And We Beheld his Glory
In a sermon for Christmas Day, St Bede confronts his brethren with the truth about Mary’s wonderful child.
early AD 700s
In a sermon for Christmas Day, St Bede confronts his brethren with the truth about Mary’s wonderful child.
early AD 700s
In his Gospel, St John tells us that Mary’s child was actually God himself. From early times, the shock of this simple proposition was too much, even for very senior clergy, and they retreated into hair-splitting qualifications to escape it. The eighth-century English monk Bede, in a Christmas sermon, reminded his brethren of what happened to that child later.
Translated for Clay Lane.
“And we beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”* Christ’s glory, which men could not see before his incarnation, they did see afterwards: they watched his humanity flash back with miracles, and understood the divinity hidden within — and those who understood it best of all were those judged worthy to behold his brightness when, before his Passion, he was transfigured on the holy mountain, and a voice came down upon him from out of this magnificent glory, saying ‘This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased’.* And after the Passion, when the glory of his resurrection and ascension had passed before their eyes, they were wonderfully refreshed by the gift of his Spirit. By all of this, they recognised clearly that a glory of this order belonged not to one of the holy men, but only to that man who was in divinity the only-begotten of the Father.
Full of grace and truth. This same man Christ Jesus was full of grace, to whom a singular gift was given above all other mortals: that, immediately from the moment he was conceived in the womb of a virgin and began to be man, he was also true God; whence the same glorious ever-virgin Mary is to be rightly believed and confessed as birth-giver* not only of the man Christ, but also of God.
Translated for Clay Lane.
Freely translated from ‘A Sermon for High Mass on Christmas Day’, by St Bede of Jarrow (?632-735).
* Bede is expounding the well-known opening to St John’s Gospel. See John 1:1-14. ‘We’ here means above all John and his fellow Apostles, who are eyewitnesses testifying to all that will follow in the Gospel: see also 1 John 1:1-4
* See Matthew 17:1-9.
* Genitrix. Not the same word as mater (mother). Bede has chosen this word to emphasise that Mary was not just Jesus’s mother — and therefore God’s mother — by family relationship alone, but actually the one who gave birth to him. It was a word that brought with it all the blood, sinew and passage implied by it, all the constraint in space and time: ‘Our God contracted to a span / Incomprehensibly made man’, as Charles Wesley put it in Let Earth and Heaven Combine. Many struggled with the whole mental picture: that is why the early hymn Te Deum Laudamus insisted that God did not “abhor the virgin’s womb”.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
What was the misconception that Bede was hoping to correct?
That Jesus was just a holy man.
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
Jesus was a man. Jesus was God. Mary gave birth to him.
See if you can include one or more of these words in your answer.
IBaby. IIBoth. IIIOnly.