Christmas as God's triumph over darkness and evil

The Roman Liturgy presents the feast of Christmas not so much about Christ's historical birth in Bethlehem, but his duel with darkness, and triumph over evil.

Image: Christ as the Rider on the White Horse, from the Book of the Apocalypse – alluded to in the propers of the Christmas Octave. Wikimedia Commons. As Amazon Associates, we earn from qualifying purchases through our Amazon links. See also The WM Review Reading List.

In previous parts of this series, we considered Advent’s liturgical texts and their meaning for us today.

We saw that the Church calls, again and again, for her Lord’s coming, and that she promises her children that he will arrive without delay.

The restlessness and excitement of these texts only increases as Advent progresses, especially with the beginning of the “O Antiphons” on the 17th December; and that this reaches its full height on on Christmas Eve.

We saw how the Advent liturgy can be seen to focus, not just on Christ’s birth, but also the “Parousia” (the second and final coming of Christ). As Fr Henry James Coleridge SJ tells us, Advent represents the Church “training us” to see the end of the world in the right way, and even to long for it:

“The Church at this time, my brethren in Jesus Christ, is training us to prepare ourselves more particularly to celebrate with joy and thankfulness the great feast of Christmas, the commemoration of our Lord’s first coming into the world, in poverty, in suffering, in gentleness; in benignity and humility.

“But she is led by a heavenly instinct to, do this, in great measure, by means of considerations concerning our Blessed Lord’s future coming in glory, majesty, and power.

“These two thoughts seem, as it were, to require, each the other, as its own fitting and natural supplement.”¹

This “training” in turn immunizes us against fear and false hope as we face the encroaching tyranny and ecclesiastical chaos of our time.

As we saw from the writings of Fr Johannes Pinsk, this approach allows us to enter into the Church’s liturgical calls for the coming of Our Lord in an apparently new way for many.²

This “apocalyptic” approach to Advent is, to some degree, absent in the popular imagination today; for example, it rarely appears in conferences or popular carols. However, approaching Advent with this in mind inculcates into us a real hope for a host of public, ecclesial things that have not yet happened: the final, triumphant glory of Christ; the vindication of his claims against his enemies in this world; his social reign over society; and the eventual exaltation of our Holy Mother, the Church.

But here a question arises: if we are to accept this apocalyptic view of Advent, then where does this leave Christmas and Epiphany?

Are we to spend four weeks thinking about hoping for the final coming of Christ, only to give up on the idea and celebrate two feasts solely about historical events in Our Lord’s life?

The importance of history

Our Lord’s birth was an historical event.

We see this focus on the historicity of his birth on three occasions in the liturgy (the Fourth Sunday of Advent, the Martyrology on Christmas Eve, and in the Gospel of Midnight Mass). On each of these occasions, the Church proclaims the birth of Christ with reference to civil dates and known civil rulers.³

The historicity of everything about Christ’s life and work emphasises that our holy religion is based on a true, solid and historical foundation, quite unlike the other mythical, mystery religions existing in the world.

But even as an historical event, the nativity of Christ already points towards the future. We can already see the wood of the manger foreshadowing the wood of the Cross, and the swaddling clothes foreshadowing the ropes, bindings and shroud. The very name of “Bethlehem” (House of Bread) points towards Christ giving himself to us under the accidents of bread and wine, to be our true and living sustenance in the Holy Eucharist.

But Pinsk claims that Our Lord’s nativity points even further forward than this.

All the Church’s feasts, Pinsk says, have some reference to the final coming of Christ. According to him, if Advent is a season when we long for and pray for Christ’s final coming in triumph, then Christmas (and Epiphany) would in turn be a commemoration of that final coming itself.

Already the End Times

In the words of St Ignatius of Loyola, Christ wills “to conquer the whole world and all [his] enemies, and thus to enter into the glory of [his] Father.”⁴

This is also the will of his mystical body and spouse, the Church. We, the members of that mystical body, continue this mission on earth. Our head, of course, has already entered into his glory; because of this, we are already assured of the triumph, and are merely cleaning up the remaining skirmishes of the war. At any moment, the final victory is to be accomplished, and “the whole Christ, Head and Members” will definitively enter into that glory.

Pope St Leo the Great explains how this reality appears in the feast of Christmas, which pertains to the birth of the Church herself:

“… [I]n adoring the birth of our Saviour, we find we are celebrating the commencement of our own life.

“For the birth of Christ is the source of life for Christian folk, and the birthday of the Head is the birthday of the body.

“Although every individual that is called has his own order, and all the sons of the Church are separated from one another by intervals of time, yet as the entire body of the faithful being born in the font of baptism is crucified with Christ in His passion, raised again in His resurrection, and placed at the Father’s right hand in His ascension, so with Him are they born in this nativity.”⁵

Just as calling for Our Lord’s coming in Advent should progressively detach us from the worldly city, and make us cleave more and more to the Kingdom of God and the Church, so too can Christmas itself do the same. We want Our Lord to reign over our hearts and our families, but we also want him to reign over society and the whole world. We want the star to shine over the stable and manger, to show the world where Christ’s mystical body, bound in swaddling clothes, lies today. We want everyone, whether they be shepherds or kings, to recognise him and reverence him in this mystical body.

In other words, we want something which is both ecclesial and public.

Pinsk says that Christmas represents “the real fulfilment, albeit still imperfect, of what Advent has prepared”; namely, the victory and reign of Christ over his Kingdom (the Church), and over society as a whole.

Many do not know Christ, and many or even reject him. Whole nations remain or have become rebels against his reign. As such, Christ’s reign can still be extended. Each celebration of Christmas may therefore bring new graces to achieve this end, and that of the final ousting of the Prince of this world.

But in another sense, Christmas helps us celebrate the kingship of Christ which he is already exercising over us and over his kingdom. It is for this reason that the New Testament says that “the fulness of time” has already arrived. In Galatians, St Paul tells us:

“When the fulness of the time was come, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law: that he might redeem them who were under the law: that we might receive the adoption of sons.” (Gal. 4.5)

This phrase appears in several other places in the New Testament.⁶ The point, according to Pinsk, is this: all religious events (in fact, all events) prior to Christ had pointed to the Incarnation and Redemption. In a sense, there is nothing more to come:

“[T]his historical event itself is both the foundation and the revelation of the mystery to the world. With the Incarnation of the Son of God begins a new world, a new era, a new ‘aeon’, whose fundamental characteristic consists in the following: the individuals of this world are no longer mere vehicles of a life and a power received from God and created ‘ex nihilo’ by Him; they now possess a life that is properly uncreated and divine.”

For this reason, Pinsk says, “it is impossible to enclose and limit the whole mystery of the Incarnation within the framework of a simple historical event.” Rather, this annual feast of the historical birth of Christ, “while stressing the events that took place in Bethlehem, goes far beyond the limits of this purely historical aspect.”

In other words:

“[I]n order to celebrate the feast of Christmas in its fullness, it is necessary to go beyond the external circumstances of the Saviour’s birth, and to grasp what constitutes the permanent reality of this mystery.” (Emphasis added)

And what is this “permanent reality”?

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