And it was told the king of Jericho, “Behold, certain men of Israel have come here tonight to search out the land.” Then the king of Jericho sent to Rahab, saying, “Bring forth the men that have come to you, who entered your house; for they have come to search out all the land.” But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them; and she said, “True, men came to me, but I did not know where they came from; and when the gate was to be closed, at dark, the men went out; where the men went I do not know; pursue them quickly, for you will overtake them.” But she had brought them up to the roof, and hid them with the stalks of flax which she had laid in order on the roof. So the men pursued after them on the way to the Jordan as far as the fords; and as soon as the pursuers had gone out, the gate was shut.

Before they lay down, she came up to them on the roof, and said to the men, “I know that the Lord has given you the land, and that the fear of you has fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land melt away before you.

–Joshua 2:2-9

There's a wonderful sense of space and light in pine woodlands, those impossibly tall trunks stretching ever skyward to the clouds. As I walked this quiet path the morning sun burned off the mist and made the distance glow, tempting me on further and further, dwarfed by giants. pic.twitter.com/uzR7EQuPcB

— peaklass (@peaklass1) January 5, 2024

From there:

‘Years ago when I served at a church in New York City, I used to hang around with some urbane literary types, most of them disdainful of religion. I have never forgotten one conversation I had. The man in question, knowing I was a priest of the church, made a confession to me. He told me very sheepishly that he had done something behind his wife’s back. Apparently she had long since banished every hint of religion from their household. She held Christian faith in contempt, as a relic of a superstitious and unenlightened era. Church, of course, was out of the question. Her husband told me that he found himself so longing to hear the story from St. Luke that he smuggled a small King James Bible into the bathroom, locked the door, and read it to himself. That’s a true story. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Do you think that his wife would have required him to take “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” into the bathroom? Or “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”? Or Dickens’ A Christmas Carol? It’s something to think about, isn’t it? The only Christmas story that has something transcendent about it is Luke’s. That’s why it continues to have a hold on people. God is in this story. Something greater than the birth of a baby is here. This is a story about something mysterious, something ultimate.’

Merry Christmas!

(The Nativity by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621-1674)) pic.twitter.com/nA4YXYODml

— Brant Law (@Mr_BLaw) December 25, 2021

Christmas teaches us this great mystery: the truth of Trinitarian love is so beautiful and heart-breaking that it could only be communicated in the form of a child. Being a father has driven home the reality of children in a new way. When my wife was expecting our first son, a friend told me: “Being married is joyful; having children is like mainlining joy.” I have found this to be true. Yes, having children is exhausting and self-consuming and all the rest, but my little son is a well of bottomless joy and wonder, right within reach. The sound of his voice and the touch of his hand are some of life’s sweetest delights. Léon Bloy writes that suffering brings into existence new places in the human heart, but so does joy. God came to us as a baby to show us that joy is more real than sorrow, that our deepest joys now are but a taste of his inner life.

Christmas is a season of gratuitous beauty, both in the sense of being excessive and being a gift of grace. When celebrated rightly, all the effort and cost become an extravagant gift, a sign of the lavish generosity and glory of God. Christmas is the feast when that glory is revealed as humble and self-emptying, when God condescends to become a beauty we can receive. “You can never stop looking at your baby,” my mother told me, and she was right. This is not because a baby is brilliantly truthful or morally good, but because he is beautiful in a way that nothing else is.

In her recent St. Margaret of Scotland Lecture at St. Andrew’s, theologian Jennifer Newsome Martin reflects on what our experience of beauty teaches us about the truth of God—in this case, the beauty of a garden of sunflowers she had planted last spring:

And I could not stop looking at them. I never grew tired of looking at them. . . . I regarded the sunflowers in a mode of absolute gratuity, contemplating without expectation those magnificent, endlessly fascinating heliotropes that followed the sun all day with their attentive, cheerful faces turned toward the corollary giftedness of its rays. . . .

To look at them—and I know saying this probably approaches cliché—made my heart soar. I could actually feel it in my chest. But it also, in a very real way, made my heart sore. The homonymic potential here between “soar” (S-O-A-R) and “sore” (S-O-R-E) is very apt, because in my own experience of beauty, if I am paying good attention, it really is something of both: a cocktail of bliss and pain together, and inextricably so.

Is this not our experience of the child Jesus and Christmas, too?

Read it all.

Love and good wishes to all at Christmas (Nativity, Bartolome Esteban Murillo, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) pic.twitter.com/KiEV9luoWM

— Andrew Davison (@AP_Davison) December 25, 2020

When all the nation had finished passing over the Jordan, the Lord said to Joshua, “Take twelve men from the people, from each tribe a man, and command them, ‘Take twelve stones from here out of the midst of the Jordan, from the very place where the priests’ feet stood, and carry them over with you, and lay them down in the place where you lodge tonight.’” Then Joshua called the twelve men from the people of Israel, whom he had appointed, a man from each tribe; and Joshua said to them, “Pass on before the ark of the Lord your God into the midst of the Jordan, and take up each of you a stone upon his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the people of Israel, that this may be a sign among you, when your children ask in time to come, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ Then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord; when it passed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. So these stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial for ever.”

–Joshua 4:1-7

#Brighton sunrise @ThePhotoHour @StormHour pic.twitter.com/ymNaNwl2Vx

— Stephen Royle (@Steveontour1) January 4, 2024

For those who think the idea of the Crusade is one that spoils the idea of the Cross, we can only say that for them the idea of the Cross is spoiled; the idea of the cross is spoiled quite literally in the cradle. It is not here to the purpose to argue with them on the abstract ethics of fighting; the purpose in this place is merely to sum up the combination of ideas that make up the Christian and Catholic idea, and to note that all of them are already crystallised in the first Christmas story. They are three distinct and commonly contrasted things which are nevertheless one thing; but this is the only thing which can make them one.

The first is the human instinct for a heaven that shall be as literal and almost as local as a home. It is the idea pursued by all poets and pagans making myths; that a particular place must be the shrine of the god or the abode of the blest; that fairyland is a land; or that the return of the ghost must be the resurrection of the body. I do not here reason about the refusal of rationalism to satisfy this need. I only say that if the rationalists refuse to satisfy it, the pagans will not be satisfied. This is present in the story of Bethlehem and Jerusalem as it is present in the story of Delos and Delphi; and as it is not present in the whole universe of Lucretius or the whole universe of Herbert Spencer.

The second element is a philosophy larger than other philosophies; larger than that of Lucretius and infinitely larger than that of Herbert Spencer. It looks at the world through a hundred windows where the ancient stoic or the modern agnostic only looks through one. It sees life with thousands of eyes belonging to thousands of different sorts of people, where the other is only the individual standpoint of a stoic or an agnostic. It has something for all moods of man, it finds work for all kinds of men, it understands secrets of psychology, it is aware of depths of evil, it is able to distinguish between ideal and unreal marvels and miraculous exceptions, it trains itself in tact about hard cases, all with a multiplicity and subtlety and imagination about the varieties of life which is far beyond the bald or breezy platitudes of most ancient or modern moral philosophy. In a word, there is more in it; it finds more in existence to think about; it gets more out of life. Masses of this material about our many-sided life have been added since the time of St. Thomas Aquinas. But St. Thomas Aquinas alone would have found himself limited in the world of Confucius or of Comte.

And the third point is this; that while it is local enough for poetry and larger than any other philosophy, it is also a challenge and a fight. While it is deliberately broadened to embrace every aspect of truth, it is still stiffly embattled against every mode of error. It gets every kind of man to fight for it, it gets every kind of weapon to fight with, it widens its knowledge of the things that are fought for and against with every art of curiosity or sympathy; but it never forgets that it is fighting. It proclaims peace on earth and never forgets why there was war in heaven.

This is the trinity of truths symbolised here by the three types in the old Christmas story; the shepherds and the kings and that other king who warred upon the children. It is simply not true to say that other religions and philosophies are in this respect its rivals. It is not true to say that any one of them combines these characters; it is not true to say that any one of them pretends to combine them. Buddhism may profess to be equally mystical; it does not even profess to be equally military. Islam may profess to be equally military; it does not even profess to be equally metaphysical and subtle. Confucianism may profess to satisfy the need of the philosophers for order and reason; it does not even profess to satisfy the need of the mystics for miracle and sacrament and the consecration of concrete things.

There are many evidences of this presence of a spirit at once universal and unique. One will serve here which is the symbol of the subject of this chapter; that no other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event, does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem. No other birth of a god or childhood of a sage seems to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either too cold or too frivolous, or too formal and classical, or too simple and savage, or too occult and complicated. Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a scene with the sense that he was going home. He might admire it because it was poetical, or because it was philosophical, or any number of other things in separation; but not because it was itself. The truth is that there is a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story on human nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a mere legend or the life of a great man. It does not exactly in the ordinary sense turn our minds to greatness; to those extensions and exaggerations of humanity which are turned into gods and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of hero-worship. It does not exactly work outwards, adventurously, to the wonders to be found at the ends of the earth. It is rather something that surprises us from behind, from the hidden and personal part of our being; like that which can some times take us off our guard in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of the poor. It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us and pass. It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness that is there made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more human than humanity.

—The Everlasting Man (Radford, Virginia: Wilder Publications, 2008 paperback ed. of the 1925 original), pp. 114-116

Second Christmas day and the visitors encounter a confusing, vertiginous space in Tintoretto’s amazing Adoration of the Shepherds. pic.twitter.com/pGYeklocpq

— Dr. Peter Paul Rubens (@PP_Rubens) December 26, 2023

So what did it mean for Joseph and Mary to accept the Word of the Lord, to say, “We embrace the call to receive this child. We will accept whatever comes with it”? What did it take for them to literally have “God with us” in their midst (Matthew 1:23)? What does it take to be with him? This text’s answer is courage. And a willingness to do his will, no matter what.

When the angel said to Joseph, “Marry her,” he was saying, “If Jesus comes into your life, you are going to be rejected. You will have to kiss your stellar reputation good-bye.” And he married her. Surely some of Joseph’s friends said, “Why in the world did you marry her? Either you did that or she was unfaithful to you.” Can you imagine Joseph trying to tell them the truth? “Oh, I can explain. She is pregnant through the Holy Spirit. We learned all about it from the angels.” The truth wasn’t something his friends would understand, and therefore he knew they would always think ill of him.

–Tim Keller, Encounters with Jesus (New York: Penguin Books, 2013) pp. 202-203

For the second day of Christmas… “Nativity” (c. 1490), St. Martin’s Cathedral, Bratislava, Slovakia @SlovakArt #Christmas #nativity #CatholicTwitter pic.twitter.com/HJiiPmG3bj

— Lady of Good Counsel (@ofgoodcounsel) December 26, 2020

And there he came to a cave, and lodged there; and behold, the word of the Lord came to him, and he said to him, “What are you doing here, Eli′jah?” He said, “I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the people of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thy altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” And he said, “Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord.” And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. And when Eli′jah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him, and said, “What are you doing here, Eli′jah?”

–1 Kings 19:9-13

Prophet Elijah (feast day 20th July) detailed in the Madonna and Child with Saints by Andrea di Bonaiuto pic.twitter.com/q2FSeZQF62

— 🌿_ (@rebeca6169) July 20, 2023

My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. In some cases, these writers may be unconsciously infected with the Manichaean spirit of the times and suffer the much-discussed disjunction between sensibility and belief, but I think that more often the reason for this attention to the perverse is the difference between their beliefs and the beliefs of their audience. Redemption is meaningless unless there is case for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.

—Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969) pp. 33-34 [my emphasis]

Merry Christmas to all!!!

“The Nativity” (1776-1777) by John Singleton Copley pic.twitter.com/KEdKgL3OLD

— Isabel Azar (@izzyroseazar) December 26, 2021

As with the holiday, so with the culture at large. The increasingly post-Christian culture of America and Europe are nevertheless more deeply rooted in Christianity than is usually recognized by its opponents (and some of its adherents). It’s at least theoretically possible that this culture will eventually get Christianity out of its system, out of the roots of its consciousness, and negligible as a cultural force, reduced to the private practices of an eccentric few. This would take several generations, and I don’t think it will happen, but it certainly could. And if it did, the resulting culture would, like Christmas, lose the hope and the humanism which had been its legacy from Christianity. As with Christmas, if the heart were to stop beating, the body would die.

We have seen the prospects for that new culture already, in the totalitarian nightmares of communism and fascism, in the wasteland of pleasure-and-power-seeking which is offered as the good life by much of the entertainment and advertising produced by capitalism, in the drab materialist collectivism of “Imagine” and the absurd materialist egoism of Atlas Shrugged.

Perhaps it’s not even too much to say that if Christmas were to die, the remains of Christian culture would die, too, and with it that softness toward the individual human person—imperfect, of course, and slow to develop—that has characterized it. As long as the mad mixture of the very earthly and the very heavenly which is Christmas—the poor and vulnerable newborn baby among the animals on the one hand,  choirs of angels on the other—remains at the heart of the holiday, and the holiday remains very much alive in the culture, the natural coldness and brutality of the human race is always challenged from within the culture itself. Should that challenge be removed, no one would be more surprised by the result than those who worked to remove it. They might not live to see that result, but if their souls were not lost altogether, part of their purgatory might be the knowledge of what they had done to their descendants.

Read it all.

'Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name.'
Psalm 103: 1 pic.twitter.com/LDODkUq5B7

— Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) January 1, 2024

O taste and see that the Lord is good!
Happy is the man who takes refuge in him!
O fear the Lord, you his saints,
for those who fear him have no want!

–Psalm 34:8-9

🌿Guten Morgen ☀️ pic.twitter.com/aHmdjRnKaS

— 💫Stein_harmonie🍀🧚‍♀️ (@SteinHarmonie) January 2, 2024

‘Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made: and from age even unto age Thou art’ (v. 2). Thou therefore who art for ever, and before we were, and before the world was, hast become our refuge ever since we turned to Thee. … But he very rightly does not say, Thou wast from ages, and unto ages Thou shalt be: but puts the verb in the present, intimating that the substance of God is altogether immutable. It is not, He was, and Shall be, but only Is. Whence the expression, I Am that I Am; and, I Am ‘hath sent me unto you;’ (Exod. iii. 14.) and, ‘Thou shalt change them, and they shall be changed: but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.’ (Ps. cii. 26, 27.) Behold then the eternity that is our refuge, that we may fly thither from the mutability of time, there to remain for evermore.

–Saint Augustine, from his Exposition on the Book of Psalms, Psalm XC (my emphasis).

‘Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made: and from age even unto age Thou art’ (v. 2). Thou therefore who art for ever, and before we were, and before the world was, hast become our refuge ever since we turned to Thee. … But he very rightly does not say, Thou wast from ages, and unto ages Thou shalt be: but puts the verb in the present, intimating that the substance of God is altogether immutable. It is not, He was, and Shall be, but only Is. Whence the expression, I Am that I Am; and, I Am ‘hath sent me unto you;’ (Exod. iii. 14.) and, ‘Thou shalt change them, and they shall be changed: but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.’ (Ps. cii. 26, 27.) Behold then the eternity that is our refuge, that we may fly thither from the mutability of time, there to remain for evermore.

–Saint Augustine, from his Exposition on the Book of Psalms, Psalm XC (my emphasis).

Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit; and her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:

“Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and his name shall be called Emman′u-el”

(which means, God with us). When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took his wife, but knew her not until she had borne a son; and he called his name Jesus.

–Matthew 1:18-25

Today the Church of England celebrates The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus

Image: Stained glass panel in the east window of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich via https://t.co/j4kJvSKhK7 pic.twitter.com/lQsIY0Vgsv

— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) January 1, 2024

‘At a moment in history God broke through an adolescent girl’s womb in the Ancient Near East,
eternity intersected with time,
the supernatural became the natural,
the author of the story entered as a character in his own book,
and, in the memorable words of JB Phillips which I have always loved, we became the visited planet.’

–Yours truly from the morning sermon

Adoration of the Shepherds by Dutch painter Matthias Stomer, 1632. pic.twitter.com/KnJq38VjXy

— Archaeology & Art (@archaeologyart) December 24, 2021

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.”

—A Grief Observed [London: Faber&Faber, 1961], p.52

Adoration of the Shepherds in the stillest of nights, by Georges de la Tour in 1644. For the end of Second Christmas Day. pic.twitter.com/wK5fMD4bJH

— Dr. Peter Paul Rubens (@PP_Rubens) December 27, 2021

And so, from the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to lead a life worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

–Colossians 1:9-20

Erbacon Community Church#AlmostHeaven #WestVirginia #Highlands #Faith #Hope #Love #ThePhotoHour pic.twitter.com/XxozfLMymy

— Thomas R Fletcher (@ThomasRFletcher) December 31, 2023

I have a friend who teaches in the upper peninsula in Michigan. He has one of those schools that run from kindergarten all the way up through eighth grade, including special ed. One of his students was intellectually slow, couldn’t do very well in classes. And when Christmas Pageant time came he wanted to have a part in the Pageant. What’s more, he wanted a speaking part. He wouldn’t settle for anything less.

So they made into the innkeeper. They figured he could handle that because all he had to do was say, “No room,” twice: once before Mary spoke, once after she spoke. The night of the Pageant, Mary knocks on the door he opens the door, and he says in a brusque fashion, “No room!” Mary says, “But I’m sick, and I’m cold, and I’m going to have a baby, and if you don’t give me a place to sleep, my baby will be born in the cold, cold night.”

He just stood there. The boy behind him nudged him and said, “No room, No room, say, “No room.’” And finally, he turned and he said, “I know what I’m supposed to say, but she can have my room.”

–Anthony Campolo in William H. Willimon Ed, Sermons from Duke Chapel: Voices from “A Great Towering Church” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p.294

Second day of Christmas: Joseph takes a nap as visitors start to arrive to see new baby. Adoration of the Shepherds by Mantegna, 1450s. pic.twitter.com/Bbp8JlO5bV

— Dr. Peter Paul Rubens (@PP_Rubens) December 26, 2022

So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine. And at Caper′na-um there was an official whose son was ill. When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. Jesus therefore said to him, “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” The official said to him, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your son will live.” The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went his way. As he was going down, his servants met him and told him that his son was living. So he asked them the hour when he began to mend, and they said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.” The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live”; and he himself believed, and all his household. This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.

–John 4:46-54

Nederland waterland. Fijne zaterdag🙂. #natuur #landschap #winter #Buren #EckEnWiel #Utrechtseheuvelrug #Amerongen #Nederrijn #hoogwater #mooieluchten pic.twitter.com/w9kDfyQ1P4

— Tjark Dieterman (@DietermanTjark) December 30, 2023

One is very often asked at present whether we could not have a Christianity stripped, or, as people who asked it say, ‘freed’ from its miraculous elements, a Christianity with the miraculous elements suppressed. Now, it seems to me that precisely the one religion in the world, or, at least the only one I know, with which you could not do that is Christianity. In a religion like Buddhism, if you took away the miracles attributed to Gautama Buddha in some very late sources, there would be no loss; in fact, the religion would get on very much better without them because in that case the miracles largely contradict the teaching. Or even in the case of a religion like Mohammedanism, nothing essential would be altered if you took away the miracles. You could have a great prophet preaching his dogmas without bringing in any miracles; they are only in the nature of a digression, or illuminated capitals. But you cannot possibly do that with Christianity, because the Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle. If you take that away there nothing specifically Christian left. There may be many admirable human things which Christianity shares with all other systems in the world, but there would be nothing specifically Christian. Conversely, once you have accepted that, then you will see that all other well-established Christian miracles–because, of course, there are ill-established Christian miracles; there are Christian legends just as much as there are heathen legends, or modern journalistic legends–you will see that all the well-established Christian miracles are part of it, that they all either prepare for, or exhibit, or result from the Incarnation. Just as every natural event exhibits the total character of the natural universe at a particular point and space of time; so every miracle exhibits the character of the Incarnation. Now, if one asks whether that central grand miracle in Christianity is itself probable or improbable, of course, quite clearly you cannot be applying Hume’s kind of probability. You cannot mean a probability based on statistics according to which the more often a thing has happened, the more likely it is to happen again (the more often you get indigestion from eating a certain food, the more probable it is, if you eat it again, that you again have indigestion). Certainly the Incarnation cannot be probable in that sense. It is of its very nature to have happened only once. But then it is of the very nature of the history of this world to have happened only once; and if the Incarnation happened at all, it is the central chapter of that history. It is improbable in the same way in which the whole of nature is improbable, because it is only there once, and will happen only once.

–C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Today's art: The Adoration of the Shepherds – Hugo van der Goes https://t.co/4qNPRSKb3d pic.twitter.com/zCZyQGHwZn

— Art and the Bible (@artbible) December 28, 2022

I love thee, O Lord, my strength.
The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer,
my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised,
and I am saved from my enemies.

–Psalm 18:1-3

Good morning Cape Cod!
Friday morning at the Nauset Lighthouse, Eastham, Massachusetts. #lighthouses #capecod #FridayVibes pic.twitter.com/uBfqeBrQNj

— Darius Aniunas (@dariusaniunas) December 29, 2023

“Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you Good News of a great joy . . . This day is born the Savior,” that is, he who, as Son of God and Son of the Father, has traveled (in obedience to the Father) the path that leads away from the Father and into the darkness of the world. Behind him omnipotence and freedom; before, powerlessness, bonds and obedience. Behind him the comprehensive divine vision; before him the prospect of the meaninglessness of death on the Cross between two criminals, Behind him the bliss of life with the Father; before him, grievous solidarity with all who do not know the Father, do not want to know him and deny his existence. Rejoice then, for God himself has passed this way! The Son took with him the awareness of doing the Father’s will. He took with him the unceasing prayer that the Father’s will would be done on the dark earth as in the brightness of heaven. He took with him his rejoicing that the Father had hidden these things from the wise and revealed them to babes, to the simple and the poor. “I am the way,” and this way is “the truth” for you; along this way you will find “the life.” Along “the way” that I am you will learn to lose your life in order to find it; you will learn to grow beyond yourselves and your insincerity into a truth that is greater than you are. From a worldly point of view everything may seem very dark; your dedication may seem unproductive and a failure. But do not be afraid: you are on God’s path. “Let not your hearts be troubled: believe in God; believe also in me.” I am walking on ahead of you and blazing the trail of Christian love for you. It leads to your most inaccessible brother, the person most forsaken by God. But it is the path of divine love itself. You are on the right path. All who deny themselves in order to carry out love’s commission are on the right path.

Miracles happen along this path. Apparently insignificant miracles, noticed by hardly anyone. The very finding of a Child wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger—is this not a miracle in itself? Then there is the miracle when a particular mission, hidden in a person’s heart, really reaches its goal, bringing God’s peace and joy where there were nothing but despair and resignation; when someone succeeds in striking a tiny light in the midst of an overpowering darkness. When joy irradiates a heart that no longer dared to believe in it. Now and again we ourselves are assured that the angel’s word we are trying to obey will bring us to the place where God’s Word and Son is already made man. We are assured that, in spite of all the noise and nonsense, today, December 25, is Christmas just as truly as two millennia ago. Once and for all God has started out on his journey toward us, and nothing, till the world’s end, will stop him from coming to us and abiding in us.

Read it all.

'The darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining'
1 John 2: 8 pic.twitter.com/mlzaDeP7lH

— Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) December 27, 2023

“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.”

–Thomas Merton, “The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room” in Raids on the Unspeakable (New York: New Directions, 1966), pp. 51-52

Adoration of the Magi
Albrecht #Durer, 1504https://t.co/zJVxEQNtRz pic.twitter.com/229uTU5uyw

— Argent Arts (@ArgentArts) July 7, 2020

We remember this day, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by the order of King Herod. Receive, we beseech thee, into the arms of thy mercy all innocent victims; and by thy great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish thy rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Today's the feast of the Holy Innocents, remembering the massacre of Bethlehem infants by order of Herod. In replica 15th Century German glass at Erpingham, Norfolk, the Holy Family flee into Egypt while the awful slaughter happens in the foreground. pic.twitter.com/jb4i9EE96V

— Simon Knott (@SimoninSuffolk) December 28, 2023

Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth;
    break forth, O mountains, into singing!
For the Lord has comforted his people,
    and will have compassion on his afflicted.

But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me,
    my Lord has forgotten me.”
“Can a woman forget her sucking child,
    that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget,
    yet I will not forget you.
Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands;
    your walls are continually before me.
Your builders outstrip your destroyers,
    and those who laid you waste go forth from you.
Lift up your eyes round about and see;
    they all gather, they come to you.
As I live, says the Lord,
    you shall put them all on as an ornament,
    you shall bind them on as a bride does.

“Surely your waste and your desolate places
    and your devastated land—
surely now you will be too narrow for your inhabitants,
    and those who swallowed you up will be far away.
The children born in the time of your bereavement
    will yet say in your ears:
‘The place is too narrow for me;
    make room for me to dwell in.’
Then you will say in your heart:
    ‘Who has borne me these?
I was bereaved and barren,
    exiled and put away,
    but who has brought up these?
Behold, I was left alone;
    whence then have these come?’”

–Isaiah 49:13-21

☘️Guten Morgen ☀️ pic.twitter.com/JesvMQP4s6

— 💫Stein_harmonie🍀🧚‍♀️ (@SteinHarmonie) December 28, 2023

By stating that Jesus is “born of woman”—this Mary (as both St. Matthew and St. Luke attest)—St. Paul insists that Jesus is most emphatically human, the “firstborn of all creation. That this Mary is at the same time a virgin prevents the birth of Jesus from being reduced to what we know or can reproduce from our own experience.

Life that is unmistakably human life is before us here, a real baby from an actual mother’s womb; there is also miracle here, and mystery that cannot be brushed aside in our attempts to bring the operations of God, let alone our own lives, under our control.

The miracle of the virgin birth, maintained from the earliest times in the church and confessed in its creeds, is, in Karl Barth’s straightforward phrase, a “summons to reverence and worship….” Barth maintained that the one-sided views of those who questioned or denied that Jesus was “born of the virgin Mary” are “in the last resort to be understood only as coming from dread of reverence and only as invitation to comfortable encounter with an all too near or all too far-off God.”

–Eugene Peterson in God With Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas ed. Greg Pennoyer and Gregory Wolfe (Massachusettes, Paraclete Press, 2007), p., 5

Merry Christmas to you all. And to celebrate some Christmas themed photos. First a window from Hambledon, Hampshire… pic.twitter.com/JogNvXFUS3

— English Churches (@EngChurchPics) December 25, 2023

This mediator must represent God to humankind, and humankind to God. He must have points of contact with both God and humanity, and yet be distinguishable from them both. The central Christian idea of the incarnation, which expresses the belief that Jesus is both God and man, divine and human, portrays Jesus as the perfect mediator between God and human beings. He, and he alone, is able to redeem us and reconcile us to God.

—“I Believe”: Exploring the Apostles’ Creed (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998), p.48

'For you are great and do wondrous things; you alone are God'
Psalm 86: 10 pic.twitter.com/mYB4olG0Tz

— Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) December 26, 2023

Merciful Lord, we beseech thee to cast thy bright beams of light upon thy Church, that we, being illumined by the teaching of thine apostle and evangelist John, may so walk in the light of thy truth, that we may at length attain to the fullness of life everlasting; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Lieven van Lathem, Flemish
Saint John on Patmos, 1469

(The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 37, fol. 18) pic.twitter.com/A2QikuEiXf

— John McCafferty (@jdmccafferty) February 25, 2023

Truly, truly, I say to you, he who receives any one whom I send receives me; and he who receives me receives him who sent me.”

When Jesus had thus spoken, he was troubled in spirit, and testified, “Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he spoke. One of his disciples, whom Jesus loved, was lying close to the breast of Jesus; so Simon Peter beckoned to him and said, “Tell us who it is of whom he speaks.” So lying thus, close to the breast of Jesus, he said to him, “Lord, who is it?” Jesus answered, “It is he to whom I shall give this morsel when I have dipped it.” So when he had dipped the morsel, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. Then after the morsel, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, “What you are going to do, do quickly.” Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the money box, Jesus was telling him, “Buy what we need for the feast”; or, that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the morsel, he immediately went out; and it was night.

When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of man glorified, and in him God is glorified; if God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once. Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot come.’ A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

–John 13:20-35

Winter's Joy (1928)
🎨 Peder Mørk Mønsted pic.twitter.com/maZ5GU0Uho

— Cian McCarthy (@arealmofwonder) December 27, 2023

How can you cope with the end of a world and the beginning of another one? How can you put an earthquake into a test-tube, or the sea into a bottle? “How can you live with the terrifying thought that the hurricane has become human, that fire has become flesh, that life itself became life and walked in our midst? Christianity either means that, or it means nothing. It is either the most devastating disclosure of the deepest reality of the world, or it is a sham, a nonsense, a bit of deceitful playacting. Most of us, unable to cope with saying either of those things, condemn ourselves to live in the shallow world in between. We may not be content there, but we don’t know how to escape.

–NT Wright, For All God’s Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church (Grand Rapids, Eerdman’s, 1994) the introduction, page ix

Today's art: The Adoration of the Magi – Leonardo da Vinci https://t.co/TK2hAm4jnj pic.twitter.com/JiYBAsuHQS

— Art and the Bible (@artbible) August 27, 2021

God with us means more than God over or side by side with us, before or behind us. It means more than His divine being in even the most intimate active connection with our human being otherwise peculiar to Him. At this point, at the heart of the Christian message and in relation to the event of which it speaks, it means that God has made himself the one who fulfills his redemptive will. It means that He Himself in His own person at His own cost but also on His own initiative has become the inconceivable Yet and Nevertheless of this event, and so its clear and well-founded and legitimate, its true and holy and righteous Therefore. It means that God has become man in order as such, but in divine sovereignty, to take up our case. What takes place in the work of inconceivable mercy is, therefore, the free overruling of God, but it is not an arbitrary overlooking and ignoring, not an artificial bridging, covering over or hiding, but a real closing of the breach, gulf and abyss between God and us for which we are responsible. At the very point where we refuse and fail, offending and provoking God, making ourselves impossible before Him and in that way missing our destiny, treading under foot our dignity, forfeiting our right, losing our salvation and hopelessly compromising our creaturely being at that very point God Himself intervenes as man.

—Church Dogmatics (IV.1) [E.T. By Geoffrey Bromiley and Thomas Torrance of the German Original] (London: T and T Clark, 1956), page 12

Strange bursts of light create fantastical effects in this nighttime Adoration of the Shepherds by, of course, El Greco, in 1610. pic.twitter.com/3PtC6J4wH5

— Dr. Peter Paul Rubens (@PP_Rubens) December 27, 2022

The crucial significance of the cradle at Bethlehem lies in its place in the sequence of steps down that led the Son of God to the cross of Calvary, and we do not understand it till we see it in this context…the taking of manhood by the Son is set before us in a way which shows us how we should ever view it–not simply as a marvel of nature, but rather as a wonder of grace.

–J. I. Packer, Knowing God, (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press; 20th Anniversary ed.), p.42

Adoration of the Shepherds, 1608 #rubens #flemishart https://t.co/Ks6skyuNca pic.twitter.com/SXrCNP3dPK

— Peter Paul Rubens (@artistrubens) March 5, 2023