Monday Message, December 19, 2022
KNOW
The diocesan offices will be closed from the afternoon of December 23rd to Tuesday, January 3rd. If you need assistance, you can try email or texting. Enjoy some time with your families and get some rest. The work of reimagining catechesis continues in 2023.
REFLECT
Some theologians tell us that Easter is the most important feast of the Church year. In some ways that is true. However, people, believers and nonbelievers alike, celebrate Christmas far more widely and with far greater joy.
Is this simply because Christmas is about motherhood, the birth of a child, innocence, and love? After all, these are at the heart of human life. Yet most of us would find it hard to identify with rising from the darkness of the tomb. Maybe that is the difference. But perhaps there is more, a lot more. Perhaps we are more deeply in touch with an abstract idea we call the Incarnation than we realize. It could be that something deep inside us knows what “the Word made Flesh” really means.
From the moment God breathed God’s life-giving spirit over the darkness of the void and brought creation to life, God spoke to people. Through giants like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Deborah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, the psalmists, God gave us the words of life.
But, on Christmas day, the living Word of God came into the world. Mary gave birth to the Son of God. In this Jesus, God communicated most eloquently with God’s people. In this Jesus, God held children. God met with skeptics and dined with outcasts. In Jesus, God talked, listened. God wept over the dead Lazarus. God touched the leper. God put mud and spittle on the blind man’s eyes and healed him. Through Jesus, God entered the cycle of human life and unswervingly walked its path to the end.
Perhaps Christmas is so touching because God skipped nothing, not the frantic eruption of birth nor the numbing moment of death. God came to be one of us.
Perhaps the gift-giving of Christmas, the outpouring of love we lavish on one another, echoes the final message this God-Made-Man spoke through human flesh: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).
Maybe this feast opens the door to some inner cell of our hearts where we imprison the Word that tells us that now we must be the arms of God surrounding the little ones; that we must be God’s voice to speak and God’s ears to listen; that we must weep God’s tears; that we must be God’s healing hands; that we must be Jesus in our times and in our culture. the power of this truth escapes and, at least for a few moments, warms up the coldness of our world.
It is indeed up to the twenty-first-century Christians to give birth to Jesus in their own time, their own culture, their own families. This is the heart of faith and life. And deep within us, we know it.
We feel it and so we celebrate.
