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The Wonder of the Incarnation
Bishop Michael Campbell OSA with a meditation for Advent and Christmas
Through her liturgical seasons of Advent and Christmas the Church sets before us a rich fare of doctrinal themes and biblical passages which have the purpose of deepening our understanding and appreciation of the wonder of salvation which God has accomplished for us in Christ. By means of her liturgical cycle the Church exercises her maternal teaching role in a preeminent way, forming us spiritually and leading us year by year ever more profoundly, in the Pauline phrase, into the mystery of Christ. Blessed Columba Marmion in his spiritual writings was fond of stressing that each liturgical season has its own distinctive grace, if we but dispose ourselves to it in a spirit of devotion and breathe in its atmosphere.
The four weeks of Advent seem to pass all too quickly, and can easily be overshadowed by the commercial build-up to Christmas so characteristic of current western society. Advent, with its hope and expectation of the coming of God’s Messiah, resonates with the profound longings and aspirations of the human heart. The wonderful selection of scriptural texts, particularly from the prophet Isaiah, seem to arouse and capture the believer’s desire for something more enduring and satisfying than that which our fleeting material world has to offer. Who cannot be moved by the content and mood of those great O antiphons recited or sung in the days leading up to Christmas?
The Advent liturgy invites us, as it were, to transport ourselves spiritually back in time and to make our own the faith and hope of the people of Israel as they looked to Almighty God to make good his promises to Abraham and David and send a saviour from heaven.
The exclamation of Isaiah captures perfectly such sentiments: Shower, O heavens, from above, and let the skies rain down righteousness, let the earth open, that salvation may sprout forth… (Is. 45:8). When we reflect prayerfully on the long centuries during which God’s people treasured and pondered the words of the prophets and their Scriptures, often hoping against hope, we learn the lesson of patience for our own lives. Like the Israelites of old, we are being taught that what matters is God’s time and not our own. The mind-set of our present age can often demand immediate answers and instant solutions; one grace of the Advent season is that of learning to wait on God patiently but with quiet confidence.
If we allow ourselves to be led by the spirit of the Advent liturgy we can gain a sense of perspective of how God’s plan of salvation gradually evolves and unfolds over many years through the history of Israel, the people he originally and mysteriously chose to be his own. As a small and insignificant power, Israel was subject to those surrounding nations greater than herself, and often at their mercy. Her people would know defeat, subjection and even exile, yet the guiding and salvific hand of God was ever at work throughout that history, directing it towards that moment, ‘the fullness of time’, when ‘God would send his Son, born of a woman…’ (Gal.4:4). As we, in the twenty-first century, live through what appear to be unsettling and uncertain times and a future difficult to discern, the experience of Israel as enshrined in the Scriptural passages, antiphons and hymns of Advent, and her unswerving belief in God, can serve to reassure and point for us a way forward on our journey of faith.
Towards the end of the Advent season the Church sets before us yet again those appealing accounts of the conception and birth of John the Baptist, born to his parents Zechariah and Elizabeth in their later years. Replete with the atmosphere of Jerusalem Temple piety, the story of John and his parents reminds us how a single conception and birth ultimately reside in the power of God, the Lord of life. We will have heard countless times St Luke’s telling of the Annunciation to Our Lady and the conception of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, yet it touches us and captures our attention whenever we hear it. When the sanctity and inviolability of human life, especially in the womb, is under threat, the sacred nature of these infancy narratives which are set before us in Advent, should give us cause for pause and prayerful, even sober reflection and atonement.
When we come to the liturgical season of Christmastide I have always found the idea of a tableau helpful, a stage-setting of sorts where the various biblical figures from both the Old and the New Testament each have their own unique different part to play in this most sacred of dramas, often termed by biblical exegetes as salvation history. The Preface of Christmas speaks of the ‘wonder of the Incarnation’ and that surely should be the uppermost feeling of the believer throughout this whole liturgical period. The splendid history that has been the Old Testament has now reached its climax in the child lying in the manger, the principal actor so to speak in this whole divine drama. The Evangelist John, and especially the First Letter of John, read at Christmastide, see in this infant the visible expression and living embodiment of the divine love of the Father for the human race. As we contemplate that scene in the stable at Bethlehem more often than not words can fail us. The Incarnation of the Son of God is indeed a wonder!
Catholic piety loves to dwell on Mary and her role in God’s saving design. The tranquil nature of the crib setting should, in our meditation, be balanced against the momentous decision of Our Lady when she gave her assent, her fiat, to the angel Gabriel. Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, writing on the Annunciation highlights the confusion and bewilderment of Mary when faced with such a far-reaching choice. The consequences of that decision would be life-long for her, leading ultimately to Calvary and beyond, to Pentecost and the beginning of the Church. We each have our individual part today in furthering God’s plan of salvation for the world, but when assenting to God’s will we can be inspired by the faith and generosity of Mary of Nazareth.
We will never fully understand God’s ways, and the fact that the first to see the new-born child were simple shepherds underscores this truth. A simple thought to enrich our devotion at Christmastide is that the shepherds were going about their work, doing what they knew best. Can we believe that God often chooses to reveal himself as we engage in the ordinary events of everyday, such as earning a living? Perhaps, in the words of the poet, Francis Thompson, we can miss ‘the many-splendoured thing’. I referred earlier to Advent as being a time of patient waiting, and the Evangelist Luke offers us two wonderful examples of that patience, in the characters of Simeon and Anna. The old man Simeon had spent his whole life with the assurance of his biblical faith that he would set eyes on the Messiah, God’s anointed one, before he died. Both he and Anna saw their piety rewarded far beyond what they could have imagined. Their one moment had come and they were there to take full advantage of it. In our Christmas meditation we could resolve to imitate those two venerable saints of the Old Testament and patiently await God’s time in preference to our own.
We walk by faith and not by sight, and no Christmas figure better exemplifies that than Joseph, the spouse of Mary and foster-father of the child Jesus. He was called upon to take Mary in circumstances he did not fully understand and be a reliable father and protector to her Son. Saint Joseph’s silent presence alongside Mary and the child is often commented on as the example of someone who quietly and obediently does what is asked of him by God. With good reason Joseph is invoked as Patron of the Universal Church. In our moments of prayer before the crib this Christmas time we should ask him to watch over the Church, and guide and guard her on the sea of history as he once did Mary and her special child.
On their long pilgrimage through history the people of Israel met opposition from hostile powers without and weakness within. The figures of the Magi in our Christmastide tableau recall the cruel Herod and his evil desire to destroy the child Jesus. These wise men ‘from the East’ encountered doubt and opposition in their search for the king whose star they followed and eventually found, and worship the one whom every heart desires. We may reflect that finding and following Christ ‘the desire of the nations’ is not always easy or straightforward. As the Christmas liturgical season comes to a close the perseverance and determination of the Magi can give us hope on our lifelong journey towards him who is and remains our heart’s desire.
