Every Eye Will See Him, G. Carol Bomer
collaged pages of an old Pilgrim's Progress, acrylic, medium, on canvas (22"x24")
Lectionary Texts for December 25, Christmas Day
These passages place the Christmas celebration in the context of history and the eternal Trinity. If Jesus is indeed the Word made flesh and if God communicates to people through the Word, we do well to re-visit exactly who Christ is to know what God is trying to communicate through the incarnation. In the passages for Christmas day, we see that:
- Jesus is the victory of God.
- Jesus is comforter and redeemer.
- Jesus is the heir and creator of all things.
- Jesus is life and light.
- Jesus is grace and truth.
- Jesus gives the power to become children of God.
As Christmas is usually a time of celebration, I read these passages with those glasses on. What are we celebrating? It seems like the reasons are many, prompting us to sing with the psalmist, "Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things!" The gift we receive is not the revelation of something new, but the revelation of something that has been present all along--indeed something that is the source of all life.
These texts make me think of the opening passage of Robert Farrar Capon's Fingerprints of God, in which the Holy Spirit, Jesus and God are sitting around before the creation of the world smoking cigars, drinking scotch and going over one more time how this whole redemption thing is going to play out. God and Jesus think that the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection at a fixed point in history are the way to go. However, the Spirit has some qualms, given the nature of human beings as linear thinkers. The Spirit believes that it will be difficult for humans to realize that redemption has been occurring through Jesus from the very beginning--indeed before and above and through and beside and below all of time. The Spirit argues,
Just think what they'll do with a Jesus who stays in history for only thirty-three years. Even if I get John to say that he's the Word who made everything from the beinning, they'll probably imagine him as a pot of holy soup we delivered too late for a good many of our customers. And after they've jumped to the conclusion that the Word wasn't present to anyone who lived before Jesus, they'll leap to the even more dreadful notion that nobody who lived after him can have his benefits until their assorted churches get him canned, marketed and distributed to them.
Since the Spirit's alternate suggestion--an image of the Son hiding in an ever-replenishing box of chocolates in every home--was turned down, we now must discern the revelation of God through the incarnation.
Since the incarnation of God blows the lid off everything we know in a quantifiable, scientific way, it seems like Christmas should be a time to celebrate mystery, to thank God for all we do not and cannot know. We often use the term "word" to describe the bound book that we can hold in our hands, but John is using the term here in a much more expansive way. Jesus is the Word who was, is and shall be forever and ever! Capon writes,
Strictly speaking, the Bible isn't just a book; it's the voice of the Word himself speaking in and to the church. It's the sacrament of a Person really present, not simply a collection of his words faxed in.... The Word speaks all things into being at the beginning. But then, when his creatures deface the world by contradicting his speaking (by denying their own natures as he has spoken them), the Word just keeps on talking. At the very instants of their contradictions, without a single throat-clearing or a moment's hesitation, he counterspeaks their contradiction in his same, original voice. In him, creation and redemption are one act; both have always been going on full force in everything.
The Bible, Capon contends, ought to be read like a mystery story, as opposed to an operating manual or an account of God's emergency measures to patch up a broken humanity. In reading Scripture like a mystery story, we can follow the technique of any good detective in looking for fingerprints, that is, seeking out the unique evidence of self God has left throughout all of human history, up to the present time. Capon writes that, in spite of all of our efforts to scientifically explain and identify the historic person of Jesus Christ,
The Incarnate Word, in all his guises (early or late, fetching or not) remains the star of the show who has left at least the mark of his thumb on every act. And the Holy Spirit has handled it so thoroughly that the whole of it bears witness to the "Finger of the Hand Divine," who never wrote anything but the same old story: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. The only thing we need to do is gaze long enough at those fingerprints to trust the three Persons who left them--and then to let our love answer theirs as best we can.
If we use this year's festival as a celebration of mystery, we would do well to celebrate by indulging our imaginations and channeling all of our love and doubt and knowledge and uncertainty and questions into praise of that which we do not understand, but which we sense is graciously pulling us to itself.
