Words on the Word
Erik Varden is a monk and bishop, born in Norway in 1974. In 2002, after ten years at the University of Cambridge, he joined Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Charnwood Forest. Pope Francis named him bishop of Trondheim in 2019.
Please find below a selection of homilies:
2 Sunday A 
Isaiah 49:3, 5-6: He formed me in the womb to be his servant.
1 Corinthians 1:1-3: Paul, appointed by God to be an apostle.
John 1:29-34: I did not know him myself.
‘No’, says the Baptist, ‘I did not know him.’ Indeed, he Read More
1 Corinthians 1:1-3: Paul, appointed by God to be an apostle.
John 1:29-34: I did not know him myself.
‘No’, says the Baptist, ‘I did not know him.’ Indeed, he Read More
A Nuptial Homily Homily given at the Nuptial Mass for the marriage of Patricia Pauline Jane Boon and Ole Bendik Heggtveit.
Ephesians 5.22-23: This mystery is profound.
John 2.1-11: You have kept the good wine until now.
That grand theoretician of Western civilisation, Mae West, famously Read More
Ephesians 5.22-23: This mystery is profound.
John 2.1-11: You have kept the good wine until now.
That grand theoretician of Western civilisation, Mae West, famously Read More
Correspondence Dipping into the Journal of Alexander Schmemann, I am struck by an entry dated 2 April 1976, struck and somehow heartened by the resonance.
Schmemann writes about an experience we can all relate to: ‘Letters from Andronikoff, from Vania Morozov, from Read More
Schmemann writes about an experience we can all relate to: ‘Letters from Andronikoff, from Vania Morozov, from Read More
Heridas que sanan Healing Wounds was recently launched in Spanish, in a fine version done by Carlos Ezcurra (who translated the English text) and Armando Pego (who translated Arnulf of Leuven’s poem). Professor Pego has reflected on his conversation with the poem here. Read More
Intermission Coram Fratribus will take an Epiphanytide break. I thank you for your companionship through the site. May 2026 be blessed for you, truly an annus Domini. A good thing to read this season is Nathaniel Peter’s essay on Christmas joy, Read More
In Conversation During Christmastide we meditate on the fact that the Word has become flesh. It is a good time to think about what words are. Bishop Daniel Flores helps us to do this, and to think about translating words, in a Read More
2 Sunday A
Isaiah 49:3, 5-6: He formed me in the womb to be his servant.
1 Corinthians 1:1-3: Paul, appointed by God to be an apostle.
John 1:29-34: I did not know him myself.
‘No’, says the Baptist, ‘I did not know him.’ Indeed, he says it twice in reference to Jesus’s apparition in Bethany, beyond the Jordan, where John was baptising. How may we understand this statement? Surely if anyone knew Jesus, John did?
In Luke we read how Mary, shortly after Christ’s conception, went off to stay with Elisabeth, her kinswoman, likewise pregnant. When Mary arrived, and Elisabeth heard her voice, her baby ‘skipped in her womb’. To describe the reaction of John, still unborn, Luke uses a verb with deep Biblical resonance. We find it again in the Greek Old Testament version of a Psalm (Ps 114) which begins with the words: ‘When Israel went forth from Egypt’.
This Psalm is one of Scripture’s fundamental accounts of redemption. It tells us how the whole of creation rejoiced when Israel cast off Egypt’s yoke: ‘The sea saw it and fled; Jordan was driven back. The mountains skipped like rams.’
That is how the infant John skipped in the embryonic presence of Jesus. He knew, before he had seen the light of day, who the Redeemer was. At this he rejoiced. How, then, could he say, thirty years on, ‘I knew him not’?
Of course, we could explain this business away by saying simply that we’re dealing with different sources. The text we’ve read is John’s; the one about Mary and Elisabeth is Luke’s. Two traditions; two versions of the relationship between Jesus and the Baptist. Perhaps John didn’t have Luke’s text at his disposal? Or perhaps Luke invented the story of the meeting of the unborn to enliven his text?
Thus exegetes have argued for decades in voluminous, often dull commentaries. Thank God, we have made progress. We have passed beyond the certainty that we, blessed with critical skills, see everything more clearly than Christians have done for the past 2,000 years; that we are the first to recognise the challenge of reconciling Biblical texts, and therefore have a licence to bracket any awkwardness or simply to dismiss as invention what we do not understand.
This approach to the Bible is no longer permissible. We must take the text seriously as it stands. This is more demanding. It is also a lot more interesting.
Considering, then, John’s statement again, let us note this: at the Baptism, he does not say about Jesus, ‘I never set eyes on him before’. He says, ‘I knew him not’. Who among us has not experienced that someone we’ve had dealings with for years suddenly reveals a new side of himself or herself, forcing us to admit: ‘I thought I knew him (or her); but now I see I didn’t, really.’
There can be many reasons for such development. Our friend, or spouse, may have been battling with some difficult thing they have not shared with us, whether to spare us concern or themselves humiliation. Once our eyes are opened to what the other has carried secretly, we need to read our common history afresh. Everything appears in a different light. Certain realities we’ve never understood seem at once obvious. Others we thought were straightforward pose questions. We ascertain: ‘I knew him (or her) not. At least not the way I thought I did.’
We must be ready to enlarge our knowledge, to integrate the new thing we have learnt if we wish for a deeper, more truthful relationship. If instead we just hold on to what we thought was an adequate image of the other, our relationship, if it survives at all, will be built on illusion. We shan’t, in fact, be relating to another person, but to our notion of what that person ought to have been.
If we see the relationship between Jesus and John in this perspective, a lot is clarified. John’s apparently paradoxical statement, ‘I knew him not’, makes sense. The Gospel shows again and again what the Jewish people expected from God’s redemption. People hoped that the Lord, as in former days, would show his mighty arm, crush enemies, cleanse the Promised Land, and let each true Israelite enjoy his inheritance under his vine and fig tree.
This is a hope John the Precursor will have shared. It will have been impressed on his consciousness. That is why he skipped for joy, like the mountains at Israel’s exodus, when the Son of God was incarnate. John’s whole life was directed towards the freeing of Israel.
But what did he see when Jesus at last showed himself publicly? Not a sceptred warrior making of his enemies a footstool, but ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world’ — who takes them away by bearing them. The Lamb says, ‘My burden is light’. He bids us, ‘Bear my burden with me’.
We do well to ask ourselves: Do I choose to know Jesus, the Lamb of God, as he lets himself be known, or do I nurture an image of him born of my fancy? The Lord meets us here, in the sacred mysteries. The mysteries make the Lamb’s sacrifice present and draw us into that sacrifice. Let us ask for grace to see him and receive him as he is, to enter his broad and spacious joy, and not to stay hanging around outside, enclosed in our own, all too narrow expectations.
The Meditations of St John the Baptist, which you can see in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid.
1 Corinthians 1:1-3: Paul, appointed by God to be an apostle.
John 1:29-34: I did not know him myself.
‘No’, says the Baptist, ‘I did not know him.’ Indeed, he says it twice in reference to Jesus’s apparition in Bethany, beyond the Jordan, where John was baptising. How may we understand this statement? Surely if anyone knew Jesus, John did?
In Luke we read how Mary, shortly after Christ’s conception, went off to stay with Elisabeth, her kinswoman, likewise pregnant. When Mary arrived, and Elisabeth heard her voice, her baby ‘skipped in her womb’. To describe the reaction of John, still unborn, Luke uses a verb with deep Biblical resonance. We find it again in the Greek Old Testament version of a Psalm (Ps 114) which begins with the words: ‘When Israel went forth from Egypt’.
This Psalm is one of Scripture’s fundamental accounts of redemption. It tells us how the whole of creation rejoiced when Israel cast off Egypt’s yoke: ‘The sea saw it and fled; Jordan was driven back. The mountains skipped like rams.’
That is how the infant John skipped in the embryonic presence of Jesus. He knew, before he had seen the light of day, who the Redeemer was. At this he rejoiced. How, then, could he say, thirty years on, ‘I knew him not’?
Of course, we could explain this business away by saying simply that we’re dealing with different sources. The text we’ve read is John’s; the one about Mary and Elisabeth is Luke’s. Two traditions; two versions of the relationship between Jesus and the Baptist. Perhaps John didn’t have Luke’s text at his disposal? Or perhaps Luke invented the story of the meeting of the unborn to enliven his text?
Thus exegetes have argued for decades in voluminous, often dull commentaries. Thank God, we have made progress. We have passed beyond the certainty that we, blessed with critical skills, see everything more clearly than Christians have done for the past 2,000 years; that we are the first to recognise the challenge of reconciling Biblical texts, and therefore have a licence to bracket any awkwardness or simply to dismiss as invention what we do not understand.
This approach to the Bible is no longer permissible. We must take the text seriously as it stands. This is more demanding. It is also a lot more interesting.
Considering, then, John’s statement again, let us note this: at the Baptism, he does not say about Jesus, ‘I never set eyes on him before’. He says, ‘I knew him not’. Who among us has not experienced that someone we’ve had dealings with for years suddenly reveals a new side of himself or herself, forcing us to admit: ‘I thought I knew him (or her); but now I see I didn’t, really.’
There can be many reasons for such development. Our friend, or spouse, may have been battling with some difficult thing they have not shared with us, whether to spare us concern or themselves humiliation. Once our eyes are opened to what the other has carried secretly, we need to read our common history afresh. Everything appears in a different light. Certain realities we’ve never understood seem at once obvious. Others we thought were straightforward pose questions. We ascertain: ‘I knew him (or her) not. At least not the way I thought I did.’
We must be ready to enlarge our knowledge, to integrate the new thing we have learnt if we wish for a deeper, more truthful relationship. If instead we just hold on to what we thought was an adequate image of the other, our relationship, if it survives at all, will be built on illusion. We shan’t, in fact, be relating to another person, but to our notion of what that person ought to have been.
If we see the relationship between Jesus and John in this perspective, a lot is clarified. John’s apparently paradoxical statement, ‘I knew him not’, makes sense. The Gospel shows again and again what the Jewish people expected from God’s redemption. People hoped that the Lord, as in former days, would show his mighty arm, crush enemies, cleanse the Promised Land, and let each true Israelite enjoy his inheritance under his vine and fig tree.
This is a hope John the Precursor will have shared. It will have been impressed on his consciousness. That is why he skipped for joy, like the mountains at Israel’s exodus, when the Son of God was incarnate. John’s whole life was directed towards the freeing of Israel.
But what did he see when Jesus at last showed himself publicly? Not a sceptred warrior making of his enemies a footstool, but ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world’ — who takes them away by bearing them. The Lamb says, ‘My burden is light’. He bids us, ‘Bear my burden with me’.
We do well to ask ourselves: Do I choose to know Jesus, the Lamb of God, as he lets himself be known, or do I nurture an image of him born of my fancy? The Lord meets us here, in the sacred mysteries. The mysteries make the Lamb’s sacrifice present and draw us into that sacrifice. Let us ask for grace to see him and receive him as he is, to enter his broad and spacious joy, and not to stay hanging around outside, enclosed in our own, all too narrow expectations.
The Meditations of St John the Baptist, which you can see in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid.
A Nuptial Homily
Homily given at the Nuptial Mass for the marriage of Patricia Pauline Jane Boon and Ole Bendik Heggtveit.
Ephesians 5.22-23: This mystery is profound.
John 2.1-11: You have kept the good wine until now.
That grand theoretician of Western civilisation, Mae West, famously declared: ‘Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.’ She was right: marriage has an institutional aspect. Spouses undertake a mutual obligation that has relational, civic, and financial consequence.
The Christian understanding of such obligation has been a stumbling block since the days of our Lord. A key factor that caused keen groupies to draw back from discipleship was Christ’s teaching on marriage. The radicality of it was more than they could bear.
These days, most people have but foggy ideas of what the Gospel teaches, but they know they’re against it. A recent essay in the TLS argued for the abolition of marriage as an institution, pace Miss West, on the grounds that marriage has been a ‘mechanism for maintaining the gendered division of labour, for regulating men’s access to women’s bodies, and for giving men ownership and control of children’.
Well, if that were all there is to it, good riddance!
Only, it isn’t, of course.
We can be grateful to Patricia and Ole Bendik for recalling us to this fact. They have put before us Paul’s teaching on marriage in his letter to the Ephesians. This text was written when the Apostle was old, imprisoned, and awaiting pretty certain execution. The rhetorical edge of his earlier writings is gone, almost. There’s no time for it; he has essentials to convey.
Paul’s great matter is this: he affirms that as Christians we really subsist in Christ. His life is ours. A Christian does not just adhere to certain notions; he or she is being transformed in a communion of love. When we think of ourselves as ‘members of Christ’s Body’, it isn’t by way of metaphor; it is a statement of fact. Apart from him we decompose, we lose our consistency and vitality. He on his part desires our full and vibrant incorporation, for a body, to function with joyfulness and grace, longs to be whole.
The Christian union of man and wife is to Paul the embodied sign of this spiritual calling. The institutional aspect of marriage is not its core. Marriage, says Paul, is a mystery, that is, a sacrament. What’s a sacrament? An instance of a concrete procedure that by providential agency becomes a vehicle of sanctifying grace, thereby both remaining and transcending itself.
Dear Patricia and Ole Bendik, you now consecrate yourselves to each other until death because you love each other and wish to construct your lives on the basis of that love always. That is magnificent. But it is not all. By administering the sacrament of wedlock to one another, having it blessed by the Church, you open your shared love to Christ’s. You call him into it as fire, to enlighten, warm, and purify. To say you are henceforth one detracts nothing from the genius of each. No, what you are in particular is splendidly enhanced by what in common you become. Together you are to manifest Christ’s love, enabling him, by your fidelity, to make your lives’ water wine, to let your union become a hospitable, festive anticipation of the Kingdom, which for good reason is likened to a wedding feast.
‘Love’ is a big word. The way we tend to use it, we associate it with strong emotion. Yet few relationships, even the happiest, are marked by a continuos ecstasy of sentiment. Paul wisely extends his terminology. Speaking of married love he speaks of reverence, submission, respect, self-giving. These are quotidian articulations of the time-surpassing love to which you pledge yourselves. Love is not least a matter of well-kept promises. ‘Let your yes be yes, your no be no’, says our Lord. The principle holds for all, but is especially important in marriage.
Be truthful. Shun deceit. And never take each other for granted.
You are getting married on the feast of St Antony the Great, a fourth-century Egyptian hermit. He is at once distant and close. Like you, he decided to structure his existence on Christ’s love. He applied it with coherence in his work, relationships, and spiritual paternity until he died at about 105. On his deathbed he distilled his experience in two counsels. He said: ‘Let Christ be the air you breathe’; then, ‘Live as if you began your consecration today’. The same applies to you. Let Christ be the atmosphere in which your married life unfolds; and receive one another with wonder each day. Be grateful for each other. Remember to say ‘Thank you’, not least for little things. Tend carefully to the regular, institutional commitment you undertake; but never let your love be institutionalised.
The preface of this nuptial Mass refers to marriage as blandum concordiæ iugum et insolubile vinculum pacis: ‘A sweet yoke of concord and an unbreakable bond of peace’. It’s a lovely phrase! It represents at once a benediction and a task. God grant you joy as you give yourselves to this task! May you be blessed by it; and may you be a blessing for all those whom your joined, concordant lives touch.
Amen.
The Marriage at Cana, c. 1495/1497, by the Master of the Catholic Kings, now in the National Gallery of Art.
Ephesians 5.22-23: This mystery is profound.
John 2.1-11: You have kept the good wine until now.
That grand theoretician of Western civilisation, Mae West, famously declared: ‘Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.’ She was right: marriage has an institutional aspect. Spouses undertake a mutual obligation that has relational, civic, and financial consequence.
The Christian understanding of such obligation has been a stumbling block since the days of our Lord. A key factor that caused keen groupies to draw back from discipleship was Christ’s teaching on marriage. The radicality of it was more than they could bear.
These days, most people have but foggy ideas of what the Gospel teaches, but they know they’re against it. A recent essay in the TLS argued for the abolition of marriage as an institution, pace Miss West, on the grounds that marriage has been a ‘mechanism for maintaining the gendered division of labour, for regulating men’s access to women’s bodies, and for giving men ownership and control of children’.
Well, if that were all there is to it, good riddance!
Only, it isn’t, of course.
We can be grateful to Patricia and Ole Bendik for recalling us to this fact. They have put before us Paul’s teaching on marriage in his letter to the Ephesians. This text was written when the Apostle was old, imprisoned, and awaiting pretty certain execution. The rhetorical edge of his earlier writings is gone, almost. There’s no time for it; he has essentials to convey.
Paul’s great matter is this: he affirms that as Christians we really subsist in Christ. His life is ours. A Christian does not just adhere to certain notions; he or she is being transformed in a communion of love. When we think of ourselves as ‘members of Christ’s Body’, it isn’t by way of metaphor; it is a statement of fact. Apart from him we decompose, we lose our consistency and vitality. He on his part desires our full and vibrant incorporation, for a body, to function with joyfulness and grace, longs to be whole.
The Christian union of man and wife is to Paul the embodied sign of this spiritual calling. The institutional aspect of marriage is not its core. Marriage, says Paul, is a mystery, that is, a sacrament. What’s a sacrament? An instance of a concrete procedure that by providential agency becomes a vehicle of sanctifying grace, thereby both remaining and transcending itself.
Dear Patricia and Ole Bendik, you now consecrate yourselves to each other until death because you love each other and wish to construct your lives on the basis of that love always. That is magnificent. But it is not all. By administering the sacrament of wedlock to one another, having it blessed by the Church, you open your shared love to Christ’s. You call him into it as fire, to enlighten, warm, and purify. To say you are henceforth one detracts nothing from the genius of each. No, what you are in particular is splendidly enhanced by what in common you become. Together you are to manifest Christ’s love, enabling him, by your fidelity, to make your lives’ water wine, to let your union become a hospitable, festive anticipation of the Kingdom, which for good reason is likened to a wedding feast.
‘Love’ is a big word. The way we tend to use it, we associate it with strong emotion. Yet few relationships, even the happiest, are marked by a continuos ecstasy of sentiment. Paul wisely extends his terminology. Speaking of married love he speaks of reverence, submission, respect, self-giving. These are quotidian articulations of the time-surpassing love to which you pledge yourselves. Love is not least a matter of well-kept promises. ‘Let your yes be yes, your no be no’, says our Lord. The principle holds for all, but is especially important in marriage.
Be truthful. Shun deceit. And never take each other for granted.
You are getting married on the feast of St Antony the Great, a fourth-century Egyptian hermit. He is at once distant and close. Like you, he decided to structure his existence on Christ’s love. He applied it with coherence in his work, relationships, and spiritual paternity until he died at about 105. On his deathbed he distilled his experience in two counsels. He said: ‘Let Christ be the air you breathe’; then, ‘Live as if you began your consecration today’. The same applies to you. Let Christ be the atmosphere in which your married life unfolds; and receive one another with wonder each day. Be grateful for each other. Remember to say ‘Thank you’, not least for little things. Tend carefully to the regular, institutional commitment you undertake; but never let your love be institutionalised.
The preface of this nuptial Mass refers to marriage as blandum concordiæ iugum et insolubile vinculum pacis: ‘A sweet yoke of concord and an unbreakable bond of peace’. It’s a lovely phrase! It represents at once a benediction and a task. God grant you joy as you give yourselves to this task! May you be blessed by it; and may you be a blessing for all those whom your joined, concordant lives touch.
Amen.
The Marriage at Cana, c. 1495/1497, by the Master of the Catholic Kings, now in the National Gallery of Art.
Sea Music
Only after hearing the world première of Eduardo Soutullo’s Eismeer did I learn that the work was inspired by a painting: Caspar David Friedrich’s canvas bearing the same title.
While listening to the music, I kept thinking of this photograph, which I saw in an exhibition recently: Herbert George Ponting’s shot from a grotto within an iceberg, captured while he accompanied Scott on his expedition to the Antarctic in 1911.
Soutullo’s composition is forceful and very beautiful. I can’t think of any musical work, other than Debussy’s La Mer, that evokes the sea with such immediacy.
While listening to the music, I kept thinking of this photograph, which I saw in an exhibition recently: Herbert George Ponting’s shot from a grotto within an iceberg, captured while he accompanied Scott on his expedition to the Antarctic in 1911.
Soutullo’s composition is forceful and very beautiful. I can’t think of any musical work, other than Debussy’s La Mer, that evokes the sea with such immediacy.
Correspondence
Dipping into the Journal of Alexander Schmemann, I am struck by an entry dated 2 April 1976, struck and somehow heartened by the resonance.
Schmemann writes about an experience we can all relate to: ‘Letters from Andronikoff, from Vania Morozov, from a reader of Cabasilas. Why am I totally unable to answer letters as they arrive, and why do I have to wait until they pile up in order to invest, despairingly, a whole day in doing so? Surely because each missive requires that one surrenders a portion of one’s heart to it, and we are sparing in this respect.’
The same entry reflects on the impossibility of reducing ‘faith’ to ‘religion’ or to ‘ideology’. ‘Religion and ideology subjugate us. Only faith liberates.’
Schmemann writes about an experience we can all relate to: ‘Letters from Andronikoff, from Vania Morozov, from a reader of Cabasilas. Why am I totally unable to answer letters as they arrive, and why do I have to wait until they pile up in order to invest, despairingly, a whole day in doing so? Surely because each missive requires that one surrenders a portion of one’s heart to it, and we are sparing in this respect.’
The same entry reflects on the impossibility of reducing ‘faith’ to ‘religion’ or to ‘ideology’. ‘Religion and ideology subjugate us. Only faith liberates.’
Heridas que sanan
Healing Wounds was recently launched in Spanish, in a fine version done by Carlos Ezcurra (who translated the English text) and Armando Pego (who translated Arnulf of Leuven’s poem). Professor Pego has reflected on his conversation with the poem here. The launch was noted in various media: El Debate, Omnes, InfoVaticana, and others. After the launch I had the opportunity to visit the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales. I was fascinated to find there this mural, which corresponds exactly to the type of the Crucified Monk I discuss in the book: ‘Our wounds will finally heal when they have become so one with Christ’s, so fully surrendered, that we no longer know where his passion ends and ours begins. We are caught up, then, in the inexorable victory of his life over our death, of his light over our darkness, of his wholeness over our fragmentation.’
Intermission
Coram Fratribus will take an Epiphanytide break. I thank you for your companionship through the site. May 2026 be blessed for you, truly an annus Domini. A good thing to read this season is Nathaniel Peter’s essay on Christmas joy, which also takes you to some wonderful music. Nathaniel cites Pieper: ‘For man cannot have the experience of receiving what is loved, unless the world and existence as a whole represent something good and therefore beloved to him.’ There is a task for all of us in that observation. Below you can hear the Carmelites of Tromsø sing a wonderful carol. ‘Sic nos Amantem, quis non redamaret?’
Happy new year!
+fr Erik Varden
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/01-A-kom-alle-kristne.mp3
Happy new year!
+fr Erik Varden
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/01-A-kom-alle-kristne.mp3
Epiphany
The protagonists of today’s feast are the wise men from the East and the Child in the manger. Their encounter has been so amply developed in poetry and art that it seems to us deeply familiar. The Magi’s oriental majesty, their splendid capes and headgear and precious gifts, lend extravagance to Christmas. We are right to rejoice in all this loveliness. God has assumed our nature. He takes it seriously, also in its sensuous and imaginative aspects. Everything kan become praise.
The scene from Bethlehem fulfils the vision of Isaiah: ‘The nations come to your light and kings to your dawning brightness.’ This promise is realised before our eyes. It is wonderful: God prepares our salvation by means of a scenography conceived in minute detail so as to give us reliable signs by which we may ascertain its accomplishment. Now the hour has come.
We rejoice in the radiance that issues from the manger. Full daylight, however, is more than we can bear. John says it categorically: ‘The light came into the world, but men preferred darkness to the light.’ That remains the case to this day. Through the gentleness and sweetness of Christmas blows a cold wind of rejection.
God knew it would be like this. The same Isaiah who prophesied Christ’s epiphany foresaw all that the Lord’s Suffering Servant would have to endure to enact his mission: ‘He was rejected, despised by people, a man of sorrows; one before whom people hide their faces, despised. And we counted him for nothing.’ The Child in the Manger is the Lamb of God. Above the stable roof we see the outline of a Cross.
It is a noble tradition that the Church, on this thirteenth day of Christmas, proclaims the date of Easter. We are reminded that God became man, not to create an atmosphere, but to engage, on our behalf, in battle against sin and death. We know what it cost him. Let’s be mindful of that when we kneel, alongside Melchior, Balthasar and Casper, before Mary’s Child. In the gifts offered by the three, the Church recognises mystical signs of Jesus’s passion and death.
In a hymn by Thomas Kingo we sing of ‘Joy and grief proceeding hand in hand‘. In the face of Jesus the two are one. We are reminded that life is like this. We needn’t fear the admixture. We needn’t rebel against it. What matters is to know that all has been born by our loving Saviour in order, next, to assume our part in his bearing, each of us according to our own special call.
The dawn Isaiah foresaw points towards the day. Let us choose what is of the day, putting behind us all that belongs to the night. God, who is Light, has come to make us light. That, too, is part of what Isaiah saw.
After worshipping the Son of God, the Magi returned to their homeland ‘by another way’. Their choice was pragmatically motivated: the angel had warned them of Herod’s plots. However, there is also deep symbolic truth in their new itinerary. An encounter with Jesus is transformative. One isn’t the same afterwards; it no long seems right to keep on walking the way one walked before. We yearn for something else on which we may struggle to put our finger.
To be a Christian is to live in this state of otherness, constantly looking for the right way. The Way, of course, has a name, a face. It reveals itself to us to us on Mary’s lap and here on this altar. Let us follow the Way with joy, faithfully, grateful for the fellowship we have in one another.
Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi.
The scene from Bethlehem fulfils the vision of Isaiah: ‘The nations come to your light and kings to your dawning brightness.’ This promise is realised before our eyes. It is wonderful: God prepares our salvation by means of a scenography conceived in minute detail so as to give us reliable signs by which we may ascertain its accomplishment. Now the hour has come.
We rejoice in the radiance that issues from the manger. Full daylight, however, is more than we can bear. John says it categorically: ‘The light came into the world, but men preferred darkness to the light.’ That remains the case to this day. Through the gentleness and sweetness of Christmas blows a cold wind of rejection.
God knew it would be like this. The same Isaiah who prophesied Christ’s epiphany foresaw all that the Lord’s Suffering Servant would have to endure to enact his mission: ‘He was rejected, despised by people, a man of sorrows; one before whom people hide their faces, despised. And we counted him for nothing.’ The Child in the Manger is the Lamb of God. Above the stable roof we see the outline of a Cross.
It is a noble tradition that the Church, on this thirteenth day of Christmas, proclaims the date of Easter. We are reminded that God became man, not to create an atmosphere, but to engage, on our behalf, in battle against sin and death. We know what it cost him. Let’s be mindful of that when we kneel, alongside Melchior, Balthasar and Casper, before Mary’s Child. In the gifts offered by the three, the Church recognises mystical signs of Jesus’s passion and death.
In a hymn by Thomas Kingo we sing of ‘Joy and grief proceeding hand in hand‘. In the face of Jesus the two are one. We are reminded that life is like this. We needn’t fear the admixture. We needn’t rebel against it. What matters is to know that all has been born by our loving Saviour in order, next, to assume our part in his bearing, each of us according to our own special call.
The dawn Isaiah foresaw points towards the day. Let us choose what is of the day, putting behind us all that belongs to the night. God, who is Light, has come to make us light. That, too, is part of what Isaiah saw.
After worshipping the Son of God, the Magi returned to their homeland ‘by another way’. Their choice was pragmatically motivated: the angel had warned them of Herod’s plots. However, there is also deep symbolic truth in their new itinerary. An encounter with Jesus is transformative. One isn’t the same afterwards; it no long seems right to keep on walking the way one walked before. We yearn for something else on which we may struggle to put our finger.
To be a Christian is to live in this state of otherness, constantly looking for the right way. The Way, of course, has a name, a face. It reveals itself to us to us on Mary’s lap and here on this altar. Let us follow the Way with joy, faithfully, grateful for the fellowship we have in one another.
Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi.
In Conversation
During Christmastide we meditate on the fact that the Word has become flesh. It is a good time to think about what words are. Bishop Daniel Flores helps us to do this, and to think about translating words, in a recent lecture. He envisages the incarnation as the Eternal Word’s self-translation. ‘The clarity of the sign that is Christ’s flesh is at the same time inherently enigmatic. This is so not because he could be more explicicitly present to us, but because humans can only perceive direct presence through the senses. We see who someone is and what they are about through how they present themselves to us. The Incarnation is thus an invitation to see through the expressive manifestation and rightly interpret the truth shown us through his flesh. There is no getting around this need for true interpretation of Christ; nor should we hope there were. This is the human way.’ You can read the full text here.