Articles - From the Vicar

Now in a manger lies the eternal Word:
The Word He is, yet can no speech afford;
He is the Bread of Life, yet hungry lies;
The Living Fountain, yet for drink He cries;
He cannot help or clothe Himself at need
Who did the lilies clothe and ravens feed;
He is the Light of Lights, yet now doth shroud
His glory with our nature as a cloud.
He came to us a Little One, that we
Like little children might in malice be;
Little He is, and wrapped in clouts, lest He
Might strike us dead if clothed with majesty.

I love the way in which the seventeenth century poet-priest, Rowland Watkyns, piles up the paradoxes in his poem 'Upon Christ's Nativity'. These lines, saturated in scripture, summarise the truth of God's incarnation, of God's enfleshment, of Emmanuel: God-with-us. It is the truth of a God who empties himself of glory and, assuming our humanity, becomes like us. This God, as Pope Benedict puts it, has 'lifted our momentary today into God's eternal today'.

Benedict identifies what is perhaps the greatest of all challenges for Christians: the call to proclaim, in our 'momentary today', the truth of God's 'eternal today'. What better place to start than with a baby in an animal feed-box, the unlikely setting in which God affirms his love for us and for his whole creation? How better, than through rejoicing in the incarnation, to put flesh on the daily petition to God of all Christians: 'your will be done on earth as it is in heaven'?

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay