January Month of the Holy Infancy

The year begins—on a January morning, cold and early. The earth lies frozen under her strewings of snow. There is no wind, and a great silence broods over the fields; the faint bleating of a winter lamb only accentuates the stillness, as it creeps from the lambing-hut with its tale of life beginning in struggle and distress. It is the only sound of life in all that frost-bound stillness, and it is a sound of woe.

No promise shows in all that hard, dark soil. Surely nothing can live on the frozen grass, or in the waters of the pond that lie black under their scum of ice. The sun himself looks feeble as he tries in vain to disperse the January clouds, and the long beam that at last goes down into the woods contains no warmth and only the palest light. The fields are bound—water-logged ditches, half-frozen soil, hedges of bare, spindled thorn. The fields are silent—birdless, windless, lifeless; they have no voice but the cry of the winter lamb.

It is a week now since “when all things were in a quiet silence and that night in the midst of her swift course” the Eternal Word leaped from the throne of the heavens to the throne of straw. For a week he has shared the bed and shelter of the ox. Unable to do more than feed and cry, he has lain in Mary’s arms and cried for her breast. Out into the star-pricked winter darkness creeps the wailing of the speechless Word. He is the Word—he cannot speak. He is the Energy that set the worlds in motion—he lies helpless on his mother’s lap.

But now a new note has come into his cry of hunger and helplessness—the note of pain. He who is the End of the Law submits to the means he has ordained for approaching himself. He who is the Light of the World enters the thick darkness where Moses found God. He will make Sinai a foothill to Calvary.... “Verily I say unto you, I am not come to destroy but to fulfil”—perhaps to destroy by fulfilling, as an ancient bottle is burst with new-made wine. The veil of the temple is rent in twain at the cry of ‘Consummatum est,’ and in that hour the Law of Moses stands both destroyed and fulfilled.

So the child in Mary’s arms is really a mighty, propitiatory child. The Precious Blood did not fall only on Calvary but at Bethlehem. It was there that the fountain was first opened for sin and uncleanness, in the first dark hours of the year. As the winter sun shall mount at last into the blazing heavens of July, so he too will pass through shattering equinoxes of redemption to his ascended summer calm.

But our New Year’s worship is for him in his winter helplessness, his smallness, his obedience to the frosty fierceness of the law. He is the pattern of our Faith—its helplessness in its first struggle for life—for what are its two thousand years in his sight but as yesterday?—its smallness, as it lies in the stable of humble intellects and impulsive hearts—its half-conscious obedience to laws which are the patterns of heavenly things—its blood-shedding in that obedience.... We are often too confident of our Faith, just as our enemies are too contemptuous of it—we and they forget that it is still only a child, existing chiefly by desire, by feeling, by necessity.

The age of that child made obedient unto the law, and in the shedding of blood first given his human name, is not more disproportionate to the age of the Law than is the age of the Kingdom of Heaven to the age of the earth. Millions and millions of years ago life first appeared—a small helpless thing, scarcely distinguishable from the inorganic mass, in constant danger of being stamped out by the mighty forces around it. Throughout long ages it developed so slowly that its growth would be almost imperceptible to the watchman of a thousand years ... and as it grew, it submitted itself to the Law. Terrific forces bound it, moulded it, complicated it, regulated it, evolved it. We see the domain of the Law stretching back from the circumcised Christ, far beyond the Priestly Code, far beyond the days of Moses on the Mount, back to the prehistoric ages of the world, when in some dim secret place of the sea there was a change, a miraculous birth. In the same way we see the dominion of Grace stretching forward from the child of that winter’s day, beyond his helpless infancy and suffering manhood, beyond his Cross, beyond his empty grave, beyond the Mount of his Ascension, on into the far future of the world, when having grown to manhood and shared his Cross, it is raised at last to share his throne.

On the Feast of the Circumcision the old and the new kingdoms meet—the kingdom of Nature and the kingdom of Supernature, the kingdom of the Law and the kingdom of Grace. We do not understand why the greater submits to the less, why Grace is content to suffer under the Law, why the New King weeps and the Old King carries the sword.

“I am not come to destroy but to fulfil.” ... Not only the Law of Moses, but the whole Old Testament of the world’s history—that which we call, understanding but in part, the Law of Nature. The supernatural life does not come to destroy the natural, but to fulfil it, not to supplant but to complete it. Grace fulfils the Law, and Spirit raises Matter to the right hand of God. On the Feast of the Circumcision the sacramental wonder has begun.

So we watch the New Life lying on the Winter’s lap, submitting itself humbly and sweetly to nature and mankind, surrounded by dangers that threaten it—the shouts of Herod’s soldiers are not far off—suffering the pains and indignities that accompany its surrender to our limitations, baptising itself into our humanity with blood. Mary and Joseph—the loving and the wise among us—know that it will live best in the warm air of simplicity, homeliness and familiarity, of childhood and the hearth. It must be sheltered from the windy blasts of dispute, and wrapped from the frosts of prohibitions; it must not be brought into the cold halls of pomposity, nor starved by cutting off from the six days of common things.... Mary and Joseph must be careful guardians of the New Life if it is to grow through the slow ages of the world’s future—as life grew humble and close to the ground through the ages of her past—till it is old enough to claim its manhood—till it attains at last to the full stature of the Cross.