Today’s readings: Micah 5, 1-4; Hebrews 10, 5-10; Luke 1, 39-44.
On the eve of Christmas it is two women who open the door to give us a glimpse of what Christmas really signifies. Of all the prophets of old who boldly and constantly guided God’s people in its dark nights, these two women, Elizabeth and Mary, serve as the final spark for the old promises to come true.
God’s presence in our midst and in the heart of the world is not a doctrine or simply the belief of a religion. The Word became flesh, God assumed our human nature. This is not about what we say of God, but about what God Himself said to humanity when He definitively entered history and became one of us. It is also about how God Himself empowers us, as humans, not only to grasp the great mystery of transcendence but to actually make the divine happen in time and space.
The meeting of Elizabeth and Mary triggers great joy, and henceforth they serve as catalysts of the divine in human terms. Christmas is a leap forward in the history of humanity. But it is not a leap forward that happened in the past and that calls on us simply to commemorate it. Christmas comes year in year out to revitalise us and give fresh energy to radically change the course of history.
Situations change dramatically not from year to year but daily. We read the prophet Micah today in the first reading indicating Bethlehem as the least of the clans of Judah from where the one who was to rule over Israel was to be born. What the prophet is implying is that what was least expected happened. With a similar prophetic insight today we need to discern and identify when and how God’s presence is making itself fleshy, concrete, graspable and healing.
God lives among His people, in the heart of His creation, in spite of the fact that we may be led to conclude otherwise or even to give in to the temptation of a Godless world. This is the leap forward we are called to undertake personally and collectively. The Jubilee of Mercy proclaimed by Pope Francis aims precisely at this revitalising of the Christian life and of the churches. If it leaves our churches unchanged and if we remain untouched by a fresh dose of God’s mercy, then all would be a sheer waste of time and a parody.
The Capuchin Raniero Cantalamessa, recently addressing the general synod of the Church of England, recalled how the Apostles at the start of everything faced a pre-Christian world and that today we are facing a largely post-Christian world. In this new world, we need to go back to the drawing board and start again with the first proclamation about Jesus Christ with the same vigour the Apostles preached and witnessed to him. They had first-hand experience of him. Ours cannot be defined as second-hand experience.
It is precisely this experience, which can still be first-hand, that can re-energise our Spirit within and spark between us and in the world the joy of believing that filled Zechariah’s house as soon as Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting. Blessed are we when we believe that God’s promises are not vain, that while proclaiming Christ as Lord and Saviour we really mean business with a world so much in need of God’s Spirit of wisdom, courage, hope, peace and fellowship.
The aspirations we celebrate at Christmas when we proclaim the birth of a Saviour need to converge more and more with our other aspirations in politics, culture, and the scientific world. The more we separate where aspirations are concerned, the more our faith becomes alien and alienating.
Echoing what we read today from Hebrews, we cannot afford to reverse the process that reached fulfilment in Christ when he ‘abolished’ the sacrifices, oblations, the holocausts and the sacrifices for sin and substituted them with something radically new. The sacred spaces we are called to create in today’s world cannot be segregated spaces. God became man to make us divine and to render sacred what we persistently and erroneously affirmed to be profane.