Christmas Day 2023
Dear Sisters and Brothers,
Don’t we like the Gospel we have just heard? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. Once in the year, it is good to hear these fascinating lines, full of poetry and mystery and rhythm. It is not that we can pretend that we understand perfectly well what they mean -although, we are not totally perplexed either: on the contrary, we grasp something like a direction. We feel directed to the mystery beyond. We begin to see our world from an unusual vantage point.
It is like the Nativity on the steps of our church. When we want to look at it, we go into the lower part of the church. We open our eyes, and we follow the lines of this carefully composed scenery. We are led from the man asleep in the front, to the women on the marketplace, to the crib under the hill. Again, we follow the shepherd and his sheep and we ascend the hill on top of which we meet the angel. Or again we find the ruins of the temples and the wise men on their way, coming, as it were, from remote mountains. That is the way we look at the crib: from below.
I noticed however that when Br Duncan was making it, he often stood on top of the steps and looked at the composition from above as if trying to hold together all the lines of the composition from a single point of view. He made me think of St John and of his way of presenting Jesus. John does not at first look at him from below. He does not describe the crib; he mentions neither shepherds nor wise men. Nevertheless, he gives a very precise account of what happened at Christmas. But he speaks from above. This birth, he tells us, begins somewhere else; not in Bethlehem, not in Nazareth, not even in the womb of Mary (Our Lady is not mentioned in this context), but above: in what he calls “the bosom of the Father”. He gives us to understand that there would be not child born from Mary today, “full of grace and truth”, if there were not a Son filled with “glory as of the only Son from the Father”. There would be no birth in time and history, if there were not a birth before time and history, in what John calls “the beginning”.
And here, we get to the point John is trying to make. In the child of Mary, in the babe in the crib, we touch the Son in the beginning, whom he also calls “the Word”. We are in contact with what you can consider only from above: the general idea; the scheme; the original thought; the commanding design; or, to put it in one word: the “Word”. Here we have the image of God looking from above on the world He created and all that happens to His beloved children, the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. In His Word, God sees everything; He draws the lines of the composition which, so often, we, who are below, do not see. We only see the surface of things and events. God sees through them. He understands everything, and, in His loving knowledge, He gently, prudently, wisely leads all the lines of the composition to the one point where they appear in perfect unity: Jesus, His eternal Son.
The Child in the crib is the Word in the beginning. When we confess Him with faith and adore Him with love, we, too, enter God’s design; we, too, get to understand that a profound wisdom of God (very different from the wisdom of men) guides the universe and gives it meaning, direction, and beauty. The world was created by the Word so that those who believe may become “children of God” born “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God”. The eternal birth of the Word and the birth of the Word made flesh in Bethlehem lead directly to our birth – “of water and the Spirit” (Jn 3:5). The sufferings of this world – and we cannot forget so many peoples and countries from which we receive such distressing news everyday – are the birth pangs of the “children of God”.
God has spoken. His Word is light and truth. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”. His Word is life: now and for ever. That is the good news of Christmas. The Child in the crib is the key to understanding the whole creation of God. All the lines of God’s composition start from Him and lead back to Him “who is, who was, and who is coming”, Jesus our Saviour. Amen.