December 28, 2006
Place
Christmas 1C / Jn 1.1-18
T S Eliot suggested that the real meaning of exploration is to get back to the starting point “and know the place for the first time.”
His counsel seems altogether appropriate for Christmas. We always know, of course, or think we know exactly how this exciting story turns out. But it is still always an exploration into the unknown of ourselves and of tomorrow, for we really have never the foggiest notion about how all that will turn out.
Most of us heave a sigh of relief when Christmas is “over.” But Christmas is never over. It remains the most profound mystery for the life of faith and it is always a starting point to which we return and risk knowing “the place for the first time.”
But what kind of mystery is it? “There are mysteries which you can solve by taking thought. For instance, a murder mystery whose mysteriousness must be dispelled in order for the truth to be known.
“There are other mysteries which do not conceal a truth to think your way to, but whose truth is itself the mystery. The mystery of yourself, for example. The more you try to fathom, the more fathomless it is revealed to be. No matter how much of yourself you are able to objectify and examine, the quintessential living part of yourself will always elude you, that is, the part that is conducting the examination. Thus you do not solve the mystery, you live the mystery. And you do that not by fully knowing yourself, but by fully being yourself.
“To say that God is a mystery is to say that you can never nail God down. Even on Christ, the nails proved ultimately ineffective.” (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Harper & Row, p 64, 1973)
For this “light shines in the darkness,” John wrote of Christmas in the prologue of his great gospel, “and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn 1.5).
When he wrote this about Jesus, it’s safe to say he probably knew from nothing about light in the terms we call the quantum principle. [It is also safe to say that neither do I. Homiletic license, however, is often a sure route into indeterminacy and arrives there with the very best of them.]
Light, say the astrophysicists, can be either particle or wave, but never both at the same time. It always depends on the way you look at it. So does Christmas. So does Jesus. Both are always a matter of the mystery, an altogether holy ambiguity. One cannot stop Jesus and make him into a bangle on the Christmas tree and also follow him as Lord at the same time.
This Jesus Light shines, as well, into the darkness of our own uncertainties, our own mysteries. We can bring that dark path of our experimentation with life, disappointed as we often are, and even lay it before the bedecked and garnished Christmas altar. Standing there, we are free to look away from the often blinding light into another year of resolutions, another year of planning, another year of expectation… and only find more darkness.
Or we can embrace that Light to lead us forth into this new year, exploring with love and faith and all those other great risks of grace. We well remember in these days that questioning apostle Thomas, the one whose faith and doubt made him something of an amalgam of himself, and perhaps a mirror of ourselves. Jesus confronted him not as some orthodox system of thought or doctrine, nor some attempt to freeze and manipulate reality, nor some institution, but that he was, instead, “the way, the truth, and the life,” the very pattern for being human as God imagined all of us to be.
Christmas allows us and sometimes even inspires us that in returning to it again and again, we might quite possibly come as T S Eliot reminded us, to “know the place — and even know our Lord — for the first time.” Perhaps we will. And then may we discover how awesome, indeed, is the gracious and mysterious ambiguity of the holy set down here in our midst.