Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

Christmas card

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Acts 7:54-58
When they heard this, they were infuriated and they ground their teeth at him ... Stephen said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." But they cried in a loud voice, covered their ears, and rushed upon him together. They threw him out of the city and began to stone him.

Matthew 10:19-20
Jesus said to his disciples, "When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say. You will be given at that very moment just what you are to say. For it will not be you who is speaking but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.

Why does the Catholic lectionary, regardless of the cycle, move from Jesus' birth one day to Stephen's death by martyrdom the next?

The story of the angels' song heard by the shepherds becomes, on the next day, Stephen's vision of the heavens opened onto the Son of Man at the right hand of God.

The escape of the Holy Family to Egypt as Herod descends on Bethlehem with his killing soldiers turns to Stephen's stoning at the hands of angry Jews.

From his first day Jesus was a lightning rod. Love him or hate him. Nothing in between.

Here is how Thomas Merton saw some of this, in 1947 (same lectionary, same transition - there's something to be said for tradition ...)

A Christmas Card by Thomas Merton
When the white stars talk together like sisters
And when the winter hills
Raise their grand semblance in the freezing night,
Somewhere one window
Bleeds like the brown eye of an open force.

Hills, stars,
White stars that stand above the eastern stable.

Look down and offer Him
The dim adoring light of your belief,
Whose small Heart bleeds with infinite fire.

Shall not this Child
(When we shall hear the bells of His amazing voice)
Conquer the winter of our hateful century?

And when His Lady Mother leans upon the crib,
Lo, with what rapiers
Those two loves fence and flame their brillancy!

Here in this straw lie planned the fires
That will melt all our sufferings:
He is our Lamb, our holocaust!

And one by one the shepherds, with their snowy feet,
Stamp and shake out their hats upon the stable dirt,
And one by one kneel down to look upon their Life.

Lord, we too. Let us kneel down to look upon our life. And know more surely every time that in our bodies birth surely gives way to death, and even more surely, death gives way to life. We are yours forever. O come let us adore. Venite adoramus.

Devotions Archive

Christmas card

Saturday, December 26, 2015