Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

It’s Christmas Eve! The Feast of Our Lord’s birth is only a few short hours away. And even before it arrives, what a great gift the church gives us in the lectionary when we’re invited to read the portion of scripture from John’s Revelation today, where we’re given a vision of supernal and radiant Light.

The Revelator writes, “I saw no temple in the city [the New Jerusalem, the Restored Creation], for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.”

There are lots of wonderful things for us here upon which we could meditate in marvel-struck slack-jawed awe…and one of them is this identification of temple and light with the immediate presence of God. The earthly temple was seen as a number of things in ancient days: the place of God’s throne on earth, a covenantally-guaranteed site of God’s presence in the midst of God’s people, from which blessing would flow through God’s people to all the ends of the earth; it was where sins were washed away, where heaven and earth were joined in harmony, where even the architecture and furnishings of the temple held a vision of that harmony.

And in a few brief hours, we celebrate once more the advent, the arrival, of that harmony alive in a human life, in Jesus Christ—in the clay of Jesus’ human body, all of the fullness of God serenely dwells, our humanity rapturously caught up in his divinity, united in his Person in which humanity and God, earth and heaven, dwell, at last, in peace. Jesus has reconciled all things to himself through his incarnation, his life, death, resurrection and ascension. In him is the washing away of sins and the death of death. From him does the Uncreated Light of the Godhead flow in cataracts of blessing and redemption to cover the whole earth in a healing and redeeming flood of radiant glory.

After a year of such darkness, in a time of such gloom, to a people mourning and weeping in a valley of tears, stumbling through the murky shadows…to poor ornery creatures like you and like I…to all of us…a light is shining. Our God has chosen, for the sheer sovereign delight of it, to make of our humanity a temple. Our God has chosen to build the throne of God’s abiding presence in our very being, in our frail humanity. Our God has chosen to enter our darkness to reveal the bright splendor of the divine life of love, to banish all shadows in the blaze of that splendor from the inside of creation, so that all creation can live on the inside of God’s grace.

So make no mistake, Beloved Friend! The baby that cries in the manger tonight is neither merely nor principally the object of our sentimental attention: the infant Jesus is the newness of the New Creation. With every cry that baby makes, hell itself trembles, death itself quakes. With every beat of that Sacred Heart, all creation strains to dance to the new rhythm of grace as the light burns brighter in the midst of our darkness: light—which is to say, in part—love unfettered and joy unbounded, stretches and streams through all humanity and all creation from the primordial and depthless depths of God’s own life, from the very site of the fulfillment of all things, where a human life is the Lamp of God’s glory and the abiding temple of God’s presence: God-with-is, Emmanuel himself, Jesus Christ.

Merry Christmas, Beloved!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+