26 December: Boreham on Eloquent Christmas

Eloquent Christmas
Christmas is a time for holly and mistletoe, for gifts and greetings, for laughter and song, for frolics and festivities; but it is more. It is a time for charity and kindly feeling, for the forgetting of old feuds and grudges, for the exercise of benevolence, sympathy, consideration, and goodwill.

It is even more. Christmas is a time, not only for cementing human ties but for establishing happier relations between the celestial and terrestial spheres. For, after all, the revelries are rooted in revelation. The songs of the carol singers and the pealing of the bells reach their richest notes only when they are attuned to the music that floated over the fields of Bethlehem. The historic commemoration rests on that foundation.

A particularly poignant problem presents itself whenever we essay to reveal our inmost thought to those of another speech or to creatures of another kind. It is said of Huber, the famous Swiss naturalist, that as a child, he one day stood with his mother beside an anthill. The insects were scurrying everywhere in obvious agitation. "They're afraid of me!" the boy remarked to his mother. "But," she objected, "you wouldn't hurt them; you're so fond of them!" "Yes," answered Huber, "but how can I let the ants know that I'm so fond of them—except by becoming an ant?"

There, as in a cameo, stands the problem by which deity was confronted. And, at Christmas time, we magnify the supreme triumph of divine ingenuity by which that baffling problem was actually and effectively solved.

Ideal In Self-Expression
The word that heaven ached to speak to earth became flesh, the classical record tells us. There is no medium of communication so expressive, or so eloquent. In moments of intense emotional stress, one's speech becomes strangely broken and incoherent. When most we long to utter all that is in our hearts, our vocal powers are paralysed. But in that agonising moment a new rhetoric is born. We express ourselves, not in stately diction and exquisitely balanced sentences, but in the awkwardness of the limbs, in the confusion of the countenance, and in a painful welter of embarrassment. The twitching of the lips, the pallor of the cheeks, the moistening of the eyes—these tell-tale signals are incomparably more revealing than any mere words could possibly be. For they are flesh; and flesh is the ideal medium of self-expression.

Wren expressed himself in granite; Turner expressed himself in oils; Michelangelo expressed himself in marble; Shakespeare expressed himself in ink; but none of these is so perfect a vehicle for the unfolding of personality as flesh and blood. It is notable that the only quality with which the Creator endowed man, and which He did not Himself possess, was flesh; He therefore selected the hallmark of man's humanity as the supreme agency for the revelation of His deity.

Mystical Interpretation
No word becomes comprehensible until it becomes incarnate. A toddler cannot read. His father, eager to help, brings him home a spelling book. He can make nothing of it. But his mother sits beside him, slips her arm round his shoulders, gently explaining the mysterious hieroglyphics; and when, in the person of his mother, the words become flesh, comprehension dawns upon him.

Ten years later he is a perfect bookworm. But again he is mystified. Why, he asks himself, must every tale that he reads contain a silly love story? But ten years later still! The word that so bewildered him in his schooldays is made flesh to him in the person of a pretty girl. And, seeing it thus daintily incarnated, he once more understands.

Heaven reveals itself to Earth in the beauty and the wonder of the universe; but a million universes would not tell us what the Babe of Bethlehem tells us, for in Him the word was made flesh. Deity unfolds itself to humanity in prophet and psalmist and apostle and seer; but a million Bibles would not tell us what the Child of Christmas tells us, for, in Him the word became bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.

Therein lies the sublime significance of Christmas, and, come Christmas when it may, in the snow-white robes of Winter or in the golden splendour of Summer, it will always and everywhere awaken a responsive chord in hearts that are restless and ill at ease until they have heard the divine word simply and clearly enunciated.

F W Boreham

Image: the word was made flesh