The Christmas Gathering

“Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto Him.”—2 Thessalonians ii. 1.

This verse is not a complete sentence. It gives the ground for an exhortation whose substance follows in later verses. I would rarely dislocate a passage of Scripture this way. We have no right, for the sake of a convenient phrase, to twist an Apostle’s meaning. We would rebuke anyone who forced a profane author’s words to mean something the author never intended; should we follow a looser rule with sacred writers?

But I do not mean to overlook the rest of St. Paul’s teaching in this chapter while examining the words that introduce it. We cannot understand one without the other; once we have considered both, we will see that the opening clause recalls and points to what follows. The Thessalonians had been troubled by things St. Paul said while with them, and repeated emphatically in his first letter, about an approaching day of the Lord. Some of them had stopped working, thinking it needless or irreligious to provide for their families since Christ was at hand.

St. Paul denounces this in harsh terms — those who will not work should not eat; those who neglect their own households are worse than unbelievers. But there was more. Before the day of Christ he had announced, he believed the Churches would be sifted, and many members, perhaps many congregations, would fall away. Before Christ’s revelation there would be the revelation of an Antichrist — one who was Christ’s opposite in every way, yet who would draw Jews, Gentiles, and baptized Christians into his circle and receive their worship. The Thessalonians could be swept into this apostasy as easily as anyone. The very habits they were cultivating to please the true King might instead prepare them to serve his enemy. This “Man of Sin” might appear as some emperor, some Jewish sorcerer, some false apostle — but he would gather into himself all the evil scattered among heathens, Hebrews, and those sealed in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. People would worship him because they saw in him the full realization of what they themselves aspired to be. To warn them of this danger — that they could not safely anticipate the coming of One in whom all good is gathered without also expecting one in whom all evil is gathered, that evil as well as good would claim their allegiance — was the most practical lesson their spiritual father could give them. It was no excessive appeal to beg them, “by the coming of Christ and the gathering together in Him,” to remember what he was telling them.

I do not, however, take these words chiefly as an appeal. The Greek preposition is more naturally rendered “for the sake of” than “by.” With that rendering his meaning becomes clearer: “Let me beg you, for the sake of that appearing of Christ I have taught you to expect and desire, and for the sake of that gathering of all the limbs of the spiritual body into the one Head — do not let anything I have said about that appearing and gathering make you forget that there will be another appearing, one who scatters rather than gathers — and that you, children of God by baptism and sealed by the Spirit, might yet reject the Son of Man and choose the Man of Sin to reign over you instead.” He is not merely appealing to the holiest of names and the highest of hopes — he is using that name and that hope as a power to keep them from apostasy, from becoming the Destroyer’s men, sharing his triumph and his doom.

Some passages here we can only guess at without reaching certainty. St. Paul speaks of a hindrance delaying the full revelation of Antichrist, which he had explained to the Thessalonians in person. This hindrance still existed, he says; in time it would be removed, and then the Man of Sin would appear in full and then be defeated. It mattered greatly to the Thessalonians to know what this hindrance was, and the Apostle says they did know. To us it is a question of historical curiosity — worth investigating, perhaps, but we risk losing ourselves in it and forgetting that a Mystery of Iniquity is at work in our own day too, that it may already have some visible form, and that some outward restraint — law, or church system, or whatever it may be — may be holding it back. Insofar as that restraint is merely outward, we cannot rely on it. Once the inward evil, the poison infecting society, reaches the heart and overcomes the good resisting it there, the restraints of tradition, custom, and fear that hold back the giant of malevolence will be torn apart like tow. He must meet a mightier foe than these; those who know no other defense and depend on them will think him unstoppable.

I believe we grasp the Apostle’s whole lesson to the Thessalonians most fully by dwelling on his opening words and asking how they bear on our own lives. I find in them a meaning belonging especially to Christmas Day — to this Christmas more than most — connecting the comings of Christ which, as I said three Sundays ago, we tend to separate and even set against one another; and showing the inward link between the Feast of Christ’s Birth and the Feast in which we proclaim His Death until He comes.

I. Severe Protestants in earlier times, especially Puritans in England and Scotland, spoke harshly of Christmas Day. It had a heathen origin, they said, a modern version of the old Saturnalia; it did not mark the real date of the Nativity; Popery lurked in the very name; we had abolished the Mass, yet its memory survived here; our most popular holiday tied us to the very nations whose idolatries we had renounced. Likely the answers made to these arguments reached few and convinced fewer. Yet in Protestant Germany, even in Presbyterian Scotland, even among descendants of those who called the day accursed, it has held its ground and kept its social character, as somehow bound up with its spiritual meaning. Something here is too strong for preaching, even for the swords of iconoclasts — they could suppress foreign customs and destroy mere ceremony, but they could no more end the observance of Christmas than the French Directory could replace weeks with decades. The objections have fallen flat. What if a heathen festival once testified that slaves, for one day, were treated as men — was that not a natural anticipation of a day proclaiming liberty to captives? Should not heathens have shown they expected and believed in a Deliverer? Chronological pedantry mattered as little here as under the Law: the Gospel does not fuss over small things. The birthdays of ordinary heroes are often unknown, yet people are sure they had a birth and choose some day to remember it. If the Incarnation is a fact at all, what a fact it is for mankind — and what a trifle whether the manger was in September or December! Just as little could shrieks about a Popish name disturb English Protestant conscience. The people might not know what the name meant, but it seemed to signify some bond uniting human beings of every class and belief, in every time and place. They knew they shared trade and dealings with Papists, that they shared the same flesh and blood. Their hearts told them: if we refuse fellowship with them in this name on this day, we commit the very sin we accuse them of.

These were simple, broad conclusions reached by plain people without logical argument, and firmer than any logic. Why? The text tells us. It was no false instinct but a deeply true one that linked Christ’s coming with gatherings, with kinship and friendship, with warm human fellowship. God must have planted these thoughts in human hearts and kept them alive. Those who see in them only vulgar distortions of a divine mystery — rather than hailing them, even half-consciously, as recognition that our race can only be united in a Living Head — risk shrinking Christ down to their own private wants, treating Him as their servant rather than their Lord.

But the more we honor this idea of Christmas, trying to grasp it ourselves so as to keep the day as God intends, the more we must expect to find deep sorrow within its gladness.

Every Christmas gathering reminds us how families once united are now scattered across the earth, what havoc death has wrought among them, what strifes worse than death have invaded them. This week many English homes will be darkened by memory of faces once bringing gladness, now gone; many will labor to hide grief lest its shadow fall on the young. If Christmas were merely a festival, without knowing which one, such thoughts would overwhelm us, and the gaiety would seem hollow mockery — dressing up a death’s head. But see it instead as a sign, a prophecy: think of Christ’s coming in the flesh as preparation and foretaste of a glorious coming still ahead, the true gathering of children into their Father’s house, the moment when “home” gains its full meaning, when Society becomes a fact and not a name. Seen this way, everything changes. The face you knew, full of warmth, becomes herald of a warmer welcome still to come; the voice richest with music and joy was sounding the first notes of a perfect harmony it will one day join. The beautiful things of this life are not, as gloomy moralists claim, mere delusive phantoms lasting an hour and leaving darkness behind — they are promises and pledges of a light and life that will outlast darkness and death. They are buds of hope, more wonderful for the cold that nips them; their fragility, and the bitterness we feel when they vanish, are themselves proof that we and they are capable of something strong and perfect. They keep alive in our hearts the sense of immortality even when it flags.

Must this not be so, if the Nativity itself warrants human sympathy and gladness? Did that birth not speak of weakness and disappointment too? Heaven promises Glory to God in the highest, yet on earth all is inglorious and low. It promises Peace, yet the Child arrives amid the sword, and innocents die for His sake. It promises Goodwill, yet factions rage everywhere, most of all in the holy city. The Birth fittingly preludes the life: thirty years of silence and obscurity, then two or three years of public ministry still marked by humiliation, with only flashes of glory; still marked by conflict, though He says “Peace I leave with you” — a peace received inwardly amid outward war; still marked by bitter factions bringing Him finally to death, with only “Father, forgive them” testifying to a goodwill higher than the will to evil. Could there be a more perfect image of what happens everywhere men dwell? Everything looks like this — glimpses of brightness in general gloom, finally extinguished in death, nothing achieved, all hopes seemingly blighted. And it is like this, if there is no Resurrection, no appearing in glory. But if there is, then the Apostolic vision of human life and destiny, bright and hopeful, must be the true one, and our habitual gloomy view the false one. We must not call any hope humanity has ever cherished — social improvement, spiritual renewal — abortive. All were inspired by Him, all gathered up in Him, all to be fulfilled when He is revealed as He is. That must be the revelation of the union of all things and persons as created in Him — the Manifestation of the Sons of God.

II. If so, the thought of Christ’s full coming, of our gathering together in Him, must make Christmas — the pledge and witness of that coming — a time of solemn warning as well as blessed hope. Do I mean hope for some, warning for others? No — hope for all, warning for all. If the gathering of all as one family in Christ fulfills the Mystery of Godliness, then the total separation of that family’s members fulfills the Mystery of Iniquity. For everyone to acknowledge an Elder Brother and a common Father, for none to exalt himself above another or claim separate interest — that would be the perfection of human and divine society, the heavenly state. For people to feel no bond to each other, each existing purely for himself — that would destroy everything partially good we have glimpsed at our Christmas gatherings; that would be the state of Hell. Who dares claim this mystery of iniquity is not working in himself? What Christian community never shows features betraying a hellish parentage, capable of unfolding into the full likeness of the spirit they came from? It is not death that tears apart families, nations, and Churches — Christ has overcome death, and His Nativity witnesses that Life has entered a world death had severed. It is dark suspicion of others, the notion that they think ill of us, undervalue us, or plot against us; it is the secret whisper or hidden conceit of our own importance and grievances that creeps in stealthily, takes hold, and saps the bonds of blood, the warmth of friendship, the memory of the departed. The pettiness of party, class rivalry, the notion that power is good in itself apart from its purpose, the sordid morality glorified once people forget their common origin and interests — this undermines a nation and delivers it to a tyrant who embodies its evils. And similar habits of mind, turned inward and mixed with sacred traditions, adopting and degrading the holiest names, becoming in a terrible sense “spiritual wickedness in high places,” have turned Churches of the living into dens of darkness rather than chambers of Light — until a Voice was heard from their midst saying, “Let us depart.”

Brethren, St. Paul — Christ Himself — beseeches us “by His coming, and by our gathering together in Him,” to fight these tendencies within us which, if allowed to surface, would take the form of Antichrist, showing us exactly what Christ will finally consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming. We need not fear that or any incarnation of evil, provided we hold fast to the Incarnate Good. What we must dread is our own hearts — the possibility that we might love this monster, choosing him to reign over us because we have been shaping ourselves into his likeness, wishing to become what he will be. I know no way to overcome this dreadful inclination except by setting before ourselves a hope that will not disappoint — the hope Apostles cherished and urged upon their Churches: not rewards for faith and obedience, but the revelation of the Son of God, “Who shall gather together in one all things in Himself, both which are in heaven and which are on earth.”

III. To keep that hope alive, fighting the enemy always trying to rob us of it, the day of our Lord’s Nativity became Christ-mas — a day commemorating the full and perfect Atonement He made for mankind by His death as well as His birth.

The word “Mass” would alarm objectors less if they knew its origin. The Missa Catechumenorum speaks of exclusion, not fellowship — like “the fencing” in the Scotch Kirk, it recalls those not admitted to the Lord’s Table. But this original sense was soon forgotten as the name came to represent the whole worship of God, conveying that this worship is essentially a Sacrifice. As the feeling grew that Christ’s Sacrifice was not complete in itself, the Mass came to be seen as completing what He had left undone. Since the idea of His Sacrifice as common to all men is inseparable from the idea of its completeness, weakening one weakened the other — so the practice of private Masses, so fiercely denounced by the Reformers, naturally followed.

Against both these abuses — against all the abuses clustered around the idea of Sacrifice in the Roman Church — we bear effective witness when we reclaim a name, not sacred in its origin, but widely felt across Europe as a symbol of unity for this week’s festival. We should let those who confess the Roman Pontiff as their spiritual head understand that we too regard all worship as Sacrifice, that we cannot separate Sacrifice from Christ, that we cannot remember His birth without remembering that He gave Himself to birth and death to take away the sins of the world. We protest only against whatever narrows this communion, whatever limits the fullness of the Sacrifice — a protest we will never abandon. And we should beg them, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together in Him, to consider whether they can safely be less Catholic — whether they can call us to unite under some lesser, earthlier name than that of Him born of the Virgin, who will be revealed in His Father’s glory.

But, brethren, it is not chiefly for the sake of impressing those who reject us — though we should spare no effort to show our confession implies no intended separation from anyone — that I hold to this link between the Nativity and the Sacrifice.

If God, out of tender love for mankind, sent His Son not only to take our flesh but to die on the cross, then we can face the thoughts this season stirs in so many hearts. As people eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, they remain one with those torn from them by sickness or violence; they can trust that their dearest ones are keeping a more perfect Christmas, forgetting none with whom they once kept it; they need not doubt that as Jesus died and rose, He will bring with Him those who sleep in Him. As we eat that flesh and drink that blood, we may feel Christ binding us by the greatest of Sacraments to Himself and to all whom our own evil nature and the evil spirit would tempt us to abandon — that Christ was born into a world of sin and strife so that He might give us a second birth into righteousness and peace, and that He died as sin and strife’s victim so that all sin and strife might die in us.