A meditation on the Birth of Christ.

Forget the cosy stable scenes. Christ is born into the reality of our often selfish, hurtful and nasty existence

 

Behold the wonder that we celebrate

The eternal and infinite Word from God, from before the origin of our vast cosmos billions of years ago, comes to be joined to human existence.

The great wonder of it.

So gracious and beyond our desiring, indeed even coming when we have not known or thought about it.

But why did He come?

To save us from all or our follies and brokenness and sin?

Ah yes but so much more..

For from the beginning and even before our sinful existence came to be upon the earth, He was already predestined to come and be joined to our flesh, just because of the glory such a union would be, and create a centre for the joyful union of all life that sprang from Him.

His was a Cosmic destiny that unites all that He caused to exist and loved from the beginning.

And to what sort of world did He come?

The one that we know, so broken and unjust, often nasty , selfish and hurtful

So beautiful but spoilt and degraded

Where men and women care not for those different to themselves

Where people lived in hovels while others lived in rich mansions

Where many had little to eat, while others were bloated with food and wine

Where women had less status than men, and had not the same rights as men wished for themselves.

Where people cause cruelty and death against the innocent in war and people were no more than unfortunate victims of others violence and schemes.

Yes He came to a world like ours. The Roman world just as bad as ours.

So do not think of cosy stables, with attendant donkey or cattle

Do not think for happy pictures of shepherds with their little lambs, or sages with strange gifts from afar

Think instead of a baby, wrapped in rags in makeshift cot, in a cellar in the ruins of the rubble of Alleppo

For that is the world into which the most gracious and infinite Word has come and ever comes, and sighs and cries with us

..and tries to raise our gaze to what things can be instead.

 

I composed this for a local church magazine

Loving the Divine Nature

(Inspired from some of the writings of John Duns Scotus on the nature of God as Trinity)

 The highest praise and purpose of our life is to love Thee above all other things.

For Thou art to be loved, as it is written “God is to be loved” and “Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all of thy heart and strength”

For Thou Uncreated Being, before this mighty Cosmos came to exist billions of years ago, did exist as the Most Perfect and the highest Good.

From Thee Most Original, from Thy Most Divine Essence and nature and Being, did produce two most wonderful and everlasting Products;

The First, Thy Word, to Him Thou art as a Father and Mother and to Thee the Word is Thy Son, who comes to take on our flesh and live among us, and thus to show us the way to Thy Self and Thy Glory, and to show us all Good.

To the Second, breathed from Thy Essence, is Thy Spirit and from Thee it is Most Holy, who comes to live inside us, to inspire our thoughts with most heavenly and most noble attitudes and life.

And we are to love Thee in Thy Three-fold nature with the uttermost love that we can give, because Thou in Thy Essence cannot be surpassed, and there can never be anything better we can ever know or possess.

And when we love Thee in above all things, we are drawn to Thee along with all others who most truly love Thee, and in loving Thy Essence and Nature we find unity with all the same who love Thee.

Then it is fulfilled that we love Thee with our whole being and our neighbours in Thy Love, like ourselves.

Then in this loving we may show Thee to the world.

 

 

 

 

On Good Friday when we see the image of the Crucified Jesus nailed hands and feet to the cross we meet with every evil done to another. Every aspect of human evils nails Jesus to the cross

His wipped and scourged body from the lashings of the Roman soldiers and their cruel mockery of a crown of thorns upon his head, with blood oozing from his head where the thorns dig into his scalp.

Jesus will never experience all of the evils that people do to each other, but let for us those nails and thorns and the barbarity of what is done be to us the sign of very evil and depravity of human nature that still resorts to barbarism and treats others with indifference and cruellty.

Let those nails and thorns depict for us the rape and abuse of women, the degradation of women’s lives as sex slaves and toys for men’s lust.

Let those nails and thorns be to us the ill and starving children in poverty because of the unjust systems of finance and ecomomics.

Let those nails and thorns depict for us the evil minds of the ideological murderers who put innocents to death for the cause of their foul ideologies.

Let those nails and thorns depict for us those who today will be leaving desolate cities, towns and villages made so by tribal conflicts and ethnic violence.

Let those nails and thorns also be for us the great heaps of indifference and excuses not to be involved in making better the lives of those blighted by such things.

Yet hear also the amazing response to those who inflicted the nails and crown upon Him

“Father, forgive them. They know not what they do”

 

 

The most terrible week

As we recall that most basic Christian doctrine, that the Everlasting Word, sent my the Father, the origin of all, is present in the man Jesus of Nazareth, so this week that is called “Holy” is for The Word that most terrible experience of human degradation and of what wayward and backward humanity does to others.  

Sure in the history of Israel, has the Word known abandonment and betrayal by His people, as spoken aloud through the prophets. But in the Man Jesus, this experience of betrayal and abandonment is at its uttermost, and the Everlasting Word knows in human experience more acutely than ever before our sinfulness and failure to be the Intended Being we should possess.

On the Sunday they will rejoice and lay down their palm branches at His feet, in expectation of some mistaken political revolution, and nationalistic expectations, even in the hope of some violence from Him to commit in their desired cause.

He will go into their temple and upset the corruption of the greedy money changers and swindlers of the poor offering animals for sacrifice. He will preach in the vain hope of changed hearts for the priestly elite and warn of terrible things to come if they do not change. Yet His Words fall on deaf self serving ears.

And so in the days that come He will experience betrayal by one of his own and others of his inner shall desert Him for fear of their own lives. He shall know loneliness and fear in the Garden.

He will be placed like many a good prisoner of conscience in front of a corrupt court who have already decided that He must die to serve their interests. Their religious conscience corrupted by their own false ideals and power over the lives of others.

He shall be brought before a self serving foreign civil authority unwilling to withstand the trouble of releasing an innocent man, when faced with the religious mob that wants His blood.

He will be beaten and made fun of by the prison guards, who taunt Him, because He is not one of their own, just some trouble maker to be made and example of. So He will be the  beaten and bruised and tortured prisoner of conscience with no justice done for Him, but misused against Him.

Then they shall put Him to death in one of most barbaric and torturous means of punishment ever devised to serve political power and control.

See then in all these things their barbarity and that of so many other forms of self serving corruption, still known in this modern world.

But as you see that Blessed Word made Flesh experience these things ask yourself, where am I in this story? And what is ma part what He experiences this most terrible week?