Happy New Year!
We'll resume our Advent/Christmas series on the Son Rise Morning Show on Monday, January 6, 2025 (the traditional date of Epiphany) with one of Saint John Henry Newman's Catholic sermons, "The Mystery of Divine Condescension", from his Discourses to Mixed Congregations.
Newman dedicated his first published work as a priest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri to the then Bishop of Melipotamus and Vicar Apostolic of the London District, Nichols Wiseman, in 1849 (before the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850--when he would become the first Archbishop of Westminster). In his great biography of Newman, Father Ian Ker notes that the rhetoric in these sermons "is often more Italianate than Newmanian"! (p. 342)
I'll be on the air at my usual time at the top of the second national hour, about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central. Please listen live here or catch the podcast later here.Newman's topic, of course, is the Incarnation and his purpose is to persuade his congregation to appreciate, as much as is humanly possible, the great mystery of God deigning, not just to come down to us as an infant in Bethlehem, to give us grace, and to redeem us, but to raise us up to be like Him. Then he presents us with an even greater challenge in this mystery.
There are indeed some glorious passages in his sermon (which you can read in its entirety here). I'm focusing on the paragraphs excerpted in Christopher O. Blum's Waiting for Christ: Meditations for Advent and Christmas:
You say that God and man never can be one, that man cannot bear the sight and touch of his Creator, nor the Creator condescend to the feebleness of the creature; but blush and be confounded to hear, O peevish, restless hearts, that He has come down from His high throne and humbled Himself to the creature, in order that the creature might be inspired and strengthened to rise to Him.Your God has taken on Him your nature, and now prepare yourself to see in human flesh that glory and that beauty on which the Angels gaze. Since you are to see Emmanuel, since "the brilliancy of the Eternal Light and the unspotted mirror of God's majesty, and the Image of His goodness," is to walk the earth, since the Son of the Highest is to be born of woman, since the manifold attributes of the Infinite are to be poured out before your eyes through material channels and the operations of a human soul, since He, whose contemplation did but trouble you in Nature, is coming to take you captive by a manifestation, which is both intelligible to you and a pledge that He loves you one by one, raise high your expectations, for surely they cannot suffer disappointment.
But even that is not enough, because Newman contrasts the glory we could expect from the Son of God becoming man to what we know of how Jesus lived among us; we think:
doubtless He will choose some calm and holy spot, and men will go out thither and find their Incarnate God. He will be tenant of some paradise, like Adam or Elias, or He will dwell in the mystic garden of the Canticles, where nature ministers its {301} best and purest to its Creator. "The fig-tree will put forth her green figs, the vines in flower yield their sweet smell;" "spikenard and saffron" will be there; "the sweet cane and cinnamon, myrrh and aloes, with all the chief perfumes;" "the glory of Libanus, the beauty of Carmel," before "the glory of the Lord and the beauty of our God". There will He show Himself at stated times, with Angels for His choristers and saints for His doorkeepers, to the poor and needy, to the humble and devout, to those who have kept their innocence undefiled, or have purged their sins away by long penance and masterful contrition.
Instead,
He has come, not to assert a claim, but to pay a debt. Instead of wealth, He has come poor; instead of honour, He has come in ignominy; instead of blessedness, He has come to suffer. He has been delivered over from His birth to pain and contempt; His delicate frame is worn down by cold and heat, by hunger and sleeplessness; His hands are rough and bruised with {302} a mechanic's toil; His eyes are dimmed with weeping; His Name is cast out as evil. He is flung amid the throng of men; He wanders from place to place; He is the companion of sinners. . . . He hath no beauty nor comeliness; He is despised and the most abject of men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity;" nay, He is a "leper, and smitten of God, and afflicted". And so His clothes are torn off, and He is lifted up upon the bitter Cross, and there He hangs, a spectacle for profane, impure, and savage eyes, and a mockery for the evil spirit whom He had cast down into hell.
We have travelled from Bethlehem to Nazareth to Jerusalem and finally to Golgotha.
Finally, Newman offers a different model for us to follow when we struggle to comprehend this tremendous, mysterious condescension--His Mother:
Oh, wayward man! . . . when wilt thou cease to make thyself thine own centre, and learn that God is infinite in all He does, infinite when He reigns in heaven, infinite when He serves on earth, exacting our homage in the midst of His Angels, and winning homage from us in the midst of sinners? Adorable He is in His eternal rest, adorable in the glory of His court, adorable in the beauty of His works, most adorable of all, most royal, most persuasive in His deformity. Think you {303} not, my brethren, that to Mary, when she held Him in her maternal arms, when she gazed on the pale countenance and the dislocated limbs of her God, when she traced the wandering lines of blood, when she counted the weals, the bruises, and the wounds, which dishonoured that virginal flesh, think you not that to her eyes it was more beautiful than when she first worshipped it, pure, radiant, and fragrant, on the night of His nativity?
These passages may be, as Newman himself commented, "more rhetorical than my former sermons" in a letter (LD, xiii, 335, according to Father Ker), but that rhetoric certainly has a great impact, offering us, as we conclude this Christmas season after the Baptism of Our Lord, insights into "The Mystery of Divine Condescension". Like the hymn, "What Child is This?", Newman brings the Nativity and the Passion together:
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christian, fear: for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.
Nails, spear shall pierce him through,
The Cross be borne for me, for you;
Hail, hail the Word Made Flesh,
The babe, the son of Mary!
Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!
