THE NATIVITY
She brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in
swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there
was no room for them in the inn.
S. Luke II. 7.
It is very meet to bless thee who bore the Christ, O ever
Blessed and Immaculate Mother of God. More wondrous than the
Cherubim and of greater glory than the Seraphim art thou who
remaining Virgin didst give birth to God the Word. Verily, do
we magnify thee, O Mother of God. In thee, O full of grace,
all creation exults, the hierarchy of angels and the race of
men. In thee sanctified temple, spiritual paradise, glory of
virgins, of whom God took flesh, through whom our God Who was
before the world became a Child. Of thy womb He made a
throne, and its dominion is more extensive than the heavens.
In thee, O full of grace, all creation exults: glory to thee.
RUSSIAN.
We see a man and a woman on the road to Bethlehem where they are going
to be taxed according to the decree of Augustus. Bethlehem would be
known to them as the home of their ancestors, for they were both of the
lineage of David. It was a painful journey for them for Mary was near
the time of her delivery. We follow them along the road and into the
village, as the twilight fades, and see them seeking shelter for the
night. Bethlehem is a small place and the inn is crowded with those who
have come on the errand with them, and the only place where they can
find refuge for the night is a stable. But they are not used to luxury,
and the stable serves their purpose.
It also serves God's purpose. One understands as one reads this
narrative of the Nativity what is meant by the Providential government
of the world. We see how various lines of action, each free and
independent, yet converge to the production of a given event. The
different characters in the drama are all pursuing their own courses and
yet the result is a true drama, not an unrelated series of events.
Caesar's action, Joseph's lineage, our Lord's conception, all working
together, bring about the fulfilment of prophecy by the birth of the
Messiah in Bethlehem. There is in the universe an over-ruling will which
works to its ends by co-operating with human freedom, and not
destroying it. We are not the sport of chance, not the slaves of fate,
but free men; and yet through our freedom, through our blunders and
rebellions and sins as well as through our obedience, the work of God is
moving to its conclusion. Man did all that he could to defeat the ends
of God and to thwart God's purpose of redemption. Yet on a certain night
in Bethlehem of Judea the light of God overcame the human darkness, and
the voices of God's angels pierced the human tumult, and Jesus Christ
was born. "God of the substance of his Father begotten before all
worlds, man of the substance of his mother, born in the world; perfect
God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting."
The manifestation came to certain shepherds watching their flocks in the
fields about Bethlehem; simple men, quite unable to take in the meaning
of what they see and hear. One cannot help thinking of what it would
have meant in the way of an intellectual revolution if to some Greek or
Roman philosopher, speculating on the destiny of humanity, the truth
could have come that the future of the world was not in the court of
Augustus, that it was not dependent on the Roman armies or Greek
learning, but that it was bound up in the career and teaching of a Baby
that night born in a stable in an obscure village in Judea. As we
imagine such a case we see in the concrete the meaning of the revolution
set in motion by this single event; and we are led to adore the ways of
God in that He has chosen for the final approach to man for the purpose
of redemption, this way of simplicity and humbleness. Man would not
have thought of this as the best path for God to follow in this purpose
of rescue, but we can be wise after the event and see that this Child
born in poverty and obscurity would have fewer entanglements to break
through, fewer obstacles to overcome.
But these thoughts are far away from the night in Bethlehem. In the
stable there where a Baby is lying in Mary's arms and Joseph stands
looking on, there is no speculation about the world-consequences of the
event. There is rather the splendour of love: the love of the mother in
the new found mystery of this her Child; the love of God who has given
her the Child. And all is a part of the great mystery of love, of the
love wherewith God loves the world. "God so loved the world that He gave
His only begotten Son." Here is the Son, lying in Mary's arms, wrapped
in swaddling clothes, and Mary looks into His face as any human mother
looks into the face of her child. But through the eyes that smile up
into Mary's face, God is looking out on a world of sorrow and pain and
sin that He has come to redeem, and for which, in redeeming it, to die.
Presently, the shepherds come in and complete the group, the
representatives of universal humanity at the birth of their King, We
have the whole world-problem in small, but here there is no
consciousness of it. No echo of world-politics or of movements of
thought break in here. But we know that here is the beginning of that
which will set at naught world-politics and revolutionise movements of
thought, that here is the centre about which humanity will move in the
coming time. Here is that which is fundamental and abiding because here
is the one invincible power of the universe--love. All else will fail:
prophecies, systems of philosophy, religions, political and social
structures; each in the time of its flourishing, proclaiming itself the
last word of human wisdom,--these in bewildering succession have arisen
and passed away. But love has survived them all. Love never faileth;
through the slow succession of the centuries it is winning the world
to God.
It were well if we could learn to look on the happenings of this world
as the miracles of divine love. We think of the power, the justice, the
judgment of God as visible in this world's history; but these are but
the instruments of love, and all that He does has its foundation in love
and receives its impulse from love. This Nativity is the divine love
coming into the world on its last adventure, determined to win man, all
other means failing, by the extremity of sacrifice. The final word about
this Child will be that having loved his own He loved them unto the
uttermost, he loved them without stinting, with the uttermost capacity
of love. Understanding this meaning of the love of God, we are prepared
for the further fact that God uses all sorts of instruments as the
instruments of His love. He shares Himself. He pours Himself into human
life. He takes men into partnership in the work of redemption. Whenever
a soul is mastered by love, it becomes a tool in God's hands. The
progress of the Church--of God's Kingdom--might be described as the
accumulation of these tools wherewith God works--souls who are so
devoted to Him as to be the medium of bringing His power, the power of
love, to bear on the souls of their brethren.
To be the highest, the most perfect, of all the instruments of
redemption God chose Mary of Nazareth to be the Mother of His Son. She
is the most complete human embodiment of God's love. She, in her perfect
purity, can transmit that love as power with the least loss of energy in
the process of transmission. When we think of the saints as the means of
God's action, we think of blessed Mary as the highest of the saints and
the means most perfectly adapted to God's ends. Here at Bethlehem she
holds God in her arms and looks into the human face that He has taken
for this present work and all her being is absorbed in love. Oblivious,
we think her, of her mean surroundings, of the animals that share with
her their stable, of the shepherds who come in and look on in wonder, of
S. Joseph standing by in sympathy. Love is all. Love is a passion
consuming her being--what can the attendant circumstances matter? And
to-day, after all these centuries: to-day the Child is the Ascended and
Enthroned Redeemer, His risen and glorified humanity, transmitting
something of the divine glory, seated at the right hand of the Majesty
of God. And Mary, the Mother? Can we have any other thought than that
she who on the first Christmas morning looks into the face of her Baby,
still, to-day, looks up into the face of her divine Son, and the look is
the same look of love? And can we think of the look that comes back to
her from eyes that are human, taken from her body, though they be in
very truth the eyes of God--can we think, I say, of the eyes of her
Child and her God bringing anything else than the message of love? Can
we think that when in answer to our invocation she presents our prayers
in union with her own, that love will fail?
But let us come back to earth--to Bethlehem--on that first Christmas eve
and listen to the songs of the angels as they sing over the star-lit
fields. How near heaven seems! How real is God! How joyful is this
season of peace to men of good will! The message is of peace, but that
peace will need to have its nature explained in the coming years if
men's hearts are not to fail them and their faith wither away. It is not
a general peace to the world that is being proclaimed. Later on our Lord
will say: "My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I
unto you." It is such a gift as can be enjoyed only by men of good will;
converted men, that is to say, men whose will is close set with the will
of God. For how should there be peace in any world on any other terms?
How can there be peace for those who are in rebellion against God? Our
Lord can promise peace, and can fulfil His promise because He is
bringing a new potency into human life. He is a new way of approach to
God, a new way into the Holiest of all. Through His humanity God is
united to man, and through it man, any man, can be united to God. And
one of the results of that union is this gift of peace, and the fact
that it arises from the union explains its new character, why our Lord
calls it His peace.
This peace is the Christmas gift of the divine child to us. This is the
method of God's work, from the inside out; from the spiritual fact to
its external result. We do not begin by finding peace with this world:
"in the world ye shall have tribulation." And most of the failure to
attain peace, and much of men's loss of faith is due to repudiation of
the divine method. We live in a disordered and pain-stricken world where
human life is uniformly a life of trial and struggle, and our easy
yielding to temptation is an attempt at some sort of an adjustment with
the world such as we think will produce peace and quiet. We constantly
demand of religion that it should effect this for us. So far as one can
see much of the revolt against religion to-day has its ground in the
failure of religion to meet the demands made upon it for a better world.
Men look out on a world seething with unrest and filled with injustice,
and they turn upon the Church and ask, "Why have you not changed all
this? Are you not, in fact, neglecting your duty in not changing it? Or
if you are not neglecting your duty, you must at least confess to your
impotence. Your self-confessed business is to make a better world."
True; but only on the conditions which love imposes. Religion does not
propose to improve the world by a more skilful application of the
principles of worldliness. It does not propose to turn stones into bread
at the demand of any devils whatsoever. It does not say, "If you will
support me and give me a certain superficial honour, I will bless your
efforts and increase the success of your undertakings." Religion
proposes to improve the world on the condition that the principles of
religion shall be accepted as the working principles of life; on
condition, that is, that love shall be made the ground of human
association. Religion can make a better world, it can make the kingdoms
of God and of His Christ; but it can only do so on the condition that it
is whole-heartedly accepted and thoroughly applied. The proof that it
can do this is in the fact that it can and does make better individuals.
Wherever men and women have lived by the principles of the Gospel they
have brought forth the fruits of the Gospel. It has done this, not under
some specially favourable circumstances, but it has done it under all
circumstances of life and in all nations of men. What has been done in
unnumbered individual cases, can be done in whole communities when the
communities want it done. It is quite pointless in times of great social
distress to ask passionately, "why does not God make a better world?"
The only question which is at all to the point is, "why has God not made
_me_ better?" The problem of God's dealing with the world is, in
essence, the problem of God's dealing with me. If He has not reformed
me, if I do not, in my self-examination, find that I am responding to
the ideals of God, as far as I know them, there is small point in
declamations about the state of society. Society that is godless, is
just a mass of godless individuals; and I can understand why God does
not reform the world perfectly well from the study of my own case. What
in me prevents the full control of God is the same that prevents that
control over the whole of society: and I know that that is not lack of
knowledge, but lack of love. Men ignore the primary obligation of life:
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God ... and thy neighbour as thyself." As
long as they ignore that, there can be no reformed world, no world
reflecting the divine purpose, no society,--whatever may be its widely
multiplied legislation,--securing to men conditions of life which are
sane and satisfactory.
Therefore the Child who is born of Mary in Bethlehem while the angels
are singing their carols over the fields where the shepherds watch, the
Child Who brings peace to men of good will, still, after nearly two
thousand years, finds His gift ignored and His longing to lift men to
God unsatisfied. "He came unto His own and His own received Him
not"--and the conditions are not vitally changed to-day. When we think
of a world of fifteen hundred million human beings, the number of those
who profess and call themselves Christians is comparatively small; the
number of actually practicing Christians, of men and women who do live
by the Gospel, without reserve and without compromise, is vastly
smaller. The resistance of the principles of the Gospel is to-day
intense; the demand for compromise is insistent. We are asked to throw
over a system which has obviously failed, and to accept as the
equivalent and to permit to pass under the same name a system which is
fundamentally different; a system whose end is man and not God, whose
means are natural and not supernatural, which seek to produce an
adjustment with this world that means comfort, rather than an adjustment
with the spiritual world which means sanctity.
The ideal achievement of peace is here in Bethlehem where the mother
holds the Holy Child to her breast, while her spirit is utterly in union
with Him Who is both man and God. There is never any break in the pure
peace of S. Mary because there is never any moment when her will is
separated from the will of God, when her union with Him fails. This
peace of perfect union has, through the merits of her Son, been hers
always; she has never known the wrench of the will that separates itself
from God. She has always been poor; she has been perplexed with life;
she has suffered and will suffer intensely, suffer most where she loves
most; but peace she has never lost, because her will has never wavered
in its allegiance. What visibly she is doing in these moments of her
great joy, holding God to her breast in a passion of love, she in fact
is doing always--always is she one with God.
That undisturbed peace of a never broken union is never possible for us.
We have known what it is to reject the will of God and go our own way
and indulge the appetites of our nature in violation of our recognised
standards of life. If we are to come to peace it must be along the rough
road of repentance. And it is wholly just that it should be so; that we
should win back to God at the expense of shame and suffering; that we
should retrace the road that we have travelled, with weary feet and
bleeding heart. This after all does not much matter: what does matter
immensely is that there is a road back to God and that we find it. What
matters is that we discover that repentance and reformation are the only
road to peace. We are offered many other roads alleged to lead to the
same place; but not even a child should be deceived by the modern
substitutes for repentance, by the shallow teaching whereby it is
attempted to persuade men of the innocence of sin. They are never worth
discussing, these modern substitutes for repentance. Men accept them,
not because they are rational or convincing, but because they offer a
justification for going the way that they have already made up their
minds to go. But it is plain that whatever else they do they do not
afford a basis for peace. They are no rock foundation for eternity.
Other foundation for peace can no man lay or has laid than the
acceptance of the salvation offered in Jesus Christ. He is our peace;
and when we discover that, He makes peace in us by the application to
our souls of the Blood of His Cross. This is the peace He came to bring.
This the peace that the angels announced as they sang over Bethlehem.
This is the peace which is ceaselessly proclaimed from the altars of the
Christian Church, the peace of God which passeth understanding, the
peace which is offered to all men of good will.
How shall we attain it? By being men of good will, plainly. But what
constitutes good will in a man? That which I have already discussed,
perhaps abundantly, simplicity and childlike obedience of character. S.
Joseph, the guardian of Mary and her Child here in Bethlehem, is the
best example we can have of a man of good will, a man who under the most
difficult circumstances responded with perfect readiness and complete
obedience to the heavenly message that came to him. This is to be his
course through the few years that he will live, to give himself to the
will of God in the care of Jesus. We are men of good will if we do
whatsoever our Lord says to us, if we are seeking first of all the
Kingdom of God and its righteousness, if our estimate of values
corresponds to our Lord's.
There is our trouble--that old trouble of feebly trying to live the life
of the Kingdom when what we actually want is the offer of this world.
There is, there can be, no peace in a divided life. There is a certain
spiritual sloth which has the exterior look of peace, as a corpse looks
peaceful, but it has no relation to the peace which God gives. It is in
fact the wages of sin, wages easily earned and long enjoyed. But so long
as we are spiritually alive, so long we cannot enjoy whole-heartedly
even the most fascinating of sins because there is lurking in the
background the sense of the transitoriness of our sin and of the
imminence of death and judgment. There is the skeleton in every man's
closet until he finally makes choice on one side or the other. For we
are not ignorant of the spiritual obligations of life. We always know
more than we have achieved. When we talk about our ignorance and
perplexity, we are not meaning ignorance and perplexity about the
obligation to live in a certain way, and to perform certain duties, on
this particular day: rather we are making this alleged ignorance of the
future an excuse for not taking action in the present, action which we
know to be obligatory.
And peace is so wonderful a gift! To feel oneself in harmony with God,
to know that one is carefully seeking His will and making it one's first
and highest duty to perform it. To have found the peace of the forgiven
soul as the result of absolution, at the expense of much shame and
repugnance, it may be, but with what marvellous compensations when we go
away with a sense of restored purity and the friendship of God--life
looks so different when we look at it through purified eyes! The old
life has held us so tightly, the old sins have clung so close; and then
there was a day when we gave up self and turned to God and the Gift of
God in Jesus Christ; and then we saw how miserable and vile and naked we
had been all through the time of our boasted freedom; and we came as
children to Mary's Child and offered ourselves to Him for cleansing. We
kneel and offer to Him our wills and ask that they may be made good, and
kept good in union with His most holy will. Then we find how true this
word is: "In Me ye shall have peace: in the world ye shall have
tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." It is
true, is it not? not only as we commonly interpret, that the disciples
of Christ shall have tribulation in this world; but that much that we,
giving ourselves to the world, counted joy, was in reality tribulation,
and we are glad to be rid of it.
A babe is born to bliss us bring.
I heard a maid lulley and sing.
She said: "Dear Son, leave Thy weeping:
Thy, Father is the King of bliss."
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.
"Lulley," she said and sung also,
"My own dear Son, why are Thou wo?
Have I not done as I should do?
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.
"Nay, dear mother, for thee weep I nought,
But for the woe that shall be wrought
To Me ere I mankind have bought.
Was never sorrow like it i-wis."
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.
"Peace, dear Son! Thou grievest me sore:
Thou art my child, I have no more.
Should I see men mine own Son slay?
Alas, my dear Son, what means all this?"
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.
"My hands, Mother, that ye now see,
Shall be nailed to a tree;
My feet also fast shall be,
Men shall weep that shall see this."
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.
"Ah, dear Son, hard is my happe
To see my child that lay in my lap,--
His hands, His feet that I did wrappe,--
Be so nailed; they never did amisse."
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.
"Ah, dear Mother, yet shall a spear
My heart asunder all but tear:
No wonder if I care-ful were
And wept full sore to think on this."
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.
PART TWO