Originally written for the Christmas season of 1734, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio has six cantatas, each intended for a different day of the season’s 12 days. Yale musicologist Markus Rathey explains in his “Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and the Mystical Theology of Bernard of Clairvaux,” how Bernard of Clairvaux’s threefold comings of Christ informs Bach’s work.[1]
As Samuel Tranter discussed in December on Covenant, Bernard says Christ appears in three modes. The first mode is when Christ comes to save the lost through his Incarnation and his earthly ministry. In this mode, God enters his creation. In the second mode, Christ spiritually enters the heart of the believer. This is a present-day spiritual entry of Christ. The faithful believer, through word and sacrament, through a living faith, welcomes the presence of Jesus. Rathey observes that this entails being committed to loving God and obeying his word. The essence of the second coming is the unio mystica (mystical union), where Christ dwells in the believer’s heart. And the final appearing is at the end of time in judgment.
The unio mystica is a major aspect of Bach’s Oratorio, which seems to coinhere with Bernard’s theology of Jesus’ coming. Although the Oratorio begins with the historical event of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, it turns toward the second coming. As Rathey observes, several oratorio movements relate to Christ’s second coming into the human heart. In Part 1, the text conveys the faithful’s yearning for the Lord as it “asks Zion to prepare for the arrival of the bridegroom,” Christ. Different voices – altos, tenors, sopranos in their turn – encourage the heart to welcome Christ, proclaim Christ’s presence, and at last announce the return of Christ who defeats all that is opposed to God. Rathey masterfully explains how the piece weaves the ideas of the comings into one work (Rathey 101-102).
Christ’s presence is more than a theological axiom. Rathey highlights how Johann Gerhard, a prominent 17th-century Lutheran theologian, saw the second mode, the spiritual coming, in existential terms.[2] The first coming in the flesh leads to a spiritual encounter with Jesus. Thus, Christ dwells with / inhabits the believer’s heart – a phenomenon that happens daily for the believer. But this does not undercut how Christ also will return in glory.[3]
Are there pastoral lessons here? It seems that Bernard and Bach both wish for us to receive Christ at the beginning and at the end of the journey and they affirm that Christ provides rest in the middle. Those who follow Christ and have received him manifest his love to others as a testimony not only of his entry into this world in Bethlehem, but also in the conviction that he will return in glory at the end of time.
The joy of Christmas, a celebration of the Incarnation, is both a comfort and a call to testify to God’s justice in this world. Finding the blessed indwelling of Christ in the faithful brings the greatest joy. In Life Together (1939), Dietrich Bonhoeffer invites us to notice others. He wrote: “The prisoner, the sick person, the Christian in exile, sees in the companionship of a fellow Christian a sign of the gracious presence of the triune God.” He posits that when we step out of our loneliness, we recognize Christ in each person’s presence and receive each other in reverence, humility, and joy.
As we struggle in life, we sense that we are not alone. Christ shares our plight; Christ is our constant joy, strength, and consolation. How can we make the light of Christmas dawn on those unaware of Jesus’ first coming and what it means for all of us? Many in the world have yet to know about that first Advent, and the unio mystica implies missional responsibilities for believers. Over the ages, God has used human agency to bring the gospel to the world, the proclamation that God has come to us.
The CMS missionaries and African diviners, out of the norm, influenced the dawn of that light among the Luo people in Kenya. These diviners, like the Magi from the East, used various methods to predict the future and found supernatural help to read into it. It is plausible that the Luo diviners had a revelation of God and worshiped to the extent of their revelation. God, being their creator, had means of drawing them to Christ, for even in their pre-Christian state, “He is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27, NKJV). As Joseph Ratzinger wrote in The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000), “If God does not reveal himself, man is clutching empty space.” God is revealing Christ among the unreached, and he can use us, too.
The promise of Christmas, of Christ’s first coming, is the Second Coming, the unio mystica in this life, and likewise, that he will return in glory, his third coming. To rejoice in that third coming is to find joy in the presence of Christ in our daily lives. The three are all bound together. During this Christmas season, then, let us be conscious that Jesus has entered our dark, broken world and, through his Spirit, is working even now to restore light, peace, and life.
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[1] I am indebted to Markus Rathey for his analysis of Bach’s work and the theology of Bernard of Clairvaux. See his “Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and the Mystical Theology of Bernard of Clairvaux,” In Bach and the Counterpoint of Religion, Bach Perspectives 12 (University of Illinois Press, 2018)
[2] Rathey (98) Johann Gerhard, Postille das ist die Auslegung und Erklärung der sonntäglichen und vornehmsten Fest-Evangelien über das ganze Jahr . . . Nach den Original-Ausgaben von 1613 und 1616. Vermehrt durch die Zusätze der Ausgabe von 1663 [Berlin: Schlawitz, 1870], 1:11–12).
[3] Rathey p99.
One may also wish to consider Johannes Tauler, Sermons, trans. Maria Shrady (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 35. See Rathey (p96).
The Rt. Rev. Francis Omondi, Ph.D. is Bishop of Garissa in the Anglican Church of Kenya. Previous ministry includes service in the Anglican Church of Uganda. In addition to being a Commissioner at the Anglican Communion Interfaith Commission, he has held appointments in missiology and practical theology at the South African Theological Seminary, the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life in the UK, and at St Paul’s University, Limuru, Kenya.
