+ ‘Sacrifices you have not desired but a body you have prepared for me’
Jesus and Santa walked into a bar, ordered drinks and looked sad. Santa said, I started this nice festival of showing your love for people by giving them little gifts but people have turned it into an orgy of greed and commercialism and they forget that I am actually St Nicholas. Jesus looked at him sadly and said, ‘hold my beer…’ let me tell you what they’ve done with my birthday.
It’s easy to moan about the commercialisation of Christmas but much more useful to do something about it in our families, in making space for Church, and in our gift-giving. Christmas is a precious time in the Christian calendar where our celebration chimes in with the secular world’s and we have a chance to share the Christian message. It is also a time where we can see that Christianity is not a puritanical, world-denying death cult (if you want that…). Because God is creator as well as redeemer, all good things in the world can be sanctified and used for the glory of God. That includes Christmas trees, Christmas lights, mid-winter festivals, gift-giving, singing and food. On this, I’d rather be a pagan than a puritan.
Advent changes gear about now. It’s focus is more and more on Christmas. Our first hymn, ‘O come, O come Emmanuel’ is made up of what are called the ‘Great O Antiphons’, which run from 17 Dec to Christmas Eve and all start with ‘O’ before one of the great OT titles of Christ. These antiphons are short prayers sung before and after the Magnificat at Evensong. The Magnificat, Mary’s song while she is pregnant, is in our Gospel today and we have already sung it. She is important.
Today, on the 4th Sunday of Advent, each year our attention turns to Mary, Jesus’s mother. In the first reading we heard the prophet Micah talk about the little town of Bethlehem and a woman giving birth to the Messiah. In the Gospel we see that very woman, Mary, going to visit her cousin Elizabeth and singing her song about the world turned upside down – lifting up the lowly and casting down the powerful. But I want to look at the words with which I began.
They are from our second reading from Hebrews which starts, ‘When Christ came into the world he said, ‘Sacrifices you have not desired but a body you have prepared for me’. God is not primarily interested in stuff done by us, our sacrifices and good deeds, or in the cold self-righteousness of the puritans. Instead God has done something – he has chosen a woman, asked her consent, then become a human individual in her womb. This is Christmas and it involves consent. No Mary, no Christmas. If Mary said ‘no’ to God, no Christmas. No Christ, no Christmas; but no Mary, no Christ and therefore no Mass of Christ. The Church gives us Mary today in the readings to show what Christmas is about – and we will explore this later today at our Carol Service.
Christmas is basically about God having a body, the body of Christ. This is a really weird idea. Jesus says in Hebrews, ‘a body you have prepared for me’ and it goes on to say that in this body Jesus did God’s will which led him to the cross – ‘the offering of the body of Jesus Christ’. When I say to you later ‘the body of Christ’, this is what these words mean.
Christianity is not a puritanical, world-denying death cult. All good things in the world can be sanctified and used for the glory of God because God is creator and because Good took a body to be our redeemer. At Christmas we celebrate the fact that Jesus (God) has a body, and by his body all the stuff about our bodies and other material things are given ultimate value. That includes Christmas trees, Christmas lights, mid-winter festivals, and showing love by gift-giving, singing and food.
Thanks to Mary, and thanks to God giving her a choice to consent in our salvation, Christianity is about the body as well as the soul. It is a world affirming, world transforming cult of life. Even in the uncertainty of a pandemic may your Christmas, and your life with family and friends, reflect this. And this shows the importance of receiving the Body of Christ in Holy Communion on Christmas Day. It is not a godly bit in the midst of pagan festivities but the secret heart of the festival and the bit that gives meaning to all the rest.
