The love of God is creative, always giving, always reviving.
We have reached the time of year when I treasure every ray of sunshine like the very dew of heaven. This morning, I looked out my window to see the garden patch where I so recently planted my bulbs buried under a fine layer of snow, frozen in stasis. Thus, it will remain hardened and dead until the coming of spring. Then, perhaps, I will see tulips and alliums peaking their heads above the soil to glimpse the light of life. But for now, there is neither light nor life. It is the dead time of the year and the dark time of year.
How strange then that people in the Northern Hemisphere chose to celebrate the Nativity of Christ in the middle of winter! Perhaps it makes sense for those in the Southern Hemisphere to sing joyfully of the coming of salvation when the world is springing alive with blooms and deluged with sunshine. But what do we have to celebrate at a time so bleak? The local strawberries and tomatoes are long gone; even the autumn squash have clocked out.
It makes me think of one of my favorite Christmas carols: a song sometimes maligned for its lack of biblical accuracy. Back in January 1872, the English poet Christina Rosetti, among the brightest stars in a family full of artists and writers, penned some verses that were published in Scribner’s Monthly under the title “A Christmas Carol.” [1] Ostensibly a poem about Christ’s Nativity, critics have sometimes cried foul at the opening lines.
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.
A brief survey of available climate data for Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine reveals that the average high temperature in the month of December is in the low sixties Fahrenheit. Though not technically impossible, it is therefore unlikely that Bethlehem would have snow on December 25. Rarer still would be a sustained period of cold capable of freezing the earth hard and transforming bodies of water into ice. And this is not a slight dusting of snow that Rosetti describes but “snow on snow, snow on snow”: the kind of accumulation with which I was all too familiar during my childhood on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Even allowing for the possibility of climate change, this description of Bethlehem at the time of Christ’s birth seems rather too much like Victorian England.
The traditional celebration of Advent is more somber than Christmas, for it focuses as much on Christ’s absence as his presence.
But to obsess over such details is to miss the point of what Rosetti is attempting to communicate. In the language of the historic Church, the days just before Christmas are indeed the darkest time of all. The traditional celebration of Advent is more somber than Christmas, for it focuses as much on Christ’s absence as his presence. Christ has come in his first Advent, and he will come again in a new Advent, but we exist now in the in-between. God is certainly with us in Word, sacrament, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We experience his presence in numerous ways. Yet the Scripture also uses the language of groaning, yearning, and suffering to describe our present condition (e.g., Rom. 8:22-23). We await our final redemption amid terrible evil.
In the absence of Christ, the world is as bleak as the winter Rosetti describes. A frozen landscape where nothing grows, and even the water cannot be properly drunk is a good description of our spiritual condition before Christ’s coming. The depression I feel in these days of little light or warmth is symbolic of the world without the Incarnation of the Son of God. Thus, the remainder of Rosetti’s poem, now titled “In the Bleak Midwinter,” communicates the wonder of that miraculous act: the coming of God in human flesh.
A frozen landscape where nothing grows, and even the water cannot be properly drunk is a good description of our spiritual condition before Christ’s coming.
Our God, heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain,
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign
Again, some have objected to this language, as if it were communicating something wrongful about God’s nature and attributes. But what Rosetti clearly means to say is that in his Incarnation, Christ belongs both to heaven and earth, the divine and the human. He is one person with two natures, and he is sovereign over both heaven and earth even as he is present in both heaven and earth. Not only that, but a time is coming when he will return, and the present heavens and earth will pass away. In only four lines, Rosetti shows us the mystery of the hypostatic union, the first coming of Christ in humility, and the second coming of Christ in glory.
Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
How extraordinary are these words! The image of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, receiving his sustenance upon his mother’s breast, is a powerful one. Having breastfed an infant myself, I know the angelic glow of a Botticelli Madonna and Child is not the most accurate depiction of this process. Nothing could be more earthy than breastfeeding, yet in that very humility, it does have a kind of magic: the coming together of two human beings as one gives of herself for the sake of the other. This image helps us to understand how Christ, the one who gives life to all things, became a receiver, all for the sake of giving himself in turn. He joined himself to our humanity as flesh with flesh.
In the poem’s final verse, Rosetti imagines herself as a visitor at the Nativity. Had she been called by angels or signaled by a star to travel to Bethlehem and worship the newborn Savior King, what could she have brought?
What can I give Him,
Poor as I am? —
If I were a Shepherd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man
I would do my part, —
Yet what I can I give Him, —
Give my heart.
This may be the deepest irony of all, for even as Mary could only give Christ the milk that he, as Creator, had allowed her to produce, so we can only give to God the hearts that he has revived. A heart that longs for Christ is a heart that he himself has drawn (John 6:44). As Martin Luther wrote so perceptively, “The love of God does not find, but creates that which is pleasing to it.” [2] Yes, God wants us to give him hearts of love that beat for him alone, but had Rosetti included a further verse in her poem, she would have done well to explain that this is not something we can achieve on our own.
The love of God is creative, always giving, always reviving. That is the message of this season of Advent and Christmas. God looked at a bleak world, dark and cold, and chose to return it to life. Like the coming of Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that brings an end to the endless snow, so the coming of Christ into our world—yes, into our very humanity—breaks the spell of death. Within our hearts, growth is now possible. We ourselves become fruitful. We present to Christ as a gift that which he has worked in us.
A heart that longs for Christ is a heart that he himself has drawn (John 6:44).
So, next time you hear the carol “In the Bleak Midwinter,” think not of a cozy Victorian fireside with little girls eating plum pudding and clutching the new dolls brought by Father Christmas. Think of the barren wilderness of the extreme North, which is the state of our souls without Christ. Think how he humbled himself in taking on humanity so that he could give himself to those who could give nothing themselves. By the grace of his gospel, he demands no offering of us but that which he himself gives: the righteousness of Christ.
The movie Frozen told us that only true love can melt a frozen heart. Scripture tells us that only the creative love of God can bring dead things to life. That is the hope we have in the bleak time of the year.
[1] You can view the original archived document here:
https://archive.org/details/scribnersmonthly03newy/page/278/mode/1up?view=theater
[2] Theological thesis 28 for the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation. https://thebookofconcord.org/sources-and-context/heidelberg-disputation/
