And so another year draws towards its close; another Advent leads us to the manger-side and, we are told, to the fruition of our hopes. Again the question is asked of us: do we believe that this small bemused knot of being, this wriggling, inarticulate bundle, this tiny brother to us, is the Son of God Almighty, is the answer to our prayers? This year has been as full as any other of gratuitous violence, of greed, of injustice, of licence, of untruth, of vandalism, of wrong-doing of both the red-hot and the cold and calculated varieties. It has contained illness, or frustration, or loneliness, or uncertainty. Or it seems to have allowed our own failures to have defeated us. And to live in Britain has been to observe continued cultural decline, even a new darkening of the national mood, as fundamental questions about the future of our country are exposed, some for the first time in centuries, and lacking any easy resolution; meanwhile, revolutions both moral and technological pose new challenges to human dignity even as their advantages seem irresistible to many. Even the talk of a ‘Quiet Revival’ in the churches can seem like small beer in the face of it all. Sometimes — indeed, often — we long, as the Israelites did, for Christ to come marching over the hills with a massed army, and liberate us by the sword.
But instead we find this child. This is the shock, the twist, the wit, of Christianity, and of its author: the idea that a baby will have the last word — that already He is the last word. Is this a joke? Well, perhaps in a way it is, in its sheer surprise, its drop-shot deftness. But not in its essence. For God takes His love seriously: He means exactly what He says and does. Any humour in the situation is at the devil’s expense, not ours. The idea alone — even to a sceptic, even as a proposition entertained merely for argument’s sake — is so shocking as almost to defy formulation in words: that God Himself (and not merely ‘a god’) should be born of human woman, should clothe Himself in our nature, compromised as it is, and take on our humanity entirely, even while remaining entirely Himself. The very idea that God should consider a human body fit for habitation — or at least that He should choose to make it fit for habitation simply by inhabiting it — shows us that here we are not dealing with spirit-worlds, or Pantheons, or icons of our desires, or even any normal human idea of God, but with a dramatic God outside our imaginings: not bribable or capricious or tyrannical, but careful yet surprising, gentle yet deliberate, many-dimensional, knowing His own mind: in other words, real. This Incarnation, this enfleshment — long before we even consider the Passion and the Resurrection — throws open the door of understanding to us. Now we see what God is really all about: it is this child, ostensibly needing us more than we need him, who is our longed-for liberator, whose conquest will be final and unanswerable.
It does not mean that we are wrong to ask for an end to the world’s evil. One day it will all indeed be defeated, and by this same minuscule right fist. Yesterday’s antiphon at the beginning of Mass, the penultimate of the Great Advent Antiphons, ‘O Rex Gentium’, assured us of this: of Christ’s ultimate supremacy over all things, including temporal, even if the opposition continues to work what havoc it can while it may. But the gift of a child, not a massed army, shows us that evil will be defeated not only in general but in minute particulars: not only the enormous wrongs with their towering pillars of smoke, but all the snide creeping erroneous whisperings that conspire in ourselves and in our nature. Hence the confidence and uncompromised serenity of the Star above Bethlehem, sign of the tiny child by whom all despair will be defeated and all loss made good. Hence, today, the final O antiphon, we acknowledge the true fulfilment of the old promise: ‘O Emmanuel’ — God with us, and far more closely than we can imagine.
Wishing all readers a very merry Christmas.
The choir of Ely cathedral sing David Willcocks’ arrangement of Prudentius’ hymn:
Of the Father’s heart begotten
Ere the world from chaos rose,
He is Alpha: from that Fountain,
All that is and hath been flows;
He is Omega, of all things
Yet to come the mystic Close,
Evermore and evermore.
By his word was all created;
He commanded and ’twas done;
Earth and sky and boundless ocean,
Universe of three in one,
All that sees the moon’s soft radiance,
All that breathes beneath the sun,
Evermore and evermore.
He assumed this mortal body,
Frail and feeble, doomed to die,
That the race from dust created
Might not perish utterly,
Which the dreadful Law had sentenced
In the depths of hell to lie,
Evermore and evermore.
O how blest that wondrous birthday,
When the Maid the curse retrieved,
Brought to birth mankind’s salvation,
By the Holy Ghost conceived,
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
In her loving arms received,
Evermore and evermore.
This is he, whom seer and sybil
Sang in ages long gone by;
This is he of old revealèd
In the page of prophecy;
Lo! he comes, the promised Saviour;
Let the world his praises cry!
Evermore and evermore.
Sing, ye heights of heaven, his praises;
Angels and Archangels, sing!
Wheresoe’er ye be, ye faithful,
Let your joyous anthems ring,
Every tongue his name confessing,
Countless voices answering,
Evermore and evermore.
Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (348–c. 410), tr. R. F. Davis (1866–1937)
