The post-Christmas liturgical calendar may seem a bit Scrooge-like, as the child-centered, innocent joy of the Nativity is quickly followed by three feasts of a different, even sobering, character.
First, on December 26: St. Stephen the Protomartyr, stoned to death outside Jerusalem by a mob baying for his blood (see Acts 7:54–60). Then, on December 27: St. John, the apocalyptic visionary of Revelation 18:2—“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!”—whose enemies, according to a tradition maintained at the Basilica of St. John Before the Latin Gate, tried to boil him in oil before exiling him to Patmos. Finally, on December 28: the Holy Innocents, butchered en masse because of the paranoia of Herod the Great (who did not cavil to murder three of his own sons).
The infancy narratives of Luke’s Gospel give us the key to understanding that this seemingly strange liturgical juxtaposition—Christmas and martyrdom—embodies a deep truth of Christian faith. For immediately after Luke describes Jesus’s birth and his ritual insertion into the People of Israel “at the end of eight days” (Luke 2:21), the evangelist fast-forwards to the presentation of the infant Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple, where aged Simeon prophesies that this child will be a “sign of contradiction” and his mother’s soul will be “pierced by a sword” (Luke 2:34–35).
The Incarnation and the Nativity are both sublimely beautiful and powerfully disruptive. The “principalities and powers” (Eph. 6:12) do not take kindly to the King of the Universe, whose birth into historical time challenges their hegemony. That is why, during two years of the lectionary cycle, the Church reads from the Passion narratives of John and Luke on the Solemnity of Christ the King: The Incarnation and the Nativity lead inevitably to the Cross, the fullest expression of the Lord’s gift of self for the salvation of the world. The Rosary carries the same message, as the third and fourth joyful mysteries lead, inexorably, to the fifth sorrowful mystery—and then to the glorious mysteries.
Christmas begins the journey to the Cross and Easter, and celebrating the martyrs during the Christmas Octave drives this point home. From the beginning of the Church, Christians saw in the witness of the martyrs—the “red martyrs” killed for the sake of the Name, and the “white martyrs” who suffered greatly for the gospel—the Christocentric, cruciform template of salvation. For it was through his own self-giving “to the limits of love” that the Lord Jesus redeemed the world, as Servais Pinckaers, O.P., writes. Fr. Pinckaers thus suggests that martyrdom is the ultimate expression of the Beatitudes, those eight facets of a self-portrait of the incarnate Son of God, whose example his disciples strive to follow.
Which brings to mind, this Christmastide, two extraordinary witnesses to the King born in Bethlehem of Judaea “when Quirinius was governor of Syria” (Luke 2:2).
Jimmy Lai is in his fourth year of solitary confinement in a Hong Kong prison, unjustly prosecuted for defending the human rights whose deepest roots lie in what the Bible teaches about human dignity. That this truth-teller terrifies the Hong Kong authorities—beholden to the Beijing regime with which the Vatican shamefully plays “Let’s Make a Deal”—is manifest in the chains Jimmy wears when brought out in public, in the over-the-top police presence at his Stalinesque show-trial, and in the rabid response of Hong Kong’s government to any protest on his behalf. Some time ago, Jimmy sent me a Crucifixion scene he had sketched in his cell, using colored pencil on ruled paper. Sustained like Thomas More by his Catholic faith, Jimmy Lai knows that Christmas and the Cross are entwined—and lead to Easter and glory.
The Greek Catholics of Ukraine and the global Ukrainian diaspora call their Church’s leader, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, “Patriarch”—as well they should, the protocols of Roman nomenclature notwithstanding. For no other bishop in the world over the past two and a half years—no one—has been more a father to his people than Sviatoslav Shevchuk. Amidst a genocidal war in which his priests are killed and tortured, and his people brutally bombed and murdered in cold blood, he has been a magnificent witness to hope: a bishop who has turned the horrors of war into an opportunity to encourage, comfort, catechize, and sanctify his flock.
It is scandalous that the heroic head of the largest Eastern Catholic Church has been passed over for the cardinalate ten times. That travesty is on someone else’s ledger, however. As his people celebrate the birth of the King, the Patriarch carries on in faith and charity, knowing that Christmas and the martyrs are, in God’s cruciform plan of salvation, entwined.
George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.
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