Light in Darkness

I.

Last night I mentioned an altar piece of Oberammergau in which the Trinity is shown deliberating this step, and how eternity got ready to embrace our temporality. Today we see that this is not only an interaction of time and eternity, but also a cosmic drama of light and darkness. Some of this we know from last night: the darkness of midnight mass was already penetrated by the light of the angels as they sang their Gloria in Excelsis. In old paintings, even the child Jesus radiates light into the faces of Mary and Joseph; sometimes the whole child seems to lighten up almost like a light bulb.

II.

In the Gospel of John we hear this message of light on a cosmic scale. There is nothing unusual in this even for the modern imagination: we think of the beginning of creation as a Big Bang, lighting up the whole world. And even modern physics is at a loss to explain where this material universe comes from, if not from a spiritual source; it cannot come from nothing. For Robert Grosseteste and other medieval thinkers, light is the border between spirit and matter; it is where spirit becomes manifest in matter.

For those of you who are musically inclined, you might want to think of Haydn’s oratory The Creation, where the chorus breaks out from quiet brooding in a sudden fortissimo chord on the very word “light:” and there was Light!

Before the Big Bang, there was no creation; and everything comes from God, the father of lights, and without him there is nothing. The Gospel must not be misunderstood: it is not that there is a realm of evil and darkness that would exist independently from God, or as if matter had a source in an opposing god of evil, as the Gnostics hold it. Yes, the light shines in the darkness, but darkness is merely the absence of light. And whatever exists is from God and made through the Divine Word that says: “let there be light.” When Jesus enters into this world he enters into what is his own. He does not enter into an alien realm or force that would be identified with matter; matter itself is created by God and is good. Without God there is only nothing, only the darkness; but evil is, when this darkness wants to close this world against its source and origin, against the Father of Lights, who has made all things and now sends his Son into the World in order to redeem it.

Not only is matter not evil, God himself takes it up when he assumes our nature, and becomes visible in the body of a little baby. That God enters our limitations shows us that limitations as such are not bad. Only God is unlimited, creation by its nature is limited, and there is nothing wrong with it. After all, God cannot create something unlimited without creating another God; but this God cannot be anything but he himself; there cannot be two infinite gods, otherwise both would be limited by each other. And so he does not create another God, but rather generates a Son, the Eternal Word; and this Word is God. It is this Son, however, who enters the world, beginning its transformation, in a dark place, in Bethlehem, in our limited human nature, so as to elevate our nature to his unlimited Self.

III.

Certainly, this will result in the clash with the sinfulness of fallen creation. Yet even the goodness of creation will be struggling with the creator’s presence. It is as if the director of a film has entered his own movie. It disrupts the illusions in which we are living. The camera is turned around, and we see where it all comes from. Do we want this, or is it disturbing?

He came to what was his own,
but his own people did not accept him.

Why did they not accept him? Certainly, the darkness of sin has closed the world to its creator. But even without sin, the world would have been shaken to its core, when the infinite light of God penetrated into the very heart of its material reality. The rest of history will be a struggle with this tension. Only in the end all of creation will be transformed into that light: in the heavenly Jerusalem there will be no night anymore. There will be no sun, because God himself will be our sun and our light. The walls of the heavenly Jerusalem are matter penetrated by light: they are crystal. And the sea will be a sea of glass, transparent and stable. Everything will be the space of his presence and light, and he will truly be in his own.

IV.

But in the meanwhile: how is it that the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary can contain her Creator? It is beyond comprehension. But then, how can our body contain our very own mind by which we are able to be present to far distant places and eternal truths?

Here is the invitation for us: we are to be pregnant with the Word, it is in our minds, too, that we are to contemplate the presence of God in human form.

In the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of San Francisco the apse shows a fresco, which depicts the Christ child in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary is the Seat of Wisdom, the one who makes a space for the Eternal Wisdom, the Divine Word in this world. This is an image of the contemplation of her later life: she kept all these words and moved them in her heart.

Our hearts and minds are places for the Word, places that cannot contain it. Yet they can meditate it and allow themselves to be caught up in it and to be made a New Creation, lit up by the light of God.

V.

Jesus is the beginning of that New Creation. He is the presence of a new Big Bang, but now within the old and darkened creation. That is why he is lighting up the manger, a radiating light reflected in the faces of all who stand around him, contemplating this incomprehensible wonder.

It is in the light of his face that our faces are lightened up.

We have an image of Jesus’ face in the Shroud of Turin, the burial cloth of Jesus. Scientists have said that at the resurrection the image on the Shroud of Turin was imprinted – on this piece of cloth – by a light that is comparable only to the Big Bang. This is astonishing; but we see this light not only at the resurrection. We see it already in that baby in the manger. This light is shining not only in the tomb, but already in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, bursting forth at Christmas.

It is a rather explosive mix, and the forces of darkness have tried to contain it ever since, beginning with Herod. And yet this explosiveness is not that of a violent cosmic force. It is rather the power of powerlessness; it is the light in the face of a little baby; it is the vulnerability of love that outrages the darkness.

VI.

It is in the light of his face that our faces are lightened up. Bl. Charles de Foucault tells the legend of a boy who encountered the Christ child on its flight to Egypt. This boy asked for the favor to hold the child Jesus for a while to see him more closely (and do imagine that: holding God in your arms!). And so he did. Later he came to a stream and saw his face reflected in the surface of the water. He discovered to his surprise the child’s features impressed on his own.

And this is how it should be with us: we should have a long look at the face of this child, at the face of God. We should allow him to impress his childlike innocence and humility on our own souls. Then we will forever be his children living before him, bearing his image and likeness, whatever else we might seem in the eyes of the world.

With this, our limitations are elevated to unlimited heights. As St. Irenaeus said: God became man so that man might become God. While we do not lose our limitations, meeting God is contagious. Seeing the light from the manger will, if you want, turn on the light bulbs in our minds as well. But this is not electric light; rather, it is the light of grace in our souls that makes us into a new creation; it replaces the old Adam in us with the new. It is the birth of Christ in our souls.

VII.

The great mystics of the middle ages distinguished a threefold birth of our Lord. Here is how the German Dominican Johannes Tauler puts it:

Today the church celebrates three births, each of which is such a source of joy and delight that we should break forth into jubilation, love and thanksgiving; and whoever does not feel such sentiments should mistrust himself. The first birth and the most sublime, is that whereby the Heavenly Father begets His only Son in the Divine essence, and in the distinction of the Divine persons. The second birth is that which made Mary a mother in virginity most pure and inviolate. The third is that by which every day and every hour God is truly and spiritually begotten in our souls by grace and love. These three births are shown forth by the three masses of Christmas Day.

Apparently, for Johannes Tauler the mass that we are celebrating right now is about the third of these three births. It is about God being “truly and spiritually begotten in our souls by grace and love.”

Without that grace, without Christ, Christmas is meaningless and joyless. That is why the commercial Christmas leaves us unsatisfied; we feel the aspirations of the eternal light, having penetrated our reality. Secular celebrations of this event perhaps survive longer in the mind of the world than Easter, because it requires less faith to believe that Christ was born than that he rose from the dead. Yet Christmas, too, will die without Christ. Not only Christmas, but all of our life, humanity as such becomes meaningless without God. If we are not made and remade in the image and likeness of God, if God did not restore us in his light, if we could not see his image in our own likeness, when we gaze at the child Jesus, then there is indeed no reason for the joy that the season invokes. It is the joy of children, the joy of youth, the joy that Pope Benedict pointed to in his Christmas address to the college of cardinals when he talked about the world youth days. It is this joy that is offered to us today, when we are to be remade and young again in God’s grace, becoming like the child in the manger.

And so what we want to take home from this celebration can in conclusion be said in the words of Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman:

Take these thoughts with you, my brethren, to your homes on this festive day; let them be with you in your family and social meetings. It is a day of joy: it is good to be joyful—it is wrong to be otherwise. For one day we may put off the burden of our polluted consciences, and rejoice in the perfections of our Saviour Christ, without thinking of ourselves, without thinking of our own miserable uncleanness; but contemplating His glory, His righteousness, His purity, His majesty, His overflowing love. Amen.