Nativity of Christ
1975
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In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
There is anguish when a woman is in labour, but all this is forgotten
when the child is born, because a man has come into the world. Someone
has come into the world to live, someone has entered into the realm of
transitory life in order to grow into life eternal, and the birth of a
child is always perceived as the beginning of life and as the
beginning of eternity, once more incarnate, once more made real,
visible, tangible, become part of human joy and human simplicity.
And yet, when we think of the nativity of Christ, the birth on earth
of the Son of God, we see it in a quite different way. One of the
ancient miniatures representing the birth of the Lord, shows us, apart
from the habitual features of a cave, of the Mother Virgin, of Joseph,
of the familiar animals, the manger standing by, deposited on an altar
of sacrifice. And the child is lying on it as probably Isaac laid on
the altar which Abraham had built in order to bring him as a blood
offering to the Lord. Every one of us is born through temporary life
into eternal life; the Eternal One, He who is life itself, is born
into the world in order to enter into the realm of death. Eternal,
Immortal God enters into the realm of man, not only the created world,
but to enter the fallen world where death is the end of our earthly
pilgrimage.
When we look at this image of the new-born child, lying on an altar of
stones, ready for a sacrifice, brought as an offering, we can well ask
ourselves, ╚Who is he who sacrifices this child?╩ - and we have an
answer: it is the Father who gives us His Son that through His death
we may live. We see here incarnate, clearly expressed, divine Love,
and the measure of this love divine. The Only-Begotten Son is given
unto death, delivered unto death for our sakes. Saint Paul ponders on
the event, and he exclaims, ╚Hardly would anyone die for a friend, and
Christ died for us while we still were enemies of God.╩
God called us into existence, it was a one-sided act, not of His own
powerful will, but of His immeasurable love. He called us into
existence, that we may share with Him not only existence, but life,
become partakers of all that He is; we are called, in the words of
Saint Peter, to become partakers of divine nature; we are called to be
brethren and sisters of Christ, sons and daughters of the Living God.
He created us in an act of love and in this act of love, from the
first, He gave Himself as an offering to us. And this offering is
always a sacrifice. In order to make this offering meaningful, He gave
us freedom, the freedom to accept love and to reject love, to love Him
in response to His love, or discard His love and, through our deeds,
through all our attitude to Him and to life, to proclaim to Him that
His love is of no avail to us, that we do not want it, that it is in
vain that he has loved us first, it is in vain that He had loved us so
much as to give His Only Begotten Son for us.
God gives us the freedom, and we ask very often, ╚Why?!╩ - why have we
not been made in such a way that, compelled by a blessed necessity, we
would be unable to go wrong, that we should be made in such a way that
we always and in all things would respond to the best. But is it not
simply because where there is no freedom of love and rejection of
love, there is no love? If we gravitated towards one another without
any choice, it would be a law of nature, it would not be an act of
free gift of oneself and of acceptance of the other. This freedom
means love, at least the possibility of love, as it means also the
possibility for us to reject God. But God in His freedom does not
reject us. He remains faithful to the last, perfectly generous,
heroically faithful.
And when the freedom of man is misused, He uses His freedom to come,
and to reach out towards us at the very depth of ourselves, at the
extreme distance which we reach when we die to love. He enters this
very realm which is the realm where there is no love, where there is
only dividedness, brokenness and separation, both from God and from
one another and within ourselves, the inner brokenness and conflict
between mind and heart, between conscience and action: Christ is born
into the realm of death we have made through the misuse of freedom,
because we have forgotten that freedom culminates, is fulfilled in
that love which gives itself perfectly, which is forgetfulness of
self, which is the laying down of one's life for the other.
Let us then look at this crib not as we do when we are small children,
seeing only an image of a child's birth, miraculous, wonderful; let us
look at it with an earnest and adult gaze, and see that this crib is
an altar of sacrifice, that this cave where He was born is an image of
that cave in which He will be deposited, a young man, killed for God's
sake after the agony of the Garden and the agony of the Cross, and let
us ask ourselves, 'Are we, each of us, a response to love revealed in
such a way, revealed to such degree? ╚Will we find in ourselves a
response, or shall we only say, ╚It was His choice, I have chosen
against Him. He has chosen life for me, I have chosen death for Him╩.
Is that the answer which we will give? Oh, not in words, but in deeds,
through our life, through our attitude to our own self, in which our
own dividedness is not overcome, through our attitude to one another
in which those people for whom Christ lived and died remain to us
strangers, irrelevant and can be brushed out of our way, or through
our attitude to Him Whom we do not treat as our everpresent invisible
neighbour, for Whom we have no thought, no compassion, no charity, no
love.
Or are we going to respond to this revelation of love in which the
frailty of love is made visible, perceptible to us in the frailty of
this little human body deposited on the straw of a crib, respond to
the frailty of God by a mature love?
This is the question which now the day of Christmas sets before us,
and we have days and months of liturgical unfolding of the year, to
grow through it towards a definitive and final answer when we will see
love sacrificed on Calvary. We have got this liturgical year to follow
step by step, in this year we will discover how the saints of God have
responded, and at every step the question will stand before us: ⌠And
what about you, what about thee personally, what about us in our
togetherness, what is our answer to love?■ Amen
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