CHRISTMAS: THE BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST

CHRISTMAS: The Birth of Jesus Christ

The Son of God became man, - “the Word was made flesh” (John 1) in the womb of a young virgin. No one, except the young virgin, knew that Divinity had set up its tent among men. His royal chamber was the animals’ stable, his throne the manger, his canopy the hanging cobwebs, the reek of the dung the incense.  In this Child the Divine made an advance into the world and man, a divine transfusion by which we are transformed, elevated, redeemed; for whereas we were blind, now we see. In this Child, God and man have a purchase on each other. For God is so great that he can allow himself to become a child. He is so strong that he can appear weak. So overwhelmingly attractive that he draws everyone to himself without forcing anyone. God is so Almighty that he can bind people to himself without limiting their freedom.

The Incarnation, which was the starting point of Christianity, was a descent into the temporal, into the material, into this world of births and generations, into the world of buying and selling, into this world of housing and education, to this world of leisure and of hard work; this world of unemployment and taxes. The Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God, took upon himself all this in order to transform, to elevate and transfigure.

Therefore, our salvation does not consist in a flight, an escape, a retreat from the world. Not a flight of the alone to the Alone. Not an escape from our fellowmen and our day to day burdens.

In every line of progress, spiritual, intellectual and material, the Incarnation must be sanctifying leaven.

Hence it should be the rule and not the exception to have saintly workers and peasants, saintly statesmen and judges, merchants and soldiers. All stages of life must be elevated, from childhood to adolescence, from marriage up to our last day on earth. “All flesh shall see the salvation of God” (John 1).

This divine-human Infant touched off a revolution, a quiet prolonged thunder, from the recesses of the cave of his birth, founding a Kingdom, characterized by unconditional love and undiscriminating service. The centre of this dynamic process is the human heart, and its source, the Son of God, born in the heart of each man and woman today. He is not an ideal or abstraction, a gaunt empty figure beyond description, but a Person in whom is the fullness of the Godhead, the most beautiful among men. He has come, not to use us as tools, carrying us along with him, striding on rapidly towards a high abstract goal. Nay, nothing great he put before us to achieve except to love him, to be faithful to him and to give testimony to him when the times comes. Most great men have failed, for their schemes have been their ideals, and their chosen men their tools. And when these great ones died there was no one to weep over them. But Jesus dying lives, and living he dies daily like the grain of wheat or else he takes no root in our hearts. His ideal is that we love him, that we love one another for him and that we believe in his love for us.

He comes into this world, dispossessed Infinity, naked and cold, that each one of us may give him something – the universe for his stable, for his manger our hearts and their warmth.