are for and that is what the Word is for. The Word become flesh embodies the invitation made to Adam, to walk and talk with God.
3. THE BORN OUTSIDER
Jesus is born outside, just as he dies outside. The door of the inn closes on the one about to be born, just as the gates of the city close on the one about to die. The opposition of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is present throughout the Gospel story. Jesus is never found ‘inside’, where it’s safe and comfortable. He is neither Pharisee nor Sadducee, neither Essene nor Zealot. There is no party to protect him or to promote his cause. Those who go to him must ‘go out’ to him, forfeiting the security which ordinary human associations – including families – provide. Some households briefly shelter him. Perhaps they try to hold him ‘inside’, to curb his compulsion always to be on his way somewhere else. But the one who, as on this day, ‘pitched his tent’ among us (John 1.14) can never make anywhere his permanent home. The Son of Man, with nowhere to lay his head, is always ‘outside’.
This polarity of outside and inside is starkest in the accounts of his passion, where ‘Christ outside’ stands over against the scheming inner-circles around Caiaphas, Pilate and Herod. Finally he perishes ‘outside the camp’, in that waste land where, abandoning all transitory securities, we are summoned to follow him (Hebrews 13.12–13).
This tension between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is acute in the story of the birth of Jesus. He is born outside, with the despised and rejected; outside, where all must go who are not wanted. The ones inside Luke’s inhospitable inn, those described by John as Christ’s ‘own’ (John 1.11), do not receive him. No doubt it’s warm inside, but Mary and Joseph are left out in the cold. Christians, at least in the West, have always taken it that Christ was born in winter. In fact we have no idea at what time of the year he was born. But that he was born ‘in the bleak mid-winter’ is a truth about the nature of Christ’s coming, whatever the date of the first Christmas. It was cold outside, whatever the temperature. R. S. Thomas comments, ‘The very word Christ has that thin crisp sound so suggestive of frost and snow and the small sheets of ice that crack and splinter under our feet, even as the host is broken in the priest’s fingers’ (Selected Prose, Welsh Poetry Press, 1983). In a late poem, Thomas says of Christmas, ‘Love knocks with such frosted fingers’ (‘Blind Noel’, in No Truce with the Furies, Bloodaxe Books, 1995).
It’s cold outside. It’s dark too. We’re told that the shepherds, like Nicodemus, come to Jesus by night, but we do not know whether it was at night that he was born. But, as with the season, so with the hour. Night, like winter, befits his coming. The light shines in the darkness. The poets understand these things. ‘While mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wondering love.’ There is a history behind this story – Luke insists on that – but the truth of the nativity is in its poetry, not its prose. Jesus made our night-time his, as he made our winter.
Jesus is born outside and it is outsiders who find their way to him. The shepherds’ home, such as it is, is the hillside, but their ‘outside’ status is more than a matter of where they live. Shepherds, like the silly sheep they tend, are Sabbath-breakers, and as such are condemned by the pious. The magi come to Christ out of the desert. They were never at home in their summer palaces ‘with the silken girls bringing sherbet’ (‘The Journey of the Magi’, T. S. Eliot). Matthew will contrast these pilgrim spirits with the paranoid Herod. Outside they watch the stars. Inside, he can only watch his back (Matthew 2.1–18).
Where is Christ this Christmas? Inside or outside? At St Martin-in-the-Fields we erected a Christmas crib in ‘the courts of the temple’, in the market by the church, where they sold boxer shorts emblazoned with the Union Jack. The curate’s flat, my home for five years, overlooked this market. I looked out of my window one Christmas morning to see that, in the night, the baby Jesus had been turfed out of his crib. In his place, curled up in the straw, was a ‘rough sleeper’, one of London’s homeless.
At midnight mass we place the figure of the newborn Christ in the crib. We welcome him into our houses of prayer. We ask Jesus in. In some of our churches his presence inside our four walls continues to be affirmed long after the crib is taken down. The gentle light in the sanctuary says, ‘There he is. God is with us.’ So has Christ come ‘inside’ at last? If he has, it is only to break down the barriers we still build, in Church and society, between the included and the excluded. The distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ was drawn when Adam was driven out of Eden. Christmas signals its destruction.
The Epiphany of the Lord
6 JANUARY
Isaiah 60.1–6; Ephesians 3.1–12; Matthew 2.1–12
WHO IS MANIFESTING CHRIST TO WHOM?
In the Uffizi Gallery in Florence there is an unfinished painting by Leonardo da Vinci depicting the Adoration of the Magi. Behind the magi, behind the child and his mother, there is ruin, confusion and conflict. Stone stairs in broken buildings lead to empty space. Distracted figures ignore the momentous event unfolding nearby. Horsemen struggle to control their terrified rearing mounts. No doubt Leonardo wishes to suggest the collapse of the pagan world, but his treatment of the story reflects Matthew’s. The backdrop to the Gospel-writer’s story is as dark as that drawn by the artist. A vicious tyrant rules. Innocent blood will soon be shed. Christ is born in a world awry. As at the passion of Jesus, so it is at his birth. Those in authority, both in Church and in state, dread the one who, were he to reign, would put down the mighty.
The obduracy of Jerusalem is contrasted with the openness of the East. Matthew audaciously turns a traditional theme – the haplessness of heathen quackery – on its head. Those who search the stars are more responsive to this new thing God has done than those who search the scriptures. It is as if the Egyptian magicians had outdone Joseph (Genesis 41) or Nebuchadnezzar’s enchanters had got the better of Daniel (Daniel 4). T. S. Eliot, whose ‘Journey of the Magi’ is quoted from a thousand pulpits at Epiphany, has another account, less often cited, of the kind of characters these magi are. They are those who, ‘communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, report the behaviour of the sea monster, describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry’ (Four Quartets). The first magi may have come from Persia. Today they’d set out from Glastonbury. We’d be appalled by their New Age superstitions and give them a lot of stick.
Matthew sees the magi as the first of that great company of pilgrims from all the nations who at the last day will come to yield obeisance and obedience to this child. They are the forerunners of the many who ‘will come from east and west’ to feast at the messianic banquet (Matthew 8.11–12). They are the first of the kings of the earth to bring their glory into the City of God (Revelation 21.24). If there are trumpets in church this Epiphany, let them sound a fanfare before the tremendous Old Testament reading. ‘Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn’ (Isaiah 60.3).
But – big ‘but’ – our triumphalism needs to be tempered.
At this season I am troubled by a memory. I took the train out of Khartoum and got off at the little village of Kubushaya. On one side of the tracks were fields and the Nile. On the other side desert and, on the horizon, crumbling pyramids. I set off for the pyramids, very foolishly, in the midday sun. The pyramids are all that is left of Meroe, the capital of biblical Ethiopia. The queen of Meroe was the ‘Candace’ whose steward Philip met in the desert and whom he baptized (Acts 8.26–40). To this sumptuous court, now nothing but sand and broken stones, the steward returned with the Christian gospel. I reached the pyramids and collapsed. Mercifully, out of that apparently empty desert, someone appeared. A man on a camel. He had compassion on me. All these years later I remember the love in his eyes. He put me on his own beast and brought me to an inn – or at least back to the railway station. The date was the 6th of January, the Feast of the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.
There
