Christmas: No Refuge from Reality

The Birth of Jesus is Not A Charming Folktale
“The birth of Jesus is not a fairy tale!” (Pope Francis). Listen to the precision with which Saint Luke tells the story of a real event which happened in Bethlehem over two thousand years ago: “Caesar Augustus issued a decree for a census of the whole world to be taken. This census—the first—took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone went to his own town to be registered” (Lk 2:1).  Saint Luke is recounting real history, not telling a charming children’s story. We sing “Joy to the World” because of the Good News of Christmas first announced by angels to shepherds who were going about their normal work: “I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people. Today in the town of David a saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord” (Lk 2:10-11).  The simple joy of Christmas captures the meaning of Christmas.
God’s Grace Can Work Even with People like Us
Because Jesus, the eternal Son of God, truly and quietly entered our world as a simple child in a small, forgotten outpost of the Roman Empire, then God had, not only a mother, but also a grandmother, cousins, great-aunts, and some in his family tree were caught up in the perennial passions of sex and politics.  In Christ Jesus, God has become like us in all things, but sin. We are reminded that he was part of a family that, like most, was somewhat dysfunctional, a mix of the good and bad, the saintly and the sinful, the glorious and the not so glorious.  And what good news this is for us!  It ought to give us encouragement and hope about our destiny and importance. It means that God can bring the Christ to birth even in people like us.
God So Loved You and Me He Sent His Only Son
What the first Christians sensed in the baby Jesus, his words, his life, and his death was God communicating to them how much they were loved. St John’s Gospel distils the meaning into one sentence: “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son.” Christmas says, “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8, 16). “O Holy Night” has it right: our times, our lives of repetitious nights and days can be ‘holy,’ too, because God will never allow us or the world he recreated that night to fall from his love and grace.  The third Preface at the Mass for Christmas expresses it thus, “when our frailty is assumed by your Word not only does human mortality receive unending honour but by this wondrous union, we, too, are made eternal.” God assumed our human nature in order to give us his divine nature (see 2 Pet 1:4).  The meaning of Christmas is God among us in Jesus Christ who shows us at same time, what we should look like in the presence of God.   We are saved by being lifted up to a share in the divine life, not by raising ourselves. Nobody saves themselves.  Not even Jesus.
Christ is no Longer a Romanticised Child
The Christmas crib does well to remind us of the birth of the baby Jesus.  But Christmas will be somewhat deceptive if it fails to tell you that Christ is no longer a child, that Bethlehem was a prelude to Calvary and Easter. The Christ of the first Christmas is no longer a child; he has grown up; he has risen from the dead. But his place is taken, the manger is filled, by other Christs. What will I see when I kneel before the Christmas crib?  It is no longer the romanticised Bethlehem’s Child that is enfolded in Mary’s arms. Is it an infant with a life-limiting condition who will never really grow up; is it a child trafficked and abused; a teenager trapped in the nightmare of emergency accommodation for the homeless; a face of a tormented Christ abandoned in a refugee camp; a coloured Christ bloated from hunger, eyes empty of hope.  Perhaps the crib is empty, because an unborn child was not allowed to reach it.  The Good News is that, because of God’s intervention, there is hope for all of them. The need continues for all believers to bring hope in the midst of despair for the hurt and bewildered.  We have a need to find God and be found by our God in the realities and sufferings that make our human lives.
Does what I have said about the true meaning of Christmas disturb us more than console us? Only if Christmas is a refuge from reality.  The Christmas story is neither comfortable nor cosy.  The birth of Jesus “does not provide us with a ladder by which to escape the ambiguities of life and scale the heights of heaven. Rather it enables us to burrow deep into the heart of planet Earth and find it shimmering with divinity” (Cardinal Avery Dulles).   How do we link together this challenging mission with the meek and gentle Jesus, born a baby in Nazareth? Or the angels on Christmas morning who announced Jesus as the prince of peace? When the Word of God took on our human condition, it was for the good of a universal human community.
Our Life is a Landscape Where God is Seen
Christmas calls for conversion, a fresh turning to God not simply from the age-old list of sins that stamp us as children of Eve and Adam, but from the blindness and lack awareness that keep us from seeing the image of God in each person — in each refugee, in the helpless stranger in our midst, as well as neighbours and the people who share our homes. The God who takes flesh in Jesus comes to “save his people from their sins” (see Matt 1:21).  Concretely put: salvation is more than knowledge and more than forgiveness and compassion, as magnificent as these great gifts are.  To be saved is to live like God and love like God.  It is not enough to say the right things. It is our actions that make God real in our world today: and we do this in particular today, when we bring the light of Christ into the dark places of homelessness and poverty, racism, intolerance, discrimination and violence which are unacceptable and an affront to the Gospel.  May we be Emmanuel, God-with-us, in the values we hold, the generosity we exhibit by opening our lives, our hearts, our communities and our economies to strangers fleeing persecution and war.  Our world, our society, our local place needs an ongoing engagement—an engagement beyond the comfortable associations of our language, culture and social class.  As Jesus reminded his disciples in vivid language we must go beyond loyalties to family and friends (see Mark 3:31-35; Matt 12:46-50 and Luke 8:19-21).  In our times, if we only think of family and local community loyalties, we are back in the world of fear and suspicion, fear of the other, fear of the stranger.   “Our lives are a landscape in which God is seen” (see, Cardinal José Tolentino Mendonça, The Hidden Treasure, Chapter 6) — the God whose love unlocks ours and casts out all fear.  May the coming Prince of Light drive away all darkness this Christmas, may he melt the hardness of hearts, and fill our lives with his hope.  
Christmas Challenges Us
Martin Luther King Jr. summed up his life’s purpose during the famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.  We too should have a dream.  Is it too much to ask that between now and the end of the Christmas season each of us will look into the eyes of one child, a single child abused or neglected, homeless or hungry, unloved or unwanted, be moved to anguish at the experience, and resolve to change that child’s life, give him or her a tiny but real hope that tomorrow will be different, worth living for, worth waiting for. One child. But in that one child… always the Christ Child.
In this holy season of Christmas, let our hearts, filled with gratitude, also be filled with generosity and love, particularly for those among us who are forsaken and vulnerable.  Let us share with others the joy of the Gospel that we have received, and in doing so, cast the radiant light of Christ into the shadows of this world, announcing to all the grace and peace that comes with the revelation of the true and only King.
May the blessings brought into the world by the Christ Child be with you today and throughout the New Year.