BISHOP ROBERT BARRON: The mysterious fourth Christmas story of heaven battling evil |
Christmas carolers sing 'O Holy Night' at an airport bustling with travelers.
There are three well-known accounts of Christmas in the New Testament. We have St. John’s austerely metaphysical version ("The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."). And we have the more narratively dense tellings in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Unique to Matthew is the reference to the Bethlehem star, the massacre of the innocents and the visit of the Magi. And peculiar to Luke are mentions of the census, the stable, the swaddling clothes, the shepherds and the angels. Most of us, when we imagine or depict Christmas, manage to mash together Luke’s and Matthew’s renderings.
But there is a fourth Christmas story in the New Testament, though it is rarely appreciated as such. Found in the 12th chapter of the Book of Revelation, it makes no reference to shepherds, Magi, or swaddling clothes, but it does speak of a birth and of a dragon. The portrayal of Christmas in the Revelation is not abstractly metaphysical, but it is not straightforwardly narrative either; rather, it is highly symbolic and apocalyptic. One might say that it is the view of Christmas from God’s perspective, from the highest possible point of vantage.
Chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation commences as follows: "A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars." Catholic interpreters have consistently read this figure as the Virgin Mary, and this is confirmed by what comes next: "She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth."
Here is the Blessed Mother, summing up in her person the whole history of Israel........