The Christmas Morning Mass is where the Readings are most likely to disappoint and confuse visitors to the churches, for unlike the other alternatives available for this great day there are no nativity scenes, no chubby baby in the crib, but a set of Readings much more challenging and strange, and where we are called to enter into much older ideas and developments of their understanding stretching back almost into prehistory.
Our Reading from 2nd Isaiah (52:7-10), the prophet of the Jewish exile in Babylonia in the 6th century BCE, takes us right back into the heart of Jewish belief of their and our relationship with God. Far from our being a receptive and respective people, Israel, according to the Jewish Bible, messed up on every available occasion so that continuity, knowledge and true worship of God was something given and restored again and again by God. Isaiah looks forward in hope and wonder to this restored relationship for his people and their God-given return to their ruined capital and temple. It’s God’s and their victory cry as they turn in hope towards a new future. Israel was to repeat this catastrophe and learning experience throughout its history, and by the turn of the millennia placed its hopes for renewal in the coming of the Messiah, the man whose coming would mean the end to their age old suffering and degradation. Many in Judaism looked for a warrior Messiah, one to sweep Rome, their current oppressors off their feet. Jesus, when he came, was to be a terrific disappointment to many; and Christianity would rapidly become a community largely of converts from paganism.
John (1:1-18) and the last Gospel writer saw things differently, as in his appreciation of Jesus he recognised the world-wide and even cosmic significance of Christ. Isaiah had hoped that everyone would turn to Judaism for its salvation, but John, who had lived amongst Jesus’ community as a young boy and experienced his outreach to pagans, had a different vision of God. He takes us right back to the dawn of creation, ‘In the beginning was the Word….Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through him.’ And here is the great shift from Judaism, for we all think of God as the creator, but John appreciated that God creates with and through his Word, his capacity to annunciate, to spell out; and here we see this enormous, cosmic power rooted and made visible in a human being! So overcome by this stunning act of the divine is John, that it is clear that no single word or metaphor is considered adequate to describe his experience of God’s ‘Word who was made flesh’- sarx in Greek - the stuff of you and me, capable of all that we are able, and every bit as fragile. John uses an infinite variety of words to describe Jesus the Word: Word, creator, life-giver, light, enlightener of all people, giver of power to become children of God and simply ‘flesh who lived among us’; and then in vivid contrast, ‘glory’ a glory staggeringly given to humanity to see. Yet alongside and part of this gift to the world, John injects a darker note amidst all that wonder and excitement, for he knows that this world will reject the Word of God, Jesus and he knows because he was at the crucifixion. So John’s magnificent Prologue tells the story of Jesus from creation and his earthly becoming, to the cross and beyond, as he writes for the infant church which did choose to follow Jesus, ‘Though the Law (Jewish law) was given through Moses, grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ.’ Indeed, there is no baby for us to goo over in John’s Gospel; what we are offered is the visible face of God made known in the person of Jesus.
Our Reading from Hebrews, (1:1-6) written to a Jewish-Christian group living in Rome possibly towards the end of the reign of the appalling Nero, or more likely under the following Flavians, captures something of John’s delight and delicacy; or it would if we had a better translation, for ours is so stodgy as to be barely readable. We have to make a time-walk back into the Rome of the time, when there were over 150 festival days of the gods per year celebrated, and this did not include the days of Imperial Triumphs. Titus gave 100 days of triumph for his victory over the Jewish Revolt. Such events were enormous ritual celebrations with processions, pantomimes depicting the course of the war, Games with animal slaughter, and the ritual execution of the captured enemies. One million Jews died in the war, and a similar number were enslaved, their surviving leaders were ritually slaughtered at the triumph. We know that the Triumph of Titus and Vespasian given in the year 80 CE celebrating the completion of the Arch of Titus and the Colosseum, all depicting the downfall of the Jews, was one great orgy of celebration and feasting as Titus gave Rome its ‘recompense’ for all their lost lives. We have to imagine 30,000 in the Colosseum all shouting ‘Nika’ - ‘Victory’, as they received this tribute and paid their respects to the Emperor. Within two years Titus would be dead.
Now the author of Hebrews deliberately juxtaposes the ‘triumph’ of Christ against this picture of Roman brute force and depravity. Infinitely small and insignificant as the Christian sect was, he wanted the community to understand that whilst Emperors and their blood lusts come and go, what Christianity had on offer was lasting and eternal. Here, God himself has spoken to us through his Son, the one to ‘inherit everything’. Emperors, for all their clout, came and went and were forgotten; but Jesus is the universal creator, he is God’s perfect and complete image, the one who has ‘destroyed the defilement of sin’ he is the one supreme being who towers forever above all creation; and yet, the author makes clear is the one brought close to us and whom we worship; the one given to ordinary men and women, struggling Christians in Rome, to draw us into the divine life which is his. We today seem to be living in a period of exceptionally nasty dictators, not dissimilar to some Roman emperors, yet what we celebrate at Christmas, indeed, at every Mass, is Christ’s victory over the death and destruction and the collapse we are all so familiar with and which we fear. Hebrews stands firm to pronounce our ultimate place in God’s life, assurance that the victory is that of Jesus and we have no need to fear. Happy Christmas.
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