Holy Christmas season!

"Beloved, our Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal creator of all things, today became our Savior by being born of a mother. Of his own will he was born for us today, in time, so that he could lead us to his Father's eternity. God became man so that man might become God. The Lord of the angels became man today so that man could eat the bread of angels." - from a sermon by St. Augustine


I love how our celebration of the Christmas season allows us time to examine the mysteries of Christ's incarnation over the space of a few weeks.  Those who don't celebrate a formal season of Advent often use the couple of weeks before Christmas to a similar purpose, but I truly appreciate the way that the anticipatory nature of our reflections during that period, focusing on themes of prophecy, waiting, longing and need, prepare us to celebrate more fully this season of joy and fulfillment, wonder and awe.  Advent becomes an annual John the Baptist in our lives, preparing our hearts for the coming of the Lord.

Thus the Christmas season becomes full of more than historical images of mangers and shepherds, angelic heralds and wise men from afar.  Those ancient images hold great meaning for us; they're important for us to revisit each year, but they're not the end.  The beginning and the end are found more fully in John's account, which our parish has quit using over the last several years, to my frustration.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." - Jn 1, 1


The light had come into the world, yet the world did not recognize it, a statement that remains true today. Yet these weeks are filled with reasons why we should recognize it, or perhaps with the results of recognizing it. And so we finally arrive back at St. Augustine.

I love how he uses irony and contrast to cast light on the wonder of Christ's coming to us. St. Paul did this, too, in elucidating how Jesus fulfills the age old longing of the Jewish people and extension of his salvific kingship to all peoples. And I love how the weeks of Christmas allow us to reflect on the implications of the Incarnation.

Too often we treat the holy days as if they are isolated.  I think this is because of our experience of the world in time, one event after another, which often appear isolated from each other.  But the best reflections on Christmas make the clear link between Jesus' birth and his mission, and treat his Nativity along with the rest of his earthly life, his death and resurrection, in the context of the difference they make for us. Too many of us are trying to be god in the wrong way, defining for ourselves good and evil (the original sin), seizing control of our lives in any way possible, interpreting the circumstances around us in whatever light best allows us to make the choices we think will have the best outcome for us. After all, if we are god in the same way as Jesus, it is up to us to make of ourselves what we may.

Indeed, I have a good friend who tends to view the nativity as a historical event that has had great impact on the world solely because of how Jesus lived and died, and what his disciples believed about him. He considers that Jesus was no more God than you or I, but recognizes that those who have believed otherwise have had a profound, mostly positive and lasting impact on human affairs.

But St. John and St. Augustine propose that Jesus Christ is God in a far different way, by his very nature before he was ever conceived in the womb for us. Indeed, they posit that, unlike every other person ever born, Jesus' birth was the result of a decision for the timeless creator to step into time in a unique way, so that he might deliver us into his love for eternity. The role of the ancient prophecies is not then to create a set of circumstances which Jesus must fulfill, but to allow us to recognize him because he fulfills them. Is it that sacrifice is necessary to appease an angry God, or that God who has seen all time knew that we would kill
the savior, and prepared us to recognize him by presenting centuries of law and prophecy that his life and death would fulfill alone out of the billions before or since?

Whatever is built upon fallacy eventually falls apart. Even the Jewish leaders who The Acts of the Apostles tells us whipped the disciples for preaching Jesus as risen from the dead said that if it was built on falsehood, this new movement would collapse. Christianity is built on the Godhead of Jesus, and has not only stood for two thousand years, but has transformed the world around it in the process. Yet this is temporal. Its true magnificence and miracle is how Jesus of Nazareth draws us into the eternal life for which we are created. The bread of heaven was conceived a zygote in the womb, and born in a manger for us, so that as we partake of him we are transformed by and into what we ingest.