The Holy Potential of Life's Plains and Plateaus (Christmas Day)

Readings, Isaiah 52:7-10 and John 1:1-14
Image, Mystic Nativity, Sandro Botticelli (1501)
 
At the end of that gospel reading, we hear the meaning of Christmas in brief: And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. Jesus, the eternal word of God, through whom all things came into being has come as a human being. Jesus, the light and life of all people, has been born among the people. Jesus, beginningless, now born, has a common beginning. Jesus, who held the world’s potential within him, is now in the world.
 
Christmas represents the loving convergence of divinity and humanity in the person of Christ. Christ united these two natures within himself, but he did not do it for himself, he did it for us, all of us, the great us of humanity (indeed, we might go further and say the great us of creation). Because in the Incarnation, the uniting of God and man, Christ takes up all of humanity, all creation, and unites it with God. It is this union, achieved by Christ, which inspire the wondrous words of Paul: nothing can separate us from the love of God.
 
All this is true, and serves as the bedrock of the Christian faith, but there is something more to emphasise here. And the Word became flesh and lived among us – as we have said this is the binding of humanity and divinity, the opening of salvation, the power by which we become children of God. But let us contend momentarily with all that living among implies. Because this is not only what happens at Christmas – serving symbolic and salvific ends. Christ lived among us for thirty something years, and what we get in the gospels is only a slither of that. This is not to imply that there is some secret additional knowledge squirreled away out of sight of the gospel writers; their accounts provide what is needed to see Christ’s glory. What it does mean is quite the opposite really. What is not recorded of the lived among us is not the special or monumental, but the ordinary, mundane, and everyday. The feedings, the bath times, the toothaches. The learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to look both ways. The laughter with friends, the frustration with family, the contemplation of solitude. The common meals of common days, that accrue across the slow passage of time unremembered that makes up a human life. The Word became flesh and lived these kinds of days and moments among us too.
 
And in doing so, in not just dropping in full grown, incorporating human nature and then zipping off again, the uniting of humanity with divinity means that the very ordinariness of human life is made holy, is given significance, is experienced by and taken up into divine life. It is often said of life that it is made up of hills and valleys – and Christ certainly experienced plenty of those extremities. But life has a lot of plains and plateaus, and while we don’t spend much time with them in the gospels, we know Christ lived these as well. It is not only the highpoints and low ebbs of human life that are taken up into God’s own, but the great mass of ordinary days.
 
Which means that it is not only the celebratory joy of Christmas and Easter where we may encounter Christ’s glory, but all through our years. The unremarkable stuff of life holds the same potential to be full of grace and truth. All moments carry the potential to reveal Christ’s glory, because Christ, as true light enlightens every moment, because he has lived among us in these moments.
 
So as we come to another Christmas, and soon a new year (at least as the Gregorians would have it) we might resolve to seek in the plains and plateaus of the everyday to receive the grace and truth of God, to receive a little bit of the light and life of all people, to receive a little of the promise that our humanity is united with Christ’s divinity. The feedings, the bath times, the toothaches. The learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to look both ways. The laughter with friends, the frustration with family, the contemplation of solitude. The common meals of common days, that accrue across the slow passage of time unremembered that makes up a human life. The Word who became flesh and lived these kinds of days and moments among us, is with us in these moments still. And the more we come to receive his grace and truth in these ordinary days, the more easily we shall hear, when we need it most, the good news of great joy that we have become children of God.