mass of Christ

x marks the spot

Xmas. “X” as in the Greek letter for chi. Thus, Χριστός (christos): “Christ,” meaning “messiah,” “anointed one.”

And now, Christmas. “Christ Mass,” as the origin of the word. The Mass of Christ, from Roman Catholic usage. That’s a reference to the worship service, but thinking about the “mass” of Christ can lead us in another direction.

Christmas is about the incarnation — the “enfleshment” — of Jesus the Christ, the eternal Word of God. John 1:14 says “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” As the carol goes, “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; / Hail the incarnate Deity, / Pleased in flesh with us to dwell, / Jesus, our Emmanuel.”

Christmas is the story of the divine becoming living matter. God already had a name: Yahweh. But now God has agreed to provide a human face through which the glory shines.

If God has become matter, then that says something about creation itself. An essay by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Christic,” appears in the book The Heart of Matter. (What a wonderfully “incarnational” title.) This was written in March 1955, one month before his death on Easter. (There’s a note there about “new creation,” but we won’t get into that now!)

This visionary mystic and scientist was well ahead of most in the church when meditating on the meaning of Christ’s incarnation in the universe. He writes that “we now see how the Universe, along all the lines known to us experientially, is beginning to grow to fantastic dimensions, so that the time has come for Christianity to develop a precise consciousness of all the hopes stimulated by the dogma of the Universality of Christ when it is enlarged to this new scale.” He adds “if the World is becoming so dauntingly vast and powerful, it must follow that Christ is very much greater even than we used to think.”

X marks the spot… everywhere.

We can complain about the commercialization of Christmas and whine about the kitsch and crap that gets tied with it. I suppose that’s okay. But what if we turn from that foolishness and behold the sublime — how it divinizes cosmology?

And we can even give a break to those impersonators of Santa Claus.