Who do you say that I
am? – Mathew 16:15
As we grow older, everything tends to vanish. Our interests
and focus is repurposed. We have tucked
Charles Dickens’ “Christmas Past” in our memory banks, but draw upon our
reserves to give us the pleasure of seasonal joy.
King Lear is old, and painfully wise. A terribly sane Lear,
suddenly dispossessed of his kingdom, finds himself, along with his faithful
fool, on a forbidding heath in Great Britain’s frigid north, while winds and hurricanes
beat about them. A friendly Kent, disguised as a beggar, points the way to a
shabby hovel.
Lear addresses his fool: “In, boy. Go first, you houseless
poverty.” And he then challenges the unforgiving storm: “Poor naked wretches,
wheresoe’er you are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, how shall
your houseless heads and unfed sides, your looped and windowed raggedness
defend you from seasons such as these? O, I have taken too little care of this.
Take physic, pomp, expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, that thou may’st
shake the superflux to them, and show the heavens more just.”
The superflux is the superfluity of our wealth, that portion
of our assets we may give to the poor and the stranger among us without
suffering much discomfort.
This is, in great part, the message of Christianity to an
unheeding world.
We cannot call ourselves Christians – that is, followers of
Jesus, the Christ – and avert out eyes from the poor or the stranger among us. And those of us who believe that the way of
Christ is a smooth and straight path that leads inescapably to eternal felicity
should be forced, if necessary at the point of a gun, to re-read Soren
Kierkegaard’s Attack on Christendom.
The way to Christ leads through the cross, and the true
“witness” to Christ is the one gladly willing to suffer the obloquy of
unbelievers who cannot bring themselves to believe that Christ himself and his
message will always be a stumbling stone to those who lack the courage to act
on their faith -- that one, believing in Christ, may mount to Heaven on a cross
of suffering because he or she has been redeemed by the blood of the lamb.
In Christianity, suffering is not a mere nullity – the
absence of a good, as the pre-Christian philosophers of Greece and Rome taught
us. And the stranger among us bears within himself the image of Christ on the
cross.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, also saved by his sacrifice on
the cross, fully understood the message of Christ, which is why the Christian
Church honors her as its first and truest theologian. The angel Gabriel sent by
the Father brings to her, a lowly servant of the word, the glad tidings that
await mankind, and she responds instantly, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord.
Let it be with me according to your word,” Luke 1: 38.
According to early Christian tradition, most of the Apostles
were martyred for their faith. Peter was crucified upside down in Rome; Andrew
was crucified on an X-shaped cross in Greece; James was stoned to death in
Jerusalem; Philip was crucified in Hierapolis, Turkey; Bartholomew was flayed
alive and then beheaded in Armenia; Matthew was stabbed to death in Ethiopia;
Thomas was speared to death in India; James was stoned and then clubbed to
death in Jerusalem; Jude was killed with arrows in Persia; Simon was crucified
in Persia; and Matthias was stoned and then beheaded in Jerusalem.
During this Christmas, among our family and friends, we
should try to form for ourselves an answer to the question Jesus put to his
apostles – Who do you say I am?
How can one help but be joyful at the good tidings brought,
Luke tells us, by angels to shepherds tending their flocks by night: “And the
angel said to them: Fear not. For, behold, I bring you good tidings of great
joy that shall be to all the people. For, this day is born to you a Savior, who
is Christ the Lord, in the city of David. And this shall be a sign unto you.
You shall find the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger…”
But let us not forget the words spoken to Mary by Simon, a
devout man who had been promised by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until
he had seen the Messiah: “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,
that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed (Luke 2:35).”
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