The Liturgy of the World — God Among Us

Silent night! Holy night! All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child!
Holy Infant so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace, Sleep in heavenly peace.
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The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes,
But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes….

Have you ever stopped to think about how idealized a picture of birth in a stable is presented by some of our most beloved Christmas hymns? No crying baby, everything bathed in heavenly light, silence, and serenity — not quite, perhaps, the scene the author of the Gospel of Luke intended to convey. Birth and babies always mean blood and mess; combine that with cattle in a barn, and we are talking about fairly filthy conditions.

The sanitized versions of Jesus’ birth that we so often take for granted surely warrant rethinking in light of Jesuit Father Karl Rahner’s “Liturgy of the World.” In the first installment of this series (which is archived at www.ocp.org/articles/1050), we examined Ordinary Time through that lens. We noted, with Rahner’s help, that all the times and seasons of the liturgical year are “extraordinary,” in the sense that God’s creative love and merciful grace always permeate the whole of reality. The Church’s liturgy symbolizes and ritually actualizes the Liturgy of the World, God’s continuous self-communication in the world, the active and saving power that embraces all of humanity, even when we do not have the eyes to see or the ears to hear. Recall that important to such liturgical re-awakening is the way our children — even our babies — can teach their parents (and other adults) well: how the least among us in our families, assemblies, and communities are well suited to be mystagogues, those who lead us in attentiveness to the extraordinary divine mystery in our ordinary, everyday living.

Recognizing that these things are as true for the liturgies of Ordinary Time as well as for any of the liturgical seasons, we may well ask, “What are the implications of these insights for Advent and Christmas?” Recall that for Rahner, the Liturgy of the World — which occurs throughout the history of creation — reaches its apex and comes to fullest definition on the Cross. The Paschal Mystery is indeed the truest meaning of human history. If the Paschal Triduum and its attendant celebrations of Lent and Pentecost are the commemoration of what is most central, and the Sundays in Ordinary Time are the weekly reminders of this throughout the year, just where do the Advent and Christmas celebrations enter into the picture of the Liturgy of the World?

The significance of the mystery of the Incarnation, it seems clear, is that the Paschal Mystery is “enfleshed” in human history — specifically in the person of Jesus himself. The true meaning of the birth of Christ is “read back” from his entire life, ministry, death, and resurrection. Christmas is the celebration of his true humanity — a humanity to be tested and ultimately found worthy of the glory of God, to be sure, but known to us today because we are in the fortunate position of living “this side” of his resurrection.

The Gospel accounts of Jesus’ human beginnings, the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke, make the point that, as remarkable as these events surrounding Jesus’ birth may seem, we are still talking about a fully human life. Perhaps our modern sensibilities predispose us toward understanding the Gospels as biographies of Jesus, so that we think in terms of the chronological ordering of his life (thus, of course, the infancy narratives represent the first “chapter”). We likely are also inclined to merge the story of Jesus’ humble beginnings in the manger (Luke 2) with the story of the Magi and flight into Egypt (Matthew 2), and read these both through the lens of the Prologue of John (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.... And the Word became flesh...”). Especially this latter tendency often results in our seeing the birth of Christ as the first act of a predetermined divine script, the necessary outcome being Jesus’ death on the cross, followed by his inevitable resurrection. He was after all, we presume, God right from the start, so how could it have been otherwise? (Notice how this supposition, hinted at in “Silent Night” and “Away in the Manger,” imposes an already fixed notion of “divinity” onto the person of Jesus — as we if didn’t first need Jesus to reveal who God really is.) Aside from the commercial emphasis on Christmas that overshadows the celebration of Easter in popular culture, it may well be that our theological interpretation of Christmas does not adequately recognize the Incarnation as a doctrine derived from the Paschal Mystery, not vice versa.¹

Keeping the Liturgy of the World in mind, then, we can better see how the celebration of the birth of the Lord is not simply about “the birthday of Jesus” but more profoundly about the true humanity through which the love of the true God for us is revealed. All of creation reveals God’s giving-of-self in the Liturgy of the World; this revelation is made even more explicit in the way God has related to human beings throughout history, as the history of salvation told and retold, especially in the stories of the people chosen through Abraham and Sarah and their descendents; finally, and most explicitly, this Liturgy of the World is brought to its fulfillment in the one born of Mary in the “fullness of time,” this Jesus who precisely as one like us makes a sacrament of human time itself — the span of a human life that overlaps with other human lives and intersects with other generations, going back past Abraham and Sarah to the creation of human beings, and extending to our own day. In Jesus, human time is truly God’s time as well.

This human time is experienced differently in the various stages of our lives. For babies, the rawness of emotion in joy in a familiar face or crying out in need of food or a diaper change — and the utter dependence on others so sacramental of humanity’s dependence on God — is simultaneously chaotic and wondrous time. (This week’s uncontrollably crying baby in the pew ahead of you is next week’s captivating gift, smiling and cooing as if no one but you exists in the world.) For toddlers and young children, time often seems to stand still, especially in anticipation of something as exciting as Christmas morning. Can we learn something from them about Advent as a period of waiting filled with anticipation?² As we, like Jesus himself once did, grow in wisdom, age, and (hopefully) grace, time indeed moves more quickly, as we take on the responsibilities and tasks that accompany the stages of our development. Of course, these responsibilities are not identical for any two people, and Jesus’ were unique to his own time, culture, and person.

Yet in appreciating the place of the mystery of Christmas within the Liturgy of the World, we see anew that what the theological tradition calls “the scandal of particularity” — the idea that universal human salvation should come through one individual person born a babe in first-century Palestine — turns out to be a point of contemplation for every human life. In fulfilling the tasks that come uniquely before us in our own span of life, our individuality in fact encompasses our relationships with others, and the measure of the quality of those relationships, from the day we are born until we breathe our last, is revealed in Christ to be mercy, compassion, love, forgiveness, and self-giving (dying-to-self that others may live). Jesus’ life, like ours, was not a sequence of divinely pre-ordained events—his life could have been otherwise—but he freely chose to accept his responsibilities and do the will of his Father.

Were we to consider the child Jesus born in Bethlehem and think only of John’s Prologue, our salvation would still seem to have been inevitable, even if he had died as an infant. The problem with such an outcome is: this salvation would have been entirely unknown to us! There would have been no span of a human life developed enough to reveal what such salvation and what such a saving God means for those who believe. There would have been no disciples and no Church with the mission to proclaim this salvation. There would have been no Gospel of John handed down to us with the good news that the Word of God was made flesh and pitched a dwelling-place with us. There would have been no recognition, and therefore no confession, of Jesus as Emmanuel (God-with-us) and as Christ (Messiah, Anointed One).

As we enter into this holy human time of Advent and Christmas, let us train our vision, with the eyes of a child looking toward our future, on the Liturgy of the World: a liturgy that has its fullest meaning in the Paschal Mystery, certainly, but one that once took flesh — messy and tender, wailing and wondrous — in the body of the Savior for the life of the world, and continues to be Emmanuel in the living body of Christ, the Church.

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¹See Chapter 8 in Louis-Marie Chauvet, The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001).

²See my reflection, “Receiving the Prophetic, Priestly and Royal Gift of Children” (online at: www.ocp.org/articles/892), in Today’s Liturgy with Children, Advent/Christmas 2006.

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David A. Stosur holds a Ph.D. in Liturgical Studies from the University of Notre Dame (nd.edu). He is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Liturgy at St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry (stbernards.edu) in Rochester, New York. His latest book, Unfailing Patience and Sound Teaching: Reflections on Episcopal Ministry in Honor of Rembert G. Weakland, O.S.B., is published by Liturgical Press (litpress.org).