Have you ever wondered about those weekday feasts between Christmas and New Year’s Day? They include two martyrs—St. Stephen and St.Thomas a Becket—as well as the Holy Infants, who lost their lives to Herod’s vicious pursuit of Christ. Also the Apostle John, who wasn’t even born at the time of Jesus’ Nativity. What is the Church trying to tell us by situating these particular feasts just after the joyful celebration of the Savior’s birth?
I was puzzling over that when I came across something that suggests the answer. It’s verse 9 in chapter 8 of St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, and it reads as follows: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”
In his inimitable fashion, St. Paul is here summing up the significance of Christ’s Incarnation, which we celebrate at Christmas. The Second Person of the Trinity took on human nature and entered into history (“he became poor”) for the precise purpose of redeeming us from sin (“so that…you might become rich”), with the maternity of the Blessed Virgin—she who said “Yes” to the angel—the chosen instrument by which the God-Man began his redemptive mission (as the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God, reminds us on New Year’s Day).
And those seemingly out-of-place feasts between Christmas and New Year’s fit perfectly in this framework.
Like Jesus himself, St. Stephen and St. Thomas a Becket “became poor”–they gave up their lives and thereby joined the company of those who participate by martyrdom in the redemptive work of Christ. St. Stephen, the first martyr, whose death is recounted in the Acts of the Apostles, died proclaiming Christ. St. Thomas, a 12th-century archbishop of Canterbury, was slain at the king’s behest on December 29, 1170 for upholding the rights of Christ’s Church.
As for the Holy Infants, they died in place of Jesus as a counterpart to the chorus of angels who sang on Christmas night, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased” (Luke 1.14). St. John the Apostle? The magnificent prologue of his Gospel celebrates the Incarnation (“the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”) while recalling Christ’s passion and its result: “His own people received him not. But to all who received him…he gave power to become children of God” (Jn 1:11-12).
In their own ways, then, these post-Christmas feasts belong where they are. T.S. Eliot understood that when writing his verse drama Murder in the Cathedral, based (loosely) on the martyrdom of St. Thomas a Becket. In a Christmas sermon, Becket notes that Christmas is followed immediately by the feast of the first martyr, St. Stephen. An accident? “By no means,” the soon-to-be martyred archbishop declares, adding:
Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and in the Passion of Our Lord, so also, in a smaller figure, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs….A martyr, a saint, is always made by the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways….The true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God.
Merry Christmas and happy New Year—and note those martyrs’ feasts that the Church wisely situates in between.
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Reinforcing Shaw’s point about counterpoints, we might consider the contrast between the three synoptic (and chronological) gospels and the more theological St. John…
As the only apostle and evangelist who personally witnessed BOTH the Transfiguration and the Crucifixion, does this help explain both his mystical flavor and even his delay by decades in writing? Is there possibly a further clue in the works of the 14th-century Julian of Norwich (her “Revelations”) which consumed some twenty-five years in the writing (a short version, but then the later and longer version)? Julian witnessed the Crucifixion through 16 visions (“shewings”) over the course of only one day, but in the last one was overwhelmed and consoled to see that it was only THROUGH the final agony, that the “earlier” Transfiguration took place…And vice versa.
In the ETERNITY of God, the Transfiguration and the Crucifixion (and even the Resurrection) are the very same moment. Yes? St. John needed extra time to put pen to paper, in order to convey the perspective of eternity withn the earlier gospel narratives.
The DIFFICULTY we have as historical and chronological beings, is in beholding–and being beheld by!–the fact of eternity–entering into time as the Incarnation. This collision (von Balthasar’s word) between eternity and time should give us pause, today, to consider whether the sticking point since Vatican II–and especially in the so-called Synods, is to remain more humbly secure within more than one aspect of the “truth” at a time. That is, to be open, at the same “time,” to BOTH active Love AND the perennial Truth (the deposit of Faith)…
It’s almost as if, more than the (the 13th-century Joachim of Fiore’s?) sequential age of the Holy Spirit, God is the Triune One.
A favorite prayer that impinges on priesthood, loyalty to Christ alone, and martyrdom. Thomas a Becket, a lowly priest, Saxon, a lackey to England’s Norman King Henry II has a change of heart following his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury.
“My Lord Jesus, I find it difficult to talk to you. What can I say, I who have turned away from you so often with indifference? I have been a stranger to prayer, undeserving of your friendship and your love. I’ve been without honor and feel unworthy. I am a weak and shallow creature, clever only in the second-rate and worldly arts, seeking my comfort and pleasure. I gave my love, such as it was, elsewhere, putting service to my earthly king before my duty to you. But now, they have made me the shepherd of your flock and guardian of your church. Please, Lord, teach me now how to serve you with all my heart, to know at last what it really is to love, to adore, so that I worthily administer your kingdom here upon earth and find my true honor in observing your divine will. Please, Lord, make me worthy” (Becket’s prayer in British historical movie Becket, script Edward Anhalt).
Clearly Backet had a change of heart after becoming Archbishop, but the idea that he had Saxon ancestry is quite unfounded. I suspect it was put in the film to give a simple motivation, pure fabrication.