Today’s readings: Isaiah 9, 2-7; Titus 2, 11-14; Luke 2, 1-14.
Our human reasoning and our faith may at times take different paths in dealing with the question of God or in coming to terms with the basic issues of our human quest.
Christmas is a worldwide celebration, and many, even while in festive mode, hardly realise that behind the routine celebrations of these days, there is a truth of doctrine and life about our very existence. This truth of doctrine about God who became man has been and still is contested by many and forgotten by many others. It is the truth that distinguishes Christianity from other religions and that has been object of controversy at the time when Christianity was taking shape.
It is not easy for us humans to come to terms with this truth and to digest it in our minds serenely. It is already so difficult and weary for us to come to terms rationally with our quest for God, let alone with the fact that this God we believe in became man and was like us mortal humans in time and space.
We were made for happiness. Aristotle’s fundamental question was not ‘What ought we to do?’ but ‘What do we really want?’ His ethics look closely at humanity’s deepest inclinations and are based on the desire for fullness of life inscribed in every human being. As Christians we believe this is what Jesus’s life and teachings were about, to help us all address our deepest desires.
And this is what we should be reaffirming today. On this day the Church proposes the words of Pope St Leo the Great: “Christian, remember your dignity. Sadness should have no place on the birthday of life. The fear of death has been swallowed up; life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness.”
Yet many people throughout the world are still living needlessly miserable lives. Even in celebrating, we are deeply aware that life’s hardship weighs upon us and on our beliefs. Wise thinkers and great spiritual masters have always taught that happiness can come only as a by-product of the search for something eternal. Our deepest desires and thirst are eternal by nature. So they cannot be quenched by what is not eternal. Aiming for happiness directly is a sure way not to find it.
God is not the images we have of Him. God is beyond that. The new atheists of our time claim that what is so evil about the God religions is not only the crude images of deity that are given but also that they arise from faith. Christopher Hitchens, who died recently, claims it is faith that “poisons everything”.
Christmas is narrative, not theory. The usual talk about God and our rational quest for Him is radically different from the talk on this day about a child in a manger, about shepherds and angels. This narrative has since the very beginning always provoked a myriad of responses not only by Church Fathers and Councils in the early centuries of Christianity, but also by literature, cinema, theatre, popular narrative and theology itself.
Jesus born among men has definitively given a human face to God, wiping away all false perceptions and images which conditioned over time the shape of religions and of faith itself. Many a time atheism itself, and rightly so, was the outcome of falsity in religion. Showing us who God is, Jesus disclosed to humanity the true nature and complexity of humanness. It is in Jesus, the true image of God, that we discover who we are.
In Redeemer in the Womb, John Saward writes that in assuming a complete and concrete human nature, the Universal Word in some way unites himself to every man and woman, and, by living a complete human life from conception to the last breath, he touches and hallows every stage, every state, of every man’s and woman’s existence.
The Infant-God is the Christian paradox, reminiscent of the Baroque 17th century French School of which Pierre Cardinal de Berulle was founder. It recalls also the canvases of the contemporary Rembrandt where light glows warmly in the dark. It pledges for us all, to use Isaiah’s words, that for those walking in darkness the promise of light never deludes.