During the past four weeks we were guided to prepare the way for the Lord. The first reading today from Micah is one of the clearest and most specific of the Old Testament prophecies in that it pinpoints the birthplace of the Messiah as Bethlehem. This was written about 700 years before Jesus was born. The scribes quoted it in Matthew to try to prove that Jesus wasn't the Messiah, because they thought he had been born in Nazareth, not in Bethlehem.

The big question on Christmas Eve remains: do we really need a saviour? What is it that keeps us from seeing God and His wonders in our lives? The Letter to the Hebrews today speaks of a God "who wanted no sacrifice or oblation". Just as the scribes at the time of Jesus, we can easily remain imprisoned within a religion that refuses a God with a human face.

It is no coincidence that on Christmas Eve the Gospel gives us the account of the Visitation. The long and winding road of the history of salvation reaches its peak in this meeting between Mary and Elizabeth. It is through Mary that God's real presence among us takes its form.

This Gospel speaks of something very mysterious that occurs not in the academy but in those who are so humble as to believe. The Bible was not designed merely to give accounts of past events, but to guide our present lives and choices and to ensure our future blessedness. We talk so much about secularisation, but we live in a time marked by a deep religious search. We may be looking for the transcendent in Eastern religions, in New Age sects. We may be having very real problems with our Church and with institutional religion.

The point in all this is that we must seek a breakthrough to what is really true; we must ask who we really are and what we are to do; we must ask again whether there is a God, who God is and what the world is.

In his Confessions, St Augustine tells the tale of his search for God. But what had seemed a great and noble journey was only a series of delays and postponements. For, as he himself asks, "what am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction?" At one point, he turns to God: "You pierced my heart with the arrow of your love".

No investigation whatsoever can actually resolve this mystery of God's love shown exhaustively in Christ. It is hard for us today to be humble in the way Mary was. We rather speak about assertiveness. But are we assertive because we are proud? Or is it because we are so unsure of ourselves?

The more we contemplate in Jesus the human face of God, which is His true face, the more we realise how much we can't afford to fall victim to that fundamental perspective on reality which reduces everything to historical interpretation. Christianity is not a message which has to be believed but an experience of faith which becomes a message.

One of the major challenges facing us Christians and believers today is not to prove God's existence but to discern God's presence, particularly in His absence, in the black holes of our daily living. As Cardinal Newman, in one of his sermons, says: "He is still here; He still whispers to us, He still makes sign to us. But his voice is too low, and the world's din is so loud, and His signs are so covert, and the world is so restless, that it is difficult to determine when he addresses us, and what He says".

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