Christmas meditations
Christmas – The Mystery Made Present To Us
Fr. Alfred Delp, S.J.
The meaning of our Christian holy days is not primarily our external holiday celebration, but that particular mysteries of God happen to us, and that we respond. Something in the deepest center of our being is meant here, more than the exterior symbols can even indicate. Anyone who lacks spiritual eyes, and whose soul has not become open and watchful, will not understand the reason we are so often festive in the cycle of the liturgical year. The Church stands before us with great gestures and great pomp and ceremonial rites. This is only an attempt to indicate something that reaches much deeper and must be taken much more seriously.
We need to celebrate holy days in three ways. First, by recalling a historical event. The feasts are always based on verifiable, historical facts. We should not just get carried away with unbridled enthusiasm. What is really going on? This is a question of discernment and recognition. Seen from God’s perspective, there is always a clearly defined event connected to the mystery, a clear statement intended, a fact. This brings us to the second point. Within all of the foregoing, a great mystery – the Mysterium – is hidden. Something happens between Heaven and earth that passes all understanding. This mystery is made present to us, continues in the world till the end of time, and is always in the process of happening – the abiding Mysterium.
These two points are followed by the third way in which we must consider the feast to be serious and important. Through the historical facts and through the workings of the mystery, the holy day simultaneously issues a challenge to each individual life, a message that demands a particular attitude and an interior decision from each person to whom it is proclaimed.
The Christmas celebration is the birth of the Lord. It is verifiable that Christ was born on this night. The great mystery behind this is the marriage covenant of God with mankind; that mankind is fulfilled only insofar as it has grown into this covenant. Concretely, it is meaningful to establish what this covenant, which began between divinity and humanity on that Holy Night, signifies as a challenge and message for each one of us.
In view of these preconditions, we want to read some passages from the Holy Scriptures about the mystery of Christmas.
1. The Epistle reading for Christmas day Mass: “In many and various ways God spoke in times past to our fathers through the prophets; but in these last days He has spoken to us through a Son, whom He appointed the heir of the cosmos, through whom also He created the world. He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of His nature, upholding the universe by His Word of power” (Hebrews 1:1-3). Basically, before moving on to personal devotions and contemplation or reading stories of the Holy Night, one should read these weighty verses of Saint Paul to be spiritually touched by the impact of this holy day we are celebrating. We run the risk of concealing Christmas behind bourgeois customs and sentimentality, behind all those traditions that make this holiday dear and precious to us. Yet perhaps the deep meaning is still hiding behind all those things. What this celebration is about is the founding of a final order for the world, a new center of meaning for all existence. We are not celebrating some children’s holiday, but rather the fact that God has spoken His ultimate Word to the world. Christ is the ultimate Word of God to the world. One must let this idea really sink in these days when people are seeking new values. If you take God seriously – this relationship between God and the world – and if you know how important God is to society as well as to private life, then this has to touch you. The ultimate Word of God to the world! God does not contradict Himself and does not repeat Himself. One must use every ounce of willpower to comprehend this, and let this concept sink in: Christ, as the ultimate Word of God to the world.
And Christ came and placed Himself before us as a message. That He came as a child proves how much it matters to God that the message be accepted. From this Holy Night onward, the world has had the possibility of living in nearness to God or living apart from God. The entire Epistle wants to communicate one thing: take this, take what has happened here, really seriously. What came into the world is the very image of the Divine Being, is God Himself. He lifted mankind out of every false order in this consecrated night, in this blessed night. What is said to us here gives life its meaning, individual life as well as the life of all mankind.
The ultimate Word of God to mankind. This idea is expanded upon as follows:
2. The Epistle of Christmas Mass at Dawn: “The goodness and kindness of God our Saviour appeared; He saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but by virtue of His own mercy” (Tit 3:4-7).
The impact of these facts is further developed in two ways. What does this mean for man’s inner reality, where he must come to an understanding of himself? And what does it mean for the fundamental attitudes toward life, the point at which the mystery becomes present and calls for a concrete response? To begin with the first question: What has happened to the measure of our being, through this Word that God has spoken into the world? The goodness and loving-kindness of God have appeared, so that we know and seriously must recognize ourselves as the substance of a divine commitment to man. Since then, God has taken no other position in relation to us than this “benignitas et humanitas [goodness and lovingkindness]”. Because God’s commitment upholds each and every one of us, even to the extent of His sharing in the very poorest and most helpless phase of human infancy, He has fully realized and made Himself accessible in the Incarnation. And now, in the background, our great, gruesome time stands up.
“Not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but by virtue of His own mercy” (Tit 3:5). The second tiling we need to know is that it is not because man is proud and worthy, but because God upholds us. Man needs to know that we live from grace; we live from God’s merciful commitment to mankind, from His mercy. Not as miserable wretches, however, but renewed in spirit; so that we know our intrinsic dignity, know that we are raised up above and beyond all else, because we mean so much to God. This is how we attain maturity in the presence of God.
3. Now (in the Epistle of the Mass of Christmas during the night) the effect of the foregoing is described. We will not be abused and violated, not even forced to be good or forced to love. We are challenged to do so, but it calls for a decision. The grace of God our Savior “teaches us to renounce godlessness and to live moral, upright, and pious lives in this world” (Tit 2:12). There are three great fundamental attitudes there, three great, foreign qualities of Christians in the world, three great commandments for perfection of life.
First [renouncing godlessness]: if the meaning of our lives is that God is really in covenant with mankind, then there can be no more godlessness – that would be loss of being – there is no more will to live. Godlessness is a calumniation of the divine life.
Second [regarding moral, upright, and godly living]: man should recognize that his innermost purpose is to find the way home to God and to be caught up in His life, to seek God for Himself. The fundamental concept of man in this world never can be that of certainty, but rather that of waiting for this ultimate revelation of that which began in the Holy Night. Such people, who know they are hastening to meet a great fulfilment, are always people under way.
Third [to become His own followers]: these are people of loneliness, the people whom God wanted to have as His people, gripped by a great passion that God be well pleased, and ablaze with the divine fire that will be cast upon the earth.
And now, here is the last question: What does all of this mean today – the message of the great Kyrios, the Lord, the message of the fundamental attitude that the Holy Night demands? This is no Christmas life today. Neither is it a Christmas life according to people’s inner attitude. Neither is it a Christmas holy day according to a religious perspective. The world is hostile and rejects everything. But we are experiencing the other side of Christmas. All of these blessings have already been taken away, and the night has descended again.
The first message is that the Kyrios, the Lord, is coming. The Lord does not stand in the center anymore. He is replaced by the power brokers. How man keeps lapsing into heresy! The power brokers, under whose power man has gone astray, stand in the center. One no longer sees God as the center of the world, as the foundational support. And what has developed out of this? We are standing without any foundation – we have nothing permanent anymore. There is no more talk of man’s life being dependent upon mercy. Therefore the world has become so unmerciful. When has anyone taken away more from man than this? This is a time in which “apparuit benignitas et humanitas [the goodness and loving-kindness of God our Savior appearing]” is no longer acknowledged. What has become of man, that he does not want to be human in relation to God anymore? Beforehand, the Christmas words were sent packing [references to Nazi regulations restricting or forbidding Christian practice and customs.] This is a world in which it no longer can be said that “we await the great revelation of the Lord”, a world that must cling to each day because it already knows that, in mere seconds, everything can be over. There is nothing left of peace and security. This is a world that no longer knows of the Holy Night, of the Consecration-Night, the Christ-Mass [The German word for Christmas is Weihnacht, but Fr. Deip wrote “WeiheNacht” (Consecration-Night)]. That is the one thing that we honestly have to see. The world in which we stand is un-Christmaslike, not because God is unmerciful, but rather because man has outlawed the message, and there is no room anymore for the promise.
Nevertheless, we must also look at this in a positive way. For us personally, this message of the Holy Night still does contain its great meaning and content. There are two things we need to have in terms of consciousness and attitude, and we should take possession of them today: we should not come to Midnight Mass as if we do not live in the year 1942. The year must be redeemed along with everything else. And from the Gloria, we have to take with us the peace and faith in the glory of God. There is nothing else that surpasses this night, and nothing that should be taken as more important than this event. Whatever may happen around us, let us not break down, for then we would not be taking the Lord seriously, or what we know about consecrated people seriously, or what we know about these messages. Therefore, deep down, we are the people who are comforted; and we are the last refuge for the homeless people who do not know anything about the Lord anymore. May we know about the indisputable fact of this Child and not let ourselves be disconcerted, not even by our own great un-freedom. “Apparuit benignitas et humanitas [the goodness and lovingkindness of God our Savior appearing]” (Tit 3:4). That should find its expression in the positive attitudes we take with us from this experience of the Holy Night. May we impart the goodness. May we attend to humanity again, and witness to the Lordship of God again, and know of His grace and mercy, and have gentle hands for other people again. And may we go away from Christmas Eve with the consolation that we mean so much to God that no external distress can rob us of this ultimate consolation. Our hearts must become strong, to make the divine heartbeat into the law of life again. God’s readiness is established, but our gates are locked.
Fr. Alfred Delp, S.J., priest and martyr.
Fr. Alfred Delp was a German Jesuit priest who was imprisoned in Berlin. Accused of conspiring against the Nazi government, he was arrested in 1944, tortured, imprisoned, and executed on Feb 2, 1945.
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The Simplicity of Christmas
by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini sj
«The crib is something very simple, that all children understand». A meditation from Jerusalem by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini
Jerusalem, December 2006
The crib is something very simple, that all children understand. It may be made up of many disparate little figures, of various sizes and measures: but the essential thing is that everybody in some way is drawn and looks at the same point, at the stable where Mary and Joseph, with the ox and the ass, await the birth of Jesus or adore him in the first moments after his birth.
Like the crib, all the mystery of Christmas, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, is extremely simple, and that is why it is accompanied by poverty and joy. It is not easy to explain rationally how the three things go together. But let’s make a try.
The mystery of Christmas is certainly a mystery of poverty and impoverishment: Christ, from being rich as He was, made Himself poor for us, to make Himself like us, out of love for us and above all out of love for the most poor.
Everything here is poor, simple and humble, and that why it is not difficult to understand for those who have the eyes of faith: the faith of the child, to whom the Kingdom of Heaven belongs. As Jesus said: «If your eye is simple also your body is all in the light» (Mt 6, 22). The simplicity of faith lights up the whole of life and it makes us accept with docility the great things of God. Faith is born out of love, is the new capacity for looking that comes from feeling much loved by God.
The fruit of all this comes in the words of John the Evangelist in his first epistle, when he describes the experience of Mary and Joseph at the crib: «We have seen with our own eyes, we have contemplated, touched with our hands the Word of life, because life has been made visible». And all this happened so that our joy might be perfect. Everything is therefore for our joy, for a full joy (cf. 1John 1, 1-3). This joy did not only belong to the contemporaries of Jesus, but is also ours: also today this Word of life makes itself visible and tangible in our daily life, in our neighbor to be loved, in the way of the Cross, in prayer and the Eucharist, in particular in the Eucharist of Christmas, and it fills us with joy.
Poverty, simplicity, joy: they are the simplest, most elementary words, but we are afraid and almost ashamed of them. It seems that perfect joy doesn’t fit, because there are always so many things to worry about, so many wrong, unjust situations. How, faced with that, could we enjoy true joy? But also simplicity doesn’t fit, because there are so many things to distrust, complicated things, difficult to understand, the puzzles of life are so many: how, faced with all that, could we enjoy the gift of simplicity? And isn’t poverty perhaps a condition to combat and extirpate from the earth?
But deep joy does not mean not sharing the pain for the injustice, for the hunger in the world, the great sufferings of people. It simply means trusting God, knowing that God knows all these things, that He cares for us and will awake in us and in others those gifts that history requires. And it is thus that the spirit of poverty is born: in trusting oneself in everything to God. In Him we can enjoy full joy, because we have touched the Word of the life that heals every sickness, poverty, injustice, death.
If everything is in some way so simple, believing must also be simple. We often hear it said today that it is difficult to believe in such a world, that the faith is in danger of foundering in the sea of modern indifference and relativism or being set aside by the great scientific discourses on mankind and the universe. It cannot be denied that today it can be more burdensome to show with rational argument the possibility of belief, in such a world.
But we must remember the words of Saint Paul: to believe the heart and the mouth are enough. When the heart, moved by the touch of the Spirit given us in abundance (cf. Rm 5, 5; John 3, 34), believes that God resurrected Jesus from the dead and the mouth proclaims it, we are saved (cf. Rm 10, 8-12). All the complications, all the deep thoughts that sometimes confuse us, all that has been superimposed through eastern and western thought, through theology and philosophy, is good thinking, but it should not make us forget that believing is at bottom a simple gesture, a gesture of the heart that leaps and a word that proclaims: Jesus lives, Jesus is Lord! It is so simple an act that it does not distinguish between the learned and the ignorant, between persons who have gone through the process of purification or who must still go through it. The Lord belongs to all, He is rich in love towards all those who invoke Him.
Rightly we try to deepen the mystery of the faith, we try to read it in all the pages of the Scriptures, we have parsed it sometimes in tortuous ways. But faith, I repeat, is simple, it is an act of abandonment, of trust, and we must find that simplicity again. It lights up everything and enables us to face the complexity of life without too many worries or fears.
It doesn’t take much to believe. It needs the gift of the Holy Spirit which he does not let our hearts lack and on our part we have to pay heed to a few well placed little signs. Let us look at what happened at the empty tomb of Jesus: gasping and in tears Mary Magdalene said: “They have taken away the Lord and we do not know where they have put him”. Peter goes into the sepulcher, sees the bandages and the shroud folded aside and still does not understand. But the other disciple, more intuitive and simple, whom Jesus loved, he understands. He «saw and believed», says the Gospel, because the small signs present in the sepulcher stirred in him the certainty that the Lord had risen. He did not need a treatise of theology, he didn’t write thousands of pages on the event. He saw small signs, small as those of the crib, but it was enough because his heart was already prepared to understand the mystery of the infinite love of God.
Sometimes we are in search of complicated signs, and it even goes well. But it can take little to believe if the heart is willing and if it pays heed to the Spirit who instills confidence and joy in believing, a sense of satisfaction and fullness. If we are so simple and open to grace, we enter into the number of those people to whom it is given to proclaim those essential truths that light up existence and enables us to touch with our hands the mystery manifested by the Word made flesh. We feel how perfect joy is possible in this world also, despite the sufferings and pains of every day.
The Word Became Flesh
John 1:1-18
Kathleen Rushton
Kathleen Rushton explains how Jesus comes into creation in John 1:1-18 not as a baby, as we read in Matthew and Luke, but as the Word becoming flesh and pitching a tent in us.
CHRISTMAS CAROLS, such as “O Little Babe of Bethlehem,” evoke scenes from the infancy narratives of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The wonder, lowliness, humanity and vulnerability of the newborn Christ Child inspires cribs, cards, midnight and dawn liturgies and the hearts of millions young and old.
“The Word Became Flesh”
In the Prologue of John’s Gospel (1:1-18) the coming of Jesus is not expressed as a birth. He did not become “a man” in the sense of a male person (aner), or even “a human person” (anthropos). Instead his coming is expressed as “the Word became flesh (sarx) and pitched a tent in us” (Jn 1:14, literal translation).
The Incarnation is not presented as a one-off event to be celebrated only at Christmas time. In John the Genesis creation stories with their ancient cosmologies are reshaped in order to insert Jesus, “the Word became flesh,” into an evolving understanding of the incarnate, dynamic God and the universe.
Sarx — Flesh
The word sarx in John does not characterise humanity as subject to the power of sin nor does it contrast flesh and spirit as found in Paul’s Letters. In John, it emphasises the true humanity of Jesus whom we see tired and thirsty (Jn 4:6-7, 19:28); whose emotion we hear in his voice (Jn 11:33); who wept (Jn 11:35); and whose spirit is troubled as his death approaches (Jn 12:27; 13:21).
“The Word” took on human form and chose the same earthly existence as that of every human person. “Flesh” suggests a human person in the fullest bodily sense including a rational soul. We homo sapiens have evolved with consciousness, imagination, language and religious awareness through a process which required delicate cosmological and geological conditions.
“All Flesh”
While “flesh” refers to human persons as, for example, man and woman are “one flesh” (Gen 2.24–25) and “flesh” is circumcised (Gen 17.11,14), the Word become “flesh” is not limited to humans.
Humanity is not distinct from other living creatures. God’s continuing relationship with creation is with “all flesh.” In the flood, the focus is on “all flesh” (Gen 6:13-22; 7:15-16); the covenant is made with “all flesh” (Gen 9:8–11); God sustains “all flesh” (Ps 136:25); and “all flesh” praises God (Ps 145:21). While “flesh” identifies the incarnation of Jesus with human persons and with all living creatures, there is also difference.
First Difference: Flesh Is Embodiment
Genesis 1 describes God’s creation of the world and of humans as realities that God looked down upon and saw were “good” and “very good.” Through Jesus becoming flesh, the divine enters the materiality of the created world through his body. For those incorporated in Jesus as adopted children of God, the human body is forevermore a valued part of God’s creation uniting the divine and the material.
Our evolved bodies are the bearers of human uniqueness. In our embodied existence, we face the realities of vulnerability and suffering, as well as dependence that is central to our human condition. The paradox of the Word and the flesh is reflected in the divine paradox — the understanding that out of our fragility comes our strength. The tent, a fragile sheet that can be folded up or knocked over, is a symbol of flesh and its vulnerability.
Second Difference: Imago Dei Image of God
God is portrayed as creating humanity in God’s “image” (Gen 1:26, 27). This Imago Dei is associated with reason and intellect and is related to humankind’s dominion in planet Earth. South African theologian Wentzel van Huyssteen says that Imago Dei offers a more holistic way of humanness because it “strongly underlines the sacredness and irreplaceable value of each individual human person [when] seen in the broader context of the imitation of God, the imitatio Dei.” Being created in God’s image obliges us to act in accordance with God’s love — doing God’s creative work in our everyday lives.
Imago Dei relates to humanity’s bodiliness and includes the capacity to reflect on the experience of living — being-in-the-world. Through our body we are interconnected in the universe and through our consciousness/soul we have the capacity to live out our relationship with the Creator.
Third Difference: To Work with God
In some ancient myths, humans are said to be created as workers for the sole purpose of relieving the gods of the burden of labour. The purpose of humans in the biblical tradition is different. Humans are created to work with God. Humans in the image of God are co-creators. Their labour is to love, build and sustain creation but, as we know, humans can also undermine God’s creative activity.
In John’s Gospel there are 28 references to “work” or “working” among which are “completing the works of God” and Jesus or the disciples working in open and public places.
No Body Now but Yours
This understanding of “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent in us” can affirm and challenge us. Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ and follow-up Laudate Deum call us to heed and respond to the cry of Earth and the cry of the poor. In John’s language this is the call to “flesh” to respond to “all flesh”.
Francis says it is urgent that we respond as he showed in joining the world’s leaders at COP28. As co-creators we work within God’s complex, evolving, beautiful, suffering and global world.
And recently Francis urged theologians to make a “paradigm shift” in their theologising to “a fundamentally contextual theology capable of reading and interpreting the Gospel in the conditions in which men and women live daily, in different geographical, social and cultural environments.” This recognises that the Word made flesh is known, loved and expressed differently in different parts of the world.
We need contextual theology, Francis wrote, to help bring about change in the Church and the world: “A synodal, missionary and ‘outgoing’ Church can only respond to an ‘outgoing’ theology.”
During the Advent and Christmas seasons we can take to heart Teresa of Avila’s words: “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on Earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ looks lovingly on this world. Yours are the feet with which Christ walks to do good.”
Nov 30, 2023
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