“Every night of my life, I have not retired to my bed without first saying my prayers. But . . . I look at stars and sometimes the mountains—and wait, wait for God to come so that I might see him. I have waited for years and years, but in vain. Why, Why? Mine is a great grievance, Rabbi? Why doesn’t God show himself?
Jesus, in response, smiled gently and said: “Once upon a time there was a marble throne at the eastern gate of a great city. On this throne sat 3,000 kings. All of them called upon God to appear so that they might see him, but all of them went to their graves with their wishes unfulfilled.
“Then, when these kings had died, a pauper, barefooted and hungry, came and sat upon that throne. ‘God,’ he whispered, ‘the eyes of a human being cannot look directly at the sun, for they would be blinded. How then, Omnipotent, can they look directly at you?
“Have pity, Lord, temper your strength, turn down your splendor so that I, who am poor and afflicted, may see you! “Then—listen, old man—God became a piece of bread, a cup of cool water, a warm tunic, a hut and, in the front of the hut, a woman giving suck to an infant.
“Thank you, Lord,’ he whispered. ‘You humbled yourself for my sake. You became bread, water, a warm tunic and my wife and son in order that I might see you. And I did see you. I bow down and worship your beloved many-faced face!’”
The God who is born at Christmas, the Christ of the incarnation, is more domestic than monastic. He was eventually crucified, as a poet once put it, for making God as accessible as the village well.
We celebrate many things at Christmas, not the least of which is how scandalously easy it now is to see God. Likewise, there are many challenges to the Christmas mystery, not the least of which is, precisely, to be able to see the many-faced face of God in a piece of bread, a cup of water, and in our own homes and families.
After the incarnation, every home is a monastery, every child is the Christ child, and all food and drink is a sacrament.
We struggle to believe this. For many reasons, each of us has the propensity to miss seeing God in the ordinary because we are forever searching for him in the extraordinary. We tend, nearly always, to miss the sacredness of the domestic as we look for the sacred in the monastic.
Too often we are unaware that the incarnation fundamentally changed us from being theists to being Christians, that is, from being people who believe in God to becoming people who believe in a god who was made flesh in Christ.
What’s the difference? Christmas is the difference and Kazantzakis’ parable sheds valuable light on what Christmas really means. To understand the parable of God’s many-faced face, is to understand what the very word “Christ” means.
The word “Christ” is not Jesus’ second name (like Jack Smith, Susan Dolenski or Jesus Christ). Christ is a title, not a name. Literally, in Greek, it means: the anointed one. Jesus Christ=Jesus, the anointed one.
Part of the meaning of that however is that the anointed one is the one who is God-in-the-flesh, God-in-carnus. Christmas then means God-in-the-physical just as it also means that the-physical-contains-God.
Kazantzakis puts it well. In the incarnation, in the mystery of Christmas, God does become a piece of bread, a cup of water, a warm tunic, a house, a spouse and a child. God’s many-faced face is everywhere.
We no longer need to look for God in extraordinary visions—a sunset will do. An incarnational God normally gives precisely that kind of vision! Likewise we don’t need to look for people with the stigmata to see the wounds of Christ—the pain in the faces of those we sit down at table with will do. God’s wounded body too is everywhere.
May the incarnation deeply bless our lives! May God’s many-faced face be present, sacramentally, in all of our Christmas celebrations—our food, our drink, our gifts, our family sharings. Likewise, may each of us struggle to give birth to God’s many-faced face so as to be more sacrament to those around us. God, we bow down and worship your beloved many-faced face.