I turned twenty-three two weeks before my first child was born. College graduation, marriage and childbirth; I sped from one milestone to the next. Our son was fat and pink. He smelled of breast milk and baby lotion. He smiled easily. He slept on my shoulder, his body molded to mine, his breath warm and sweet against my neck.
For the first weeks of his life, I gloried in him, but not in all the work he created and the mess he left in his tiny wake. So I found myself waiting. I was waiting for his mother — the REAL mother, THE ADULT, who knew how to change diapers and take a rectal temperature and didn’t mind devoting her life to such pursuits — to come and collect him. As day turned to night, I would glance towards the door. I didn’t want to miss her knock. She would compliment me on my babysitting skills and tell me what a good job I was doing.
“Look how he follows you with his eyes.”
“Doesn’t he hold his head up well!”
“He’s such a happy boy.”
Then, she would pay me and collect her infant and — here’s the important part — leave. With the baby. So that I could get back to my life, my actual life, the one in which I starred.
She never showed. There I was — after the showers were over and the flowers had wilted and the presents had all been opened and properly acknowledged with a note of thanks — with my new life, my actual life, my life for the rest of my life, my life as a mother.
There are people who love weddings, but hate being married. There are women who love being pregnant, but hate raising children. We all long for a day in bed, but no one wants to be sick. And who among us wouldn’t thrill to hear the fond remembrances and tearful farewells at our wake? Yet, nobody wants to die. Everyone loves Christmas, but most of us don’t want to follow Christ.
There’s the part we like and the part we don’t, but they can seldom be separated, for the ending is always there in the beginning. It’s always there, if we take the time to look; if we have the eyes to see. The baby, who pushes Mama’s hand away and uses her own chubby fists to shovel in the mashed bananas, provokes fond smiles from her parents. They might not smile if they understood what her gestures portend: The toddler cries of “Mine!” which proceed the adolescent cry, “Just leave me alone!” which proceeds the final leave taking. The adult child moving to make an adult life in a far away land — whether physically or emotionally distant — is right there in the infant struggling to sit and stand and walk on his own.
Christians want to linger at the crib, but the gospel for the First Sunday of Advent makes it clear we won’t be settling in there. We have another destination. Luke quotes Jesus, neither meekly nor mildly, telling his disciples:
People will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the world, for the powers in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.
And then, if we have any doubt that we’re not invited to a baby shower, on the Second Sunday of Advent, we meet John the Baptist, telling us that he, like the prophet Isaiah before him, has come “crying out in the desert,”
Prepare the way of the Lord,
Make straight his paths.
Every valley shall be filled
And every mountain and hill
shall be made low.
Hear those words sung often enough by a choir in a poinsettia-filled auditorium, and they begin to sound hopeful, even cheerful, part of some holiday tableau. But consider the images we have all seen in the last years of rain-eroded buildings sliding into valleys and hilltops “made low,” burned sere and bare by wildfires, and we understand how “people will die of fright” at this coming. Good news, but not easy news.
The end is there in the beginning. Both Jesus’ and John’s words in the Lucan Advent readings prepare us for the crucifixion. Here is Matthew’s description of Jesus death:
From noon onward, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon…Jesus cried out again in a loud voice and gave up his spirit. And behold, the veil of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked, rocks were split, tombs were opened, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised.
Just read that passage as part of a story and imagine standing in the middle of an earthquake. Imagine watching graves open up, as the dead within come out. And then try to imagine the whole scene as the cover of an Easter card: small girls in pastel dresses and white gloves surrounded by the newly liberated dead, all of them tossed on the heaving, splitting earth.
Then picture a Christmas card with an illustration of John the Baptist and his season’s greetings from Luke’s gospel on the Third Sunday of Advent,
I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming. I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear the threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.
Ho-ho-ho.
Just in the midst of our busiest shopping season, when the malls are filled with recorded songs about roasting chestnuts and silent nights, the church has John telling the crowds, “Whoever has two cloaks should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.”
John tells the tax collectors, “Stop collecting more than is prescribed,” and to the soldiers he says, “Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages.”
That last command alone could spell doom for the “make or break” Christmas shopping season.
We are given the Fourth Sunday of Advent and Mass at Midnight to concentrate on the baby. We see Mary walking into the hills of Judah, seeking her cousin, Elizabeth. When the infant in Elizabeth’s womb, the one we will come to call John the Baptist, hears Mary’s voice, the unborn child leaps for joy. It is the last time the word “joy” will be used to describe any action of that wild and holy man.
Then there is the beautiful mother holding her tiny child. Angels appear and glory shines from the heavens to the earth and good news of great joy — there’s that word again, a Christmas gift to us — is proclaimed to all people:
For today in the city of David a savior has been born for you who is Christ and Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.
We think we hear one thing — silver bells — when in fact, we are hearing steps on the road to Golgotha. The church knows this, too. This year, a scant six days after the Feast of the Nativity, we keep the Feast of the Holy Family. It is a familiar story: The adolescent child who knows better than his parents where he should be and what he should be doing and with whom he should be keeping company. The fact that this twelve year old really does know better than his parents, doesn’t lessen the hurt or fear or confusion for them.
Every parent knows Mary and Joseph’s stab of panic. “Where is he?” mother asks father, accusation and hope in her voice.
“I thought he was with you,” the accusation and hope volleyed back across the marital net.
These parents had traveled a day’s journey from Jerusalem before they noticed the boy missing. They search among their family and friends, in all the places he might be expected, but they do not find their son. He is gone.
Mary and Joseph leave the caravan and begin re-tracing their steps, back to the temple. They wonder what has become of their son, fearing precisely the places their imaginations long to wander, the places that will soon, too soon, become reality.
A slave trader? Those Roman soldiers? The deep well with the crumbling walls?
And, when they find him, their darling boy, their apprehension turns to anger. “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.”
But the boy rebukes them, saying, “Why are you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father’s house?”
The parents do not know, nor do they understand. They do know this is not the baby Mary wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in the manger. They may have found their son, but the baby is gone.
We face the same terrifying reality. No sooner have we turned out the lights on the Christmas tree and gone to bed in our new pajamas, than we awake on December 26th to the Feast of Saint Stephen, the first martyr. What does it cost to come to the crib and worship the One we find there? What does it cost to become one of the Comites Christi, one of the companions of Christ? As T.S. Eliot writes, it costs “not less than everything.”
The end is there in the beginning.
Within the week of Christmas, we keep the feasts of John, the imprisoned apostle and evangelist, and the feast of the murdered Bishop Thomas Becket, who opened the doors to his killers. Within the week of Christmas, we keep the feast of the slaughtered baby boys of Jerusalem, children the same age as the One before whose crib we kneel. A king searching for Jesus murdered those innocents. They were not themselves the target. They were collateral damage.
We think we hear one thing — silver bells — when in fact, we are hearing steps on the road to Golgotha.
How does the church keep these days in song? How do we acknowledge the days of Advent and Nativity and all — the grief and the glory — they hold? We would do well to consider the canticles given to those — John’s father, Zechariah, and Jesus’ mother, Mary — who stand near the center of the seasons of Advent and Christmas. Their songs, sung at the beginning of the story, point us to its end.
Zechariah’s song, the traditional canticle of morning prayer, celebrates the good news of John’s birth, the birth of Jesus’ herald. In this version, set to the traditional English tune, Forest Green, Zechariah sings the praises of God.
Blest be the God of Israel
who comes to set us free
And raises up new hope for us:
A branch for David’s tree.
So have the prophets long declared
that with a mighty arm
God would turn back our enemies
and all who wish us harm.
Good news: God comes — the Incarnation — to set us free. But contained in that phrase is the terrible truth: We are enslaved. It is only in the cross will we be freed. Long before Thomas Becket, we have the witness of Jesus, who keeps nothing for himself, not even his blood. It is this fierce love John the Baptist is called to proclaim.
My child, as prophet of the Lord
You will prepare the way,
To tell God’s people
they are saved from sin’s eternal sway.
Then shall God’s mercy from on high
Shine forth and never cease
To drive away the gloom of death
And lead us into peace.
Mary’s song, the Magnificat, is set by Joseph Gelineau to the 1956 Ladies of the Grail translation in a manner that captures the whole of the salvation story, from crib to cross to resurrection. The cantor sings,
My soul glorifies the Lord,
My spirit rejoices in God, my savior.
And the assembly responds, singing, “Alleluia.” So it goes through the hard words,
He casts the mighty from their thrones,
And raises the lowly.
He fills the hungry with good things,
Sends the rich away empty.
and the exultant:
My soul glorifies the Lord,
My spirit rejoices in God, my savior.
His mercy is from age to age
On all those who fear him.
The sung alleluias knit it all into a whole; good news, but not easy news.
There’s the part we like and the part we don’t, but they can seldom be separated, for the ending is always there in the beginning. It’s always there, if we have the eyes to see.
We are allowed time before the crib, but we are not allowed to live there. Just as Jesus is off, about his father’s business, so must we follow. The way from the crib to the cross is a hard one, but Mary reminds us that God “remembers his mercy.” Good news for us, who are in such need of mercy .
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