RICHARD CHARTRES

1,145 words

21 December 1996

The Guardian

RABBI Boteach's helpful contribution last week to this Advent series conveys a lively sense of the scandal of the Christmas story: "Is it possible that this child being held so lovingly in Mary's arms is really revered as the Creator of heaven and earth?" he asks. The story of the Nativity is a door into a faith which in the New Testament is described as foolishness to the cultivated Greeks and a scandal to the religious Jews. It still is.

My experience is that dialogue between the great religious traditions, if it is conducted with courtesy, rarely fails to illuminate aspects of one's own faith which are often obscured by familiarity. At the same time, dialogue can serve as a reminder of the large areas of common experience which believers in God share, and the gulf which separates them from the secular orthodoxy which has given birth to the world culture, dubbed by Ernest Gellner as "Consumer Unbeliever International."

In this culture the Christmas story has been domesticated, and like an old master under many layers of varnish, has lost its freshness. The scandal has been obscured as two lines of development reach a critical point. The humanisation of the divine and the divinisation of the human have both combined to eclipse the significance of the advent of the God-man.

The humanisation of the divine can be seen in many popular treatments of the Christmas story. The emphasis is not on the Nativity as the embodiment of the divine Word, but as a brilliant edition of universal human experiences. The wonder of childbirth and the spectacle of self-sacrificing maternal love are employed to evoke a warm emotional response. Christmas in this tradition is presented as a variation on the adage "hope springs eternal" only with some attractive spiritual decor.

The secular orthodoxy in which human beings are gods, "the masters and possessors of the earth" (Descartes) developed from Christianity. Many of the Church Fathers use the bold phrase that "God became man so that man may become god" but in course of time the promise has become detached from the condition that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."

The gulf between God and humanity may be obscure or meaningless for many secularists, but it can reappear disconcertingly. Despite the dreams of secular comfort and the potent myth of progress and human perfectibility, we are inescapably brought face to face with our limits. In a world permeated by death in which everything gravitates towards nothingness we either live life blindly, or we know anguish. However, in this anguish, there is a yearning for the eternal and for a communion which will overcome our isolation. This yearning can open our eyes to our own being, and can deepen our desire for unity with the One God. In contemplating our limits and our longing, our minds and hearts can be turned round and our grasp of reality transformed.

In the Church's yearly cycle of teaching, Advent is the season for meditating on the limits of our individual lives, and on our human life together on this planet. The Light which came into the world with the birth of Jesus Christ is invisible unless we are aware of the darkness and the limits of human life.

St John puts this starkly at the very beginning of his gospel. "He was in the world and the world was made by him and the world knew him not." I am convinced that the spirit-filled teachers and the Holy Scriptures are not among us to be intelligible to us while we remain as we are. On the contrary, they illuminate our darkness as a first step towards our recognising and embracing our true destiny as persons in communion with God.

The great world religions recognise the visitation of the "Word of God," God's communication with us, in various forms. For a number of ancient religions, and also for many of the groups loosely categorised as "New Age," the divine signature is deducible from the cosmos. Spiritual understanding grows with the perception of nature as the manifestation of God.

A SECOND embodiment of "Word" can be seen in the religions of the Book. The personal God who engenders history reveals himself in a Law and in a Sacred Scripture.

While related to both these traditions, Christianity also believes that "the Word became flesh" in the person of Jesus Christ. The personal incarnation of the Word gives full meaning to the cosmic and scriptural embodiments. The former is freed from the temptation to reduce God to an impersonal divine essence. The latter is freed from the temptation to separate God and humanity, leaving no possibility of communion between them.

Jesus reveals to us the human face of God. In the Nativity story we see God in the foolishness of love, coming as a vulnerable child so that we may accept him in all freedom. A Jewish-Christian text of the second century wonderfully expresses this humility of the incarnate God.

His love for me brought low his greatness.

He made himself like me so that I might receive him.

He made himself like me so that I might be clothed in him.

I had no fear when I saw him, for he is mercy for me.

He took my nature so that I might understand him, for he is mercy for me.

He took my nature so that I might understand him,

My face so that I should not turn away from him. (Odes of Solomon VII)

An experience of the birth of the Christ in our own lives and the possibility of profound communion with God comes through the Advent contemplation of the limits to human life, and a reliance, not on having but on being. Without Advent, the Incarnation is incomprehensible. "He came unto his own but they that were his own received him not" - because they were too busy drowning their sorrows in Yuletide festivity.