For we have seen his star

But in the flesh is where life happens. Saint John Paul II dedicated a great deal of his intellectual labor to his “theology of the body,” and it is heady stuff. It is worth your time, if you feel like some serious reading. If not, Christian art is the great gift to those of us without the theological orientation: “Holy infant,” we sing, knowing that that is that flesh, “so tender and mild,” into which the nails will be driven. Take the Old Testament as liberally as you like, it is in the flesh that we are created and in the flesh that we create, in the flesh that we fell and fall, and through the flesh that we were redeemed. Not the star that announced him, cold and remote, but warm and frail and vulnerable. The symmetry was not lost on the great priest-poet Gerard Manly Hopkins: “I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am: This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond.”

Some of the witnesses understood what this was all about from the beginning. One of the magi brought as his gift to the newborn king myrrh, which was used in the preparation of corpses. Nicodemus would later do the same after what was done to that child’s body had been done. What must that wise man from the east have thought, standing over that child, understanding, if he did, the Divine plan, that the little innocent in the manger would eventually be ritually humiliated, abandoned by his friends, and tortured to death? That this was necessary because . . . ? Best not to think too closely about God’s business. God’s business is God’s business.