The holly bears a berry
As red as any blood
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To do poor sinners good.
The holly bears a prickle,
As sharp as any thorn,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
For Our Saviour Christmas morn.
The holly bears a bark,
As bitter as any gall,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
For to redeem us all.
So runs the
Birmingham carol, The Holly and the Ivy.
A like understanding of the purpose of
Christ’s Incarnation for our sake occurs throughout the hymns and carols sung
in England to this day at Christmastime. In the American John Hopkins’ Epiphany
carol, We three Kings of Orient are,
Balthazar sings:
Myrrh is
mine; its bitter perfume
Breathes a
life of gathering gloom;
Sorrowing,
sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in a
stone-cold tomb.
And in
Charles Wesley’s great dogmatic hymn to the incarnation of the Divine Sun of
Righteousness (Hark! The herald angels
sing: an eighteenth century text
drawn direct from the Fathers of the third and fourth centuries) we hear:
Veiled in
flesh the Godhead see:
Hail the
incarnate Deity ….
Mild He lays
His glory by,
Born that
man no more may die.
In the
Christian east, popular hymns, as well as those of the Liturgy, honour the
self-emptying of God, his condescension (as the Circumcision of Christ is
referred to in today’s Troparion) to be born into the world as the Word made
flesh - our God united with humanity in person, revealed by light and love in
Jesus Christ Himself. Even so, there is still a hint of where this will all
lead to. One Ukrainian hymn of the eighteenth century begins with the Lord
being born to die: “God born a mortal, who can claim to know Him?” Who indeed
can have known what He was to be about and why? Another sings, “Mary gently
holds Him, tenderly consoles Him”, but not only as her little one: as the One Who has come to work redemption for
her, and for all: “Hush , my Child, my God, my Saviour” (Tidings of Great Wonder).
In parts of
Christianity where European Christmas customs have been embraced, East and West
alike, there is a rich imaginative tradition that identifies not only the Holly
and the Ivy, but also the illuminated Christmas Tree with both the Tree of Life
in the Garden of Eden and the Cross of Christ. Both signal the same Mystery:
death and longing for life, shame and victory, light and dark. And at Bethlehem,
the stable of our Lord’s Nativity is a cave in the rock, blazing with light
from within, and foreshadowing the rock Tomb in Jerusalem out of which Resurrection
will burst through Christ’s death to new life.
And the same
story is set before us on today’s feast of the Circumcision (Luke 2.20-21, 40-52), to prepare us for
what the Incarnation, the Nativity and the Theophany ultimately mean and lead
to. Here are the shepherds returning from the cave of Christ’s birth giving
glory to God for what they had witnessed, like the angels who told the
apostles, “Why seek the living among the dead – He is not here, He is risen”. This
is an echo of what Christ Himself says to His Mother and Saint Joseph when they
come looking for Him in the Temple: “Why were you looking for me? Did you not
know that I must be in my Father’s house?” – not just the Temple, but the very
dimension of existence that He calls both the Kingdom of Heaven and Eternal
Life, and which was yet to be revealed to us at His Resurrection. Thus we
gather around the new-born Lord again on the Eighth Day, the day each week when
the cycle of creation and resurrection is repeated as we still repeat it, and
as the apostles instinctively turned to the week after the first Easter, when
St Thomas acclaimed the Risen Jesus, “My Lord and my God.” We find ourselves
witness to His Circumcision - not only the ancient Hebrew act of faith and
covenant that bonds God to His people and each person to God, but also the
first letting of the Blood that would inexorably be shed upon the Cross. We
hear Him named Jesus - Yeshua, He Who saves - just as He will be acclaimed the
Son of David coming to save God’s people, with Hosanna: Hoshana, Blessed One
Who comes in the Name of the Lord. We see Him enter Jerusalem with Mary and
Joseph for the Passover, just as He will in future go up with the Disciples to
begin the week that ends in His Passion. We seem Him filled with Divine Wisdom
in the Temple of His Father, teaching the teachers, just as He will one day
return to overturn its tables and the corruption of its very purpose, when He restores the Presence of the King, “God
Who is With Us”, the Wisdom at the heart of all Creation and revealed in all
its glory shining out of the Holy of Holies.
But there is
more to this revelation than a restoration of true balance to the account of
God’s engagement with His people. There is more than the hints of the blood,
the passion and the acceptable sacrifice that are set to come and which we can
detect even in the Gospel story of His early years. After Jesus has grown into a man approaches
His great apotheosis before all the
world at the waters of Baptism, the Father identifies Him as His Son from
heaven; but it takes St John the Baptist to realise that to us in the world He
is the sacrificial Lamb – and that this is what is God looks like, what at the heart of everything God is
about - in His Temple throne, in the Brilliant Cave of the Star, the Angels,
the Magi and the Shepherds, and by the Waters of Jordan when they were made to
echo the Voice of Thunder. So, the
Wisdom of God looks first to us like a failure, an air of death about it, a
drowning out as much as a washing clean, a weakening loss of blood: rejection,
humiliation, disposal. God’s Wisdom is looking like madness to men, says St
Paul; yet it is wiser than any human wisdom. For the throne of God in glory is
none other than the Cross. The King we
have been given, hailed as God by His own Father in heaven, is none other than
a life as cheap as a symbolic animal whose life we can afford to throw away.
The Wisdom of God is a Lamb that does not open its mouth on the way to its
slaughter.
In a moving
prayer from the middle of Lent, the Anglican tradition prays: “Almighty God, Whose
most dear Son went not up to joy but first He suffered pain, and entered not
into glory before He was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the
way of the Cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace.”
This is the pattern
and sequence of life that St Paul proposes we make our own as Christians. He
looks back at Christ’s pre-sacrificial Circumcision, and sees that God has
clothed Himself with mortality, so that humanity can be robed in immortality.
Christ sowed His physical body, Paul said, and rose up with a spiritual body –
what was perishable on the Cross is turned immortal in the Tomb. So, he tells
us to think past the physical Circumcision, beyond the Passion and the Cross,
and to behold the Resurrection. He had emptied Himself, or submitted as today’s
Kontakion has it. But this is how He “cuts off the failing of mortals” in
favour of the only alternative left: salvation.
Or to look
at it another way, the fullness of God came to dwell in Christ’s Body, and the
fullness of Christ has come to dwell in us, says St Paul in today’s Epistle
(Colossians 2.8-12). So where does the fullness that is in us go to in turn?
Paul tells us: it was buried in baptism, so you could slip off your mortal
confines: You go not up to joy but first you suffer pain; you enter not into
glory before you too are crucified by walking the Way of the Cross and finding
it none other than the way of life and peace. Thus we see where we go in life,
and why. The meaning of the holly, is the meaning of the Tree of Life and the
Cross of Christ, and it is ours:
The holly bears a bark,
As bitter as any gall,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
For to redeem us all.
Troparion of the Feast, Tone 1. You are
seated on high on a fiery throne, * with Your Father Who is without beginning
and Your divine Spirit. * Yet You willed, O Jesus, to be born of a virgin
maiden, Your Mother, * and as man, You were circumcised on the eighth day, *
Glory to Your all-gracious will, * Glory to Your providence, * glory to Your
condescension, O You who alone love mankind.
Kontakion of the Feast, Tone 3. The Lord of
all submits to circumcision * and in His love cuts off the failings of mortals;
* today He gives the world salvation, * while in the highest there rejoices *
Basil the hierarch of the Creator and bearer of light, * and the divine
initiate of Christ.
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