Christmas Pageant: A Medieval Christmas

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The Saint Thomas Sunday School and Youth Group invite you to attend their annual Christmas pageant. This year they reprise A Medieval Christmas, a new production last year, based on the York Mystery Plays. Selections from this 14th century cycle of plays tell the story of the creation and fall of man and the beginning of his salvation through the birth of a savior.

The pageant is free, and all are welcome.We encourage you to stop by coffee hour after the 11am Festal Eucharist and then return to the nave of the church shortly before 1pm for the start of the pageant.

About the York Cycle of Mystery Plays

These mystery plays were composed and first performed in the late fourteenth century and enjoyed a generally continuous run until the late 1560s when they were suppressed during the Reformation.

Consisting of forty-seven pageants, the York cycle was performed as a single production on the Feast of Corpus Christi – a huge civic undertaking both in terms of finance, which was shared among the craft guilds, and in manpower, there being over three hundred speaking parts in the complete cycle.

The essential episodes were the creation, man’s fall and expulsion from the garden, and his redemption through the incarnation, passion and resurrection of Christ. The cycle continues beyond Christ’s redemptive work on earth, concluding with the anticipation of his return and final judgment.

One of the chief organizing principles underlying the construction of the cycle is the typology whereby persons and incidents from the Old Testament are held to foreshadow things to come later in the sequence of plays. In this abbreviated adaptation, we have sought to emphasize the typology expressed in the fifth chapter of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: ‚ÄúTherefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned, sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the effect of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. Then as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.‚Äù

And also beautifully expressed in Saint Irenaeus’ treatise, On the Apostolic Preaching I.32-33. ‚ÄúWhence then is the substance of the first formed [man]? From the will and the wisdom of God, and from the virgin earth‚Ķ So, from this [earth] while it was still virgin, God took dust from the earth and made man. Thus, Our Lord, recapitulating this [first] man, received the same flesh, being born from the Virgin by the Will and the Wisdom of God; that He also should show forth the likeness of Adam’s entry into flesh‚Ķ And just as through a disobedient virgin man was struck down and fell, and died, so through the Virgin who was obedient to the Word of God man was reanimated and received life. For the Lord came to seek again the sheep that was lost; and man it was that was lost‚Ķ For it was necessary that Adam should be summed up in Christ, that mortality might be swallowed up and overwhelmed by immortality; and Eve summed up in Mary, that a virgin should be a virgin’s intercessor, and by a virgin’s obedience undo and put away the disobedience of a virgin.‚Äù