it is milk for which he begs. We will not lift our hands to pull the love of God down to us, but he lifts his hands to pull human compassion down upon his cradle. So the weakness of God proves stronger than men, and the folly of God proves wiser than men. Love is the strongest instrument of omnipotence, for accomplishing those tasks he cares most dearly to perform; and this is how he brings his love to bear on human pride; by weakness not by strength, by need and not by bounty.
24 December
Christmas Eve
A Reading from a sermon of Augustine
Awake! For your sake God was made man! ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.’ For your sake, I say, God was made man.
Eternal death awaited you had he not been born in time. Never would you have been freed from sinful flesh, had he not taken on himself the likeness of sinful flesh. Everlasting would have been your misery, had he not acted in mercy. You would never have returned to life, had he not shared your death. You would have been lost, had he not hastened to your aid. You would have perished, had he not come.
Let us then joyfully celebrate the coming of our salvation and redemption. Let us celebrate the hallowed day on which he who is the great and eternal day came from the great and endless day of eternity into our own short span of time. ‘He has become our righteousness, our sanctification, our redemption, and so, as it is written: Let those who glory, glory in the Lord.’
‘Truth,’ then, ‘has sprung up from the earth.’ Christ who said, ‘I am the truth,’ is born of a virgin. ‘And righteousness has looked down from heaven’: because believing in this new-born child, we are justified not by ourselves but by God. ‘Truth has sprung up from the earth’ because the Word was made flesh. ‘And righteousness has looked down from heaven’ because ‘every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.’ ‘Truth has sprung up from the earth’ – flesh born of Mary. ‘And righteousness has looked down from heaven’ for ‘you can receive nothing unless it has been given you from heaven.’
‘Being justified by faith, let us be at peace with God’ for indeed ‘righteousness and peace have kissed each other’ through our Lord Jesus Christ, for ‘truth has sprung up from the earth.’ Through him we have access to that grace in which we stand, and our boast is in our hope of sharing the glory of God. St Paul does not say at this point ‘our glory’ but ‘the glory of God’; because righteousness has not proceeded from us but has ‘looked down from heaven’. Therefore let those who glory, glory not in themselves, but in the Lord.
For this reason, when our Lord was born of the Virgin, the message of the angels was: ‘Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth.’ For how could there be peace on earth unless ‘truth has sprung up from the earth’, that is, unless Christ were born of our flesh? And ‘he is our peace who made the two into one’ that we might be people of good will, bound together by the bond of unity.
Beloved, let us then rejoice in this grace, so that our glorying may bear witness to a good conscience, and may we glory, not in ourselves, but in the Lord. That is why Scripture says: ‘He is my glory, the one who lifts up my head.’ For what greater grace could God have made to dawn upon us than to make his only Son become the Son of Man, so that we might in our turn become children and heirs of God? Ask yourselves if this were merited; ask for its reason, for its justification, and see whether you find anything but sheer grace.
CHRISTMAS
God so loved us that for our sakes he,
through whom time was made, was made in time;
older by eternity than the world itself,
he became younger in age than many of his servants in the world;
God, who made man, was made man;
he was given existence by a mother
whom he brought into existence;
he was carried in hands which he formed;
he was nursed at breasts which he filled;
he cried like a baby in the manger in speechless infancy– this Word
without which human eloquence is speechless.
Augustine
At this feast of the nativity
let each person wreathe the door of his heart
so that the Holy Spirit may delight in that door,
enter in and take up residence there;
then by the Spirit we will be made holy.
Ephrem of Syria
The readings for the Twelve Days of Christmas focus upon the mystery of the incarnation. The various authors chosen, both Eastern and Western, meditate not only upon the wonder of Christ’s birth, but the scandal of its particularity. The significance of Bethlehem, the crib, the roles of Mary and Joseph, the sheer poverty and vulnerability of the Holy Family, are themes that recur throughout Christian literature.
Proper readings for the Feasts of St Stephen, St John the Evangelist and The Holy Innocents which, depending on where Christmas Day falls in the week, may or may not have to be transferred, are provided separately in the companion volume Celebrating the Saints, pp. 477–83.
At the end of the section, readings are provided for the Sundays of Christmastide. If for pastoral reasons the Feast of the Holy Family is observed on another date, the reading provided for First Sunday of Christmas should be used.
Christmas Day
at night:
A Reading from a sermon for the Nativity of Christ by Julian of Vezelay
‘While gentle silence enveloped the whole earth, and night was halfway through its course, your all-powerful Word, O Lord, leaped down from your royal throne in the heavens.’ In this ancient text of Scripture, the most sacred moment of time is made known to us, the moment when God’s all-powerful Word would leave the tender embrace of the Father and come down into his mother’s womb, bringing us the news of salvation. For, as it says elsewhere in Scripture, ‘God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son,’ declaring: ‘This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.’ And so from his royal throne the Word of God has come to us, humbling himself in order to raise us on high, becoming poor himself in order to make us rich, becoming human in order to make us divine.
So lost and so profoundly unhappy was the human race, that it could only trust in a word that was all-powerful. Anything less would have inspired in us nothing more than the feeblest of hopes in being set free from sin and its power. Therefore, to give poor lost humanity a categorical assurance of being saved, the Word that came to save us was called all-powerful. And see how truly all-powerful that Word was! When neither heaven nor anything under the heavens as yet had existence, the Word spoke, and they came into being, created out of nothing. He spoke the command, ‘Let there be earth,’ and the earth came into being, and when he decreed, ‘Let there be human beings,’ human beings were created.
But