The Gospel Of Saint Luke, Chapter 2 | The Birth Of Jesus
Our Advent prayers recall Jesus and Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, the birth of Jesus, the story of the Nativity as handed down to us especially through the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It is such a wonderful, intimate story, of Mary and Joseph, two people whose lives would have been otherwise utterly obscure, lived out in a remote province of the Roman Empire, far from the centre of things, to whom something extraordinary is happening.
The Angel Gabriel has visited Mary, as we read in Luke’s Gospel, and an angel has visiting Joseph in a dream, as we read in Matthew. Into Mary’s and Joseph’s humble, provincial lives, there has been an invasion of fearsome higher powers beyond the reach of human comprehension to grasp. As they journey, as Mary and Joseph seek shelter, as Mary’s time is upon her, Mary is about to give birth to God. Our Lord Jesus Christ is ready to enter this world which was created through him. God’s loving plan for our salvation is to be realised. Through our Lord Jesus’ life we are to be redeemed.
The birth of Jesus to Mary in a place far from home is God’s defining intervention in history, and God’s personal entrance as a human being, God incarnate, into history. Christians express this truth of faith in the Nicene/Niceno–Constantinopolitan Creed, formulated in AD 325 and 381 – and then with variations between different Christian traditions. This is the text of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (the profession of the faith) as currently affirmed in English translation by the Church, as translated from the Latin text, which derives from the Greek and includes ‘Deum de Deo’ and the ‘Filioque’:
I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, formulated to bring unity, a clear core of Christian belief, to the fourth century Christian Church, clearly expresses Christian faith that Jesus is God the Son. In some ways, the Creed was designed to be a compromise between different people’s Christology, but at the core this is affirmed: Jesus is God the Son become incarnate as a human being. Both of these conditions, Jesus as God and Jesus as human being, are confessed to be required for our salvation.
The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed did not put an end to debate, indeed to conflict. We can understand why this might have been. There is deep mystery here. How can God – eternal, perfect, immutable, absolute good – become a human being, who is born, who needs to breathe and eat, who lives and grows and changes from day to day, who goes to the toilet? If Jesus is both God and man, how does that work – how was that during his lifetime with us?
We believe that Jesus, God the Son incarnate, was 100% human being and 100% God – not 50/50, and not a human being especially favoured by God and filled with his Spirit as he began his ministry, and not God masquerading as a human being, pretending to be human, putting on a show, while being really apart from our human condition in all essentials. As we read the Bible, our salvation works if Jesus is human and Jesus is God.
As we pray to Jesus, as we offer our prayers to and with Jesus, during the course of Advent as with Mary we anticipate Jesus’ birth, we recall our Bible readings of the whole of the Gospel, during which Jesus’ true identity is often veiled and then gradually revealed to his disciples. Our reading of all of the Gospels, the Synoptics as well as John, affirms through and through that Jesus is truly God the Son. This is why Jesus is able to reinterpret the Law – to amend, to change the Law. This is why Jesus is able to place himself at the heart of the Sabbath and perform his healing miracles there. This is why our Bible reading as a whole tends toward and reaches its summit in the figure of Jesus on the cross, and the glory there in this salvific moment of history, where Mary was once more with Jesus – Mary saw Jesus into this world, and she was present as they put him to death on the cross.
The sign of the cross is present as we contemplate Mary and Jesus in Bethlehem, the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ far from home. In the most unexpected way possible, defenceless, uncomfortable, making do, God has entered into His Creation as a human being. This is love. Jesus himself is love, as God is love. The life of Jesus has begun and with this we are all called. All can now be healed.
Our prayer to Jesus is an act of love. Through Advent, as always, we know that our prayer needs practice, in order that we might give ourselves in complete love, which is as God loves us and how Jesus gave himself when he was made incarnate. Through prayer, we ask to be able to love absolutely, to reciprocate Jesus’ love, to be with Mary as the handmaid of the Lord.
It is especially fitting during the Season of Advent that we look to Mary to teach us how to pray to and with Jesus. Mary gave herself, when the Angel Gabriel told her what was happening, to become the model of complete self-surrender and acceptance of the will of God. ‘Behold,’ she said, ‘the handmaid of the Lord.’ May we empty ourselves of all conceit, of all pride, of all self-importance – and then of all external distraction, so that we may adopt Mary’s attitude to God and to the birth of Jesus. This Christmas, may Christ be born is us anew.
Psalm 118 is a composite hymn of thanksgiving, combining elements of individual and communal praise. The psalm’s rich thematic tapestry encompasses deliverance, trust, prophetic fulfilment and joy. The psalm’s enduring message is its affirmation of God’s unfailing mercy and faithfulness – of hope and comfort across generations [ … ]
‘Death,’ says His Grace, ‘throws it all apart. For we are not as we should be. Faith requires our adjustment to God’s truth. God’s triumph in a very real sense requires in us the loss of our everything. Which, as with Mary at the other end of Jesus’s life, is God’s truth.’ The Gospel reading is of John 11: 1-45, which is a long passage, and His Grace’s homiletic theme commences in textual wilderness. Our brokenness – in this place – a family home. Our faith, our doubt, our death… The irruption – death, doubt, fear – within our precious scenes and our most intimate places. Our domesticity. His Grace speaks from the chair, as is a bishop’s prerogative, and says: ‘So much is obscure in the Gospels. We’re always reaching through them. We’re never there. Really, we never are. Our knowledge, our understanding, of the Gospels is never complete, and with each reading comes a new revelation. There are always new riches there. Just as there are between all of us, between myself and you. The Gospels are living texts. This is a part of the conversation we have with our own Christianity. It is a part of who we are in our relationship with Jesus. We are in this sense always on the brink. ‘So yes, there is plenty that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one of the order of bishops, we would be lying if we said that weren’t the case. They are not easy texts to encounter, if by that word we may signify something more than a superficial glancing off against, but rather a profound search for the word of God. The Gospels are written by people who had their own ideas, and often didn’t know what had really happened. Luke is quite explicit on this point. His is an investigation, from the explicitly claimed point of view of an historian, rather than that of a first-hand witness, who attempts, so he says, to set out an orderly account, out of the chaos, the sheer muddle, that has been handed down to him. It is possible to imagine Luke researching and composing his account after many years, when there has arisen a desire to know what exactly happened, and this implies a certain call to faith and certain demands of historicity, to historical exactitude. So in these different ways, the people of the first years of Christian faith are in the dark. There is also a decisive need to define the life of Jesus. And people didn’t get Jesus. The whole meaning of Christianity is only now beginning to take root throughout the composition. So much needs to be evangelized. The light shines almost in tentative fashion like that first star, which drew the wise men from the east to our Lord’s cradle. ‘John’s is widely held to be a very late Gospel. There are others who say that John’s Gospel might have been the first to acquire its true shape, because it most fully expresses Jesus, as we know him to be, as members of the Catholic Church. We don’t really know when any of this is being written, but we get a feel in John of a Gospel refined over many years, through a community. So there’s a lot going on there that I’d like you to think about. ‘What I would like to suggest to you is that, while within the Gospels we are often confronted with clues, guesswork, stories that have been handed down through so many people, and so in this sense we might find ourselves to be in the wilderness, this is the very desolate space itself to which we must give ourselves in order to experience Christ’s full redemption in our lives. I suggest it is for God’s glory that we do so. ‘As we become aware of ourselves, in this seminary, we find ourselves in a very secure, comfortable setting, and there are signs of Easter everywhere. Within the very fabric of these buildings, our Lord is risen; our Lord lives. But now this is our Lenten journey, where death enters, where death breaks us. We are to ride into Jerusalem in triumph, and then we are to be utterly broken, all hope gone, our hope extinguished. And really, I suggest to you, it is only by inhabiting this thought, as if we don’t know Easter is there, that our new life can follow, just when we have given up all hope, when every promise that Jesus made to us seems to have been cancelled. ‘And here now we have the story of Lazarus. I should like to suggest to you that we have a very powerful call now. In our very comfortable space, our domesticity, with all this comfort, where so very little might seem to happen each day, so it might seem to you, there is a disturbance within all of this comfort, and that is a disturbance within ourselves, and that is our call to Jesus. I think it is correct to say that our most comfortable places break in the light of Jesus from the inside, in order that we may take the necessary steps to be with Jesus. ‘Faith is not comfortable. I think that we can all receive the message of the rolling away of the rock from the tomb of Lazarus to say something of vital importance to ourselves concerning our openness to God’s love. The rock we roll away can come in all sorts of guises, but we know when we are blocked, and I firmly believe if we are truthful then we know where those blocks might be. ‘Next Sunday, which will be Palm Sunday, we process as it were to Jerusalem, to begin our Holy Week. Now as I speak to you we are on the brink. Even now, I suggest it might be very good for all of us to lay aside what we think we know, to fall apart a little, and so […]
Pope Saint Leo the Great continues his exposition of the Beatitudes, moving from the blessing on the poor in spirit to those pronounced on those who mourn and on the meek (Matthew 5:4–5). His reflections trace both the inner character of these dispositions and their eschatological fulfilment [ … ]
