A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION

WORSHIP AT THE CRIB

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

Hans Urs von Balthasar

Worship at the Crib A Christmas Meditation

Original: Weihnacht und Anbetung, privately pu-blished (�⌧��) © Johannes Verlag Einsiedeln | En-glish translation: Adrian J. Walker | Images: Paul Klee (�,�⌧-�⌧-.), Fire at Full Moon (�⌧//); Forget-ful Angel (�⌧/⌧) | For this edition: © Johannesge-meinschaft –– The Community of Saint John, Inc, 8.8.

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f the three wise men who visited the child and his mother we read that they fell down

in worship. The same is doubtless true of the shepherds, whom every nativity scene shows in an attitude of reverent devotion, given that they had learned from the angel who this child was: the Savior, the Messiah, the Lord. Similarly, there are countless traditional images depicting Mary in silent adoration of the child lying on the ground before her. Christmastide is a season in which the worship of God as it was known throughout the Old Testament –– think of the Psalms –– finds a whole new setting and, with that, a whole new form: It is our privilege and duty to worship God in this infant whom he has sent us. This is so as-tonishing that it forces us to reflect anew on the act of worship, which has largely become foreign to us in our secularized age.

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If we still have a personal relationship with God, we mostly address petitions to him, and we are right to do so. (Thanking him is something we do less frequently –– typically, only one of the ten

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lepers healed by Jesus returns to say thanks.) Or else we surrender to God’s incomprehensible eter-nal decree, say when we are visited by suBering. This, too, is legitimate. And yet, surrender and resignation are not the same as worship.

hat is worship? God is uniquely and in-finitely mysterious. The same uniqueness

characterizes the act by which we acknowledge him with our whole being as God, as our God. This act is therefore not easy to describe. But let us try to do so nonetheless.

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To worship is to acknowledge that God alone is self-existent, while everything created exists solely on the basis of his omnipotent will and ac-tion and is thus not rooted in itself, but in him, the one and only unconditioned Absolute. To worship is thus also to acknowledge that God is the abso-lutely True, the quintessence of all truth; that he is consequently always right, no matter what he does or permits; that it is the height of folly to ar-gue with God, as if one could convict him of

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some error or injustice; and that the homme révolté destroys his own being. To worship is to acknowl-edge that God is the absolutely Good, the quintes-sence of all goodness, and that he is therefore not only always right, but in everything he is and chooses ever-worthy of being unconditionally loved with the devout homage of our whole heart. To worship, finally, is to acknowledge that God is absolutely beautiful, the quintessence of all beauty, and that we therefore cannot help but pro-claim his truth with enthusiasm and serve him with jubilation, like the Psalmist who sings to him in a spirit of exultation, or the Christian who fol-lows Paul’s injunction: “Sing God’s praises with songs of exultation, full of thanksgiving in your hearts.”

As the absolute truth, God is –– according to Scripture –– “our rock” that cannot be shaken; as goodness, he is our “shepherd,” the “wing” under which we “take refuge”; as beauty, he is the Lord of “glory,” our perfect happiness and our raptur-ous delight. All of this is already familiar in the

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Old Testament, where the devout heart hands it-self over to God in devotion, thanksgiving, trust, and a reverence that is fathomless without fear.

hat happens, though, when God’s eternal Word, sent to us on earth, now takes the

form of a child? The first thing to do is understand what God wants to say to us by speaking in this new form.

WHe is of course saying something about himself,

as he always does through his Word. Everything this child is and will become –– the youth, the ma-ture man, the teacher and miracle-worker; the one silent before the judge; the one scourged, mocked, and rejected; the one crying out in Godforsaken-ness; the one buried and rising to new and eternal life from the dead –– contains the Word that God speaks and, in speaking, speaks about himself. If God is the absolute Truth, every word he says to us from the heart of truth must of course also be about himself. If he is the absolute Good, then it’s he himself whom he’s giving (away) in all the

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words that make up Jesus’ life, suBering, death, and resurrection. And if he is absolute Beauty, then the true and the good he says and gives to us is also supremely wonderful.

In becoming an infant, then, God is telling us is this: “In all my omnipotence, which I truly am and have, I am at the same time as poor and hum-ble and trusting as this child. Correction: not just ‘as’ this child, because I am this child.” In his fu-ture role as a teacher, too, Jesus will speak to his disciples about taking the last place, serving, and laying down one’s life for one’s brothers. He won’t be referring to these things as the mere object of some human moral instruction, but as something he himself does and is, and so as something in which the Father’s heart is revealed. “Do this, for this is how God is!” And then the terrible part: When Jesus suBers for sinners, when he bears sin to the point of no longer feeling the Father and cries out as one abandoned and thirsting for God –– that, too, is what God is like! “God so loved the world that” for its sake “he gave over his

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Only-begotten Son” –– into the timelessness of the Godforsaken state. And when Jesus gives him-self out as food and drink –– that’s what God is like! It’s the Father, after all, who takes what men have torn, lacerated, and bloodied –– this Word and flesh of God –– and proBers it to us as our means of participation in his eternal life. And when Jesus’ heart is pierced, when it becomes a cavernous emptiness which Thomas’ fingers and, indeed, the whole man can enter ––L“in thy wounds hide me” –– that, too, is what God is like! A wound that reaches down into his heart and in which we find healing.

To say these things is not to indulge an over-wrought imagination, but to realize, in all simplic-ity, what Christianity means by the mystery of the Incarnation. The Word became flesh: flesh that drinks at its mother’s breast, that later struggles to make its way in life, that must undergo a grue-some passion and death, and that in all its states re-mains God’s Word who tells us of God’s nature and his truth, goodness, and beauty. Does this

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mean that we worship flesh? No, we worship God alone; God, the unique reality we most certainly are not; God, the Wholly Other, the Self-existent, the Almighty –– who, however, was pleased to show us that he is omnipotent enough to be impo-tent as well, blessed enough to suBer as well, glori-ous enough to take the lowest place in his creation as well. God is not pretending, either; he is not merely acting as if he were humble, child-like, and poor. Rather, his mystery is precisely the fact that his wealth consists in an eternal love that gives it-self away, holding nothing back, and that his power consists in the generous ability to give power and freedom to other beings, beings he has no wish to overpower ––Lunless it be by the pow-erlessness of the Cross. How could the God who created children not know in his heart what it’s like to be a child?

And at this point we can ask: Is there any God more mysterious and incomprehensible than the Christian one ––Lprecisely because he is not only a distant God, but one near-at-hand, a God whom

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we don’t have to seek beyond the clouds and adore from an ineliminable distance, but who treats us like a human being, better: as a human being, yet without therefore ceasing to be truly God, the Wholly Other, the Eternal, Immortal, and Om-nipotent? This God has lost nothing of his elusive-ness on account of the Incarnation. On the con-trary, he has become even more elusive. Only now do we begin to get a glimmer of the true extent of divine omnipotence, which includes even the power to become a powerless child. Nor can we turn away from this God with the excuse that “no one can figure out” whether he is still really God or is now just a mere mortal; we are instead con-stantly, inevitably running up against his presence in our midst, a presence that, since Jesus’ birth, can no longer be ignored. We try to turn our backs, but the figure of Jesus is already facing us from the other side. We may be Marxists, we may be Bud-dhists, but we cannot escape him. The course of world history has changed since Christmas. From now on, there is just one option: Yes or No to this

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God who has become concrete in Christ. Only now can there can be authentic atheism. Nor can any worship be profounder, provided it is authen-tic, than that of Christianity.

The Magi, the shepherds, and Mary: All wor-ship the child, just as the disciples, once they come to faith, worship him as a grown man. They do this because they recognize that he is God’s per-sonal Word, God’s expression and interpreter. Ev-erything about Jesus speaks. Everything about him says “this is what God is like, what the heavenly Father, mine and yours, is like, what our eternal Spirit is like. I show you this because I want you to know it and because I also want you to try liv-ing along the same lines: ‘Be perfect as your Fa-ther in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the good and the wicked.’”

n the incarnate Word, then, we become able to worship God in a new and Christian manner,

because this Word doesn’t merely point to God from afar, but is himself divine Speech out of

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God’s mouth and heart. “The Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and this “Word be-came flesh” and “interpreted” –– unfolded –– the One whom no eye has ever seen. But what about the rest of the world? What about the people around us, with all their comings and goings? All these things are not even remotely what God is, and so they are not even remotely worthy of wor-ship. They are this-worldly realities, they are crea-tures, and we have no right to claim that every creature, taken as such, already has an uncreated divine spark in the depths of its being. Otherwise, we should have to worship ourselves.

And yet: Don’t we find a kernel of truth in this idea that there’s something divine at the core of man? The Christian answer sounds like this: Yes, every human being does contain something divine, though not by reason of his nature, insofar as he is a creature, but by reason of grace, insofar as all men have been destined, chosen, and called to be-come children of the Father, brothers of Jesus, and bearers of the Holy Spirit. Many, probably most,

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know nothing, or very little, of this vocation, and they live in passing time as if it harbored nothing eternal. When, therefore, they meet a fellow hu-man being, they see nothing particularly world-transcendent about him. They see his look, his manners, his pleasant and unpleasant qualities; the former they find delightful, the latter irritating. They don’t see that in Christ he is a child of the Father, who loves him because Christ vouched for him and made him a brother; who, we can add, al-ready so loved him as to give up the Son, Jesus Christ, for his sake; and who thus, as Paul tells us, has paid a high price for this love of his. Men usu-ally see in their fellow men only a mirror of them-selves, random specimens among millions, struck from the same mold as they are. Small change. A few, having turned out better than the others, pos-sess more market value, more collector’s value, than most of the rest. Our much-prized contem-porary psychology and sociology always start from this assumption: “One man is as good as an-other.” In principle, everyone can be replaced by

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everyone else, because in the end everyone is made according the same model, baked from the same mold, and fashioned at the same lathe.

The Christian alone is granted the possibility of catching sight of the singularity in each man he encounters, of seeing him as one whom God doesn’t merely lump together with everyone else, as if he were some random specimen of humanity, but whom God loves in all his non-fungible uniqueness. Jesus Christ alone makes this recogni-tion possible. It was over him that the voice rang out from heaven: “‘You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!’ You and no other; you, who can’t be identified or confused with anyone else. But in you, all these men you intercede for have become lovable in my sight. In you, each of them has acquired something of your unique-ness.”

To cite the Apostle again, we have all been “con-formed to the image of his Son,” who has thus be-come “the first-born of many brethren.” And in God’s eternal idea, we were never anything except

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such beloved sons and daughters, who “before the foundation of the world were chosen in Jesus Christ to be holy in his sight.”

If this is actually true, what does the Christian see in his fellow man? Not a dubious, cheap, highly imperfect specimen of humanity-as-such, but –– despite all his shortcomings –– a unique being whom God loves for himself and no other, regardless of how filthy or how deeply buried in him the divine image may be. But the love that loves this man is worthy of worship. To say this isn’t to make the ridiculous claim that people should worship one another. It’s to make the seri-ous, consequential claim that each person can and should become for every other an occasion to worship God’s love for us, for every individual as he exists in God’s eyes.

We’ve no need, then, to erect a dividing wall be-tween the moments we reserve for our prayer and (hopefully) worship of God and the ordinary life where we’re obliged to think about very diBerent matters. To be sure, unless we keep some time free

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for directing our minds to God, for realizing his eternal love for each person, we will never think of it when encountering one another in the hustle and bustle of everyday existence. But once our meditation on the mystery of Christmas has led us into the depths of God’s worshipful love, we don’t have to abandon the attitude of worship in the midst of our daily aBairs. For now we’re not only constantly surrounded by this mystery, but every encounter with a fellow man becomes a new occa-sion to re-encounter the mystery as well.

One thinks here of the first stanza of Thomas Aquinas’ eucharistic hymn Adoro te devote:

“Adoro te devote, latens Deitasquae sub his figuris vere latitas,tibi se cor meum totum subjicit,quia te contemplans totum deficit.”

In English: “Devoutly thee I worship, hidden De-ity,/Hiding ‘neath these figures in all verity!/Lord, my heart is captive, under thy whole sway,/For, in

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thee beholding, it wholly faints away.” Now, “these figures,” I think, can mean more than just the forms of bread and wine under which the di-vinity is concealed. The “figures” can also include the forms of the world, especially the forms of men, but also all the other forms that were created for man’s sake and belong to his earthly dwelling. It’s when people can see and endure the world in this attitude that we say that “they walk in the presence of God.”

Many suppose that walking in God’s presence requires long preparation through the practice of meditative techniques. I don’t agree. It suRces to realize, in all simplicity, the meaning of our faith, whose visible pledge is given on Christmas: “God so loved the world,” and every single one of us in it, “that he gave his Only-begotten Son” for this world and for each of us as well. This Son, surren-dered to the end, lies before our gaze. Here on Christmas, on the Cross, on Easter, here on every ordinary day of the Church year.

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e mustn’t close this meditation without adding a final thought. The Son who lies

before us in the form of a child wasn’t forced into this Incarnation by the Father. For he is the same one God as the Father, and he is just as perfectly, sovereignly free as the other two divine persons. From all eternity, the Son oBered himself in di-vine freedom to guarantee the Father’s good cre-ation. Indeed, it was on the strength of this oBer that the triune God could venture, not only to create a world such as the one we actually know, but even to call it “very good.” On the Cross, the Son gathers up the entirety of the world’s un-speakable suBering, proving to the Father that even in the midst of Godforsakenness it’s possible to love and worship God above all things. But what is moving in the Father’s heart when all this happens? Hasn’t the Son’s self-oBering eternally touched him and pierced him to the depths? Mustn’t he have beheld the Son’s oBer with eternal astonishment that such an idea could arise from the depths of divine freedom? Obviously, this is a

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very anthropomorphic way of putting things, but what other way of putting things is there –– if, that is, we want to hold on to the “relative opposi-tion” of the divine persons or hypostases in the one, unique divinity? And when the work is now accomplished, when on Christmas the Father sees his Son lying before him as an infant (who is al-ready marked by the coming hour of darkness), can’t we say that his astonishment is itself the highest form of worship? Why shouldn’t the Fa-ther worship the wonder of the Son’s divine love –– just as the Son worshipped the Father and his loving will throughout his entire earthly life? “May thy name be glorified, may thy kingdom ap-pear, may thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”: Isn’t that a prayer of worshipful adora-tion? And how could the Holy Spirit, the expres-sion and the witness of the mutual love of Father and Son, fail to worship, in his turn, the eternal mutual worship of the other two?

God is a wonder in the unfathomable depth of his essence. He is a wonder to himself in the mys-

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tery of his tri-personality. God never gets bored with God. Everything in him is an eternally present event: the birth of the Son from the Fa-ther, the dynamic coinherence of the love of Fa-ther and Son in the procession of the Holy Spirit. All of this is worthy of worship for and by God himself.

We have no right, then, to think that we’re ac-quitting ourselves of some bothersome duty when we worship God. In worshipping him, we merely enter into the truth, goodness, and beauty of God himself. By the same token, we merely fulfill the law of the truth, goodness, and beauty of our own existence. God, after all, “is not far from any one of us. In him we live, and move, and have our be-ing . . . for we are also his oBspring.”

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