Today’s readings: Isaiah 7, 10-14; Romans 1, 1-7; Matthew 1, 18-25
In their long desert journey, God’s people very often fell prey to the temptation of idolatry or even atheism. A recurring question was: Is God with us? This same question returned with more frequency in later stages, when the desert journey had long been over and they enjoyed the comfort and stability of the Promised Land.
It is a question that still haunts believers and non-believers alike. Christmas, or rather what we celebrate in Christmas, is God’s answer to that primordial question. The child born to Mary was meant to be ‘God with us’. But this was never meant to be a definitive answer to the recurring question. That God is with us is not a self-evident truth.
It never was, let alone today that we live in a highly secularised, post-Christian era. God’s presence and God’s existence are not one and the same thing. Many arguments for the existence of God appeal primarily to reason. The signs of God’s presence appeal more to the heart, to experience.
To reach out to these signs, which are there but which need to be discerned more than just seen with the naked eye, we need first to be in touch with our inner feelings and desires that shape our daily living.
God gives signs that need to be read. In the cultural climate we live in, openness to the transcendent, to the possibility of signs of the divine, is unlikely to be seen as integral to our being human. The burden of the proof is on those who live it.
In our utter rationality we can persist in unbelief, though, as St Augustine affirms, faith has to be thought. The authentic believer is someone who thinks, whose faith is not blind in the sense of being cut off from the senses or emotions that existentially mark our living and believing.
In today’s gospel, Joseph, betrothed to Mary, had all the reasons on earth to go his way. Having made up his mind, he was still open to the unpredictable and unseen. Mary and Joseph make us enter a place of absolute poverty where we lay down not simply what we have but our own ego.
God enters history unobtrusively. This is what is conveyed to us through the gospel account, which is not to be taken simply in a historical sense. It is a midrash, telling us what it means to be in the power of the Spirit. This power in us is never invading in the negative sense; it empowers, it pre-disposes the heart to see the unseen and to be open for the impossible.
This narrative invites us to make time and space in our lives for the divine to transpire. We are more prone to read signs that proclaim our age as post-Christian. But God continues to give signs of His presence, which we can only discern as long as our search and struggle are authentic and point beyond the self.
St Paul, in the second reading from Romans, speaks of the “obedience of faith”, which in this day and age may easily trigger negative reactions in us. But obedience to God is in no way to be seen as something oppressive or even as in some way tramping on our personal dignity and intelligence.
This is particularly evoked in Isaiah’s text, which is of fundamental importance. Isaiah is making his proposal to a reluctant and unfaithful king Ahaz in tough times for the reign of Judah. Ahaz, through his political strategy, was betraying Israel’s tradition of values, and Isaiah was addressing precisely this situation to make his point that faith, at the end of the day, is not alien to daily politics. Rather, it can be energising.
What the prophet is affirming to the king is that believing is trusting, and trusting gives stability. This was a message to a nation in crisis. In spite of the king’s trusting exclusively his own political ambition and strategies, Isaiah invokes God’s patience. God will give a sign that He still cares for His people, and from a corrupt dynasty He can bring forth a saviour.
Christmas is reassuring that whatever the circumstances that may entangle our being and rob us of our hope, God is able and can work things out for our well-being.