The reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to Titus that we have just heard begins solemnly with the word “apparuit”, which then comes back again in the reading at the Dawn Mass: apparuit
– “there has appeared”. This is a programmatic word, by which the
Church seeks to express synthetically the essence of Christmas.
Formerly, people had spoken of God and formed human images of him in all
sorts of different ways. God himself had spoken in many and various
ways to mankind (cf. Heb 1:1 – Mass during the Day). But now
something new has happened: he has appeared. He has revealed himself. He
has emerged from the inaccessible light in which he dwells. He himself
has come into our midst. This was the great joy of Christmas for the
early Church: God has appeared. No longer is he merely an idea, no
longer do we have to form a picture of him on the basis of mere words.
He has “appeared”. But now we ask: how has he appeared? Who is he in
reality? The reading at the Dawn Mass goes on to say: “the kindness and
love of God our Saviour for mankind were revealed” (Tit 3:4). For
the people of pre-Christian times, whose response to the terrors and
contradictions of the world was to fear that God himself might not be
good either, that he too might well be cruel and arbitrary, this was a
real “epiphany”, the great light that has appeared to us: God is pure
goodness. Today too, people who are no longer able to recognize God
through faith are asking whether the ultimate power that underpins and
sustains the world is truly good, or whether evil is just as powerful
and primordial as the good and the beautiful which we encounter in
radiant moments in our world. “The kindness and love of God our Saviour
for mankind were revealed”: this is the new, consoling certainty that is
granted to us at Christmas.
In
all three Christmas Masses, the liturgy quotes a passage from the
Prophet Isaiah, which describes the epiphany that took place at
Christmas in greater detail: “A child is born for us, a son given to us
and dominion is laid on his shoulders; and this is the name they give
him: Wonder-Counsellor, Mighty-God, Eternal-Father, Prince-of-Peace.
Wide is his dominion in a peace that has no end” (Is 9:5f.).
Whether the prophet had a particular child in mind, born during his own
period of history, we do not know. But it seems impossible. This is the
only text in the Old Testament in which it is said of a child, of a
human being: his name will be Mighty-God, Eternal-Father. We are
presented with a vision that extends far beyond the historical moment
into the mysterious, into the future. A child, in all its weakness, is
Mighty God. A child, in all its neediness and dependence, is Eternal
Father. And his peace “has no end”. The prophet had previously described
the child as “a great light” and had said of the peace he would usher
in that the rod of the oppressor, the footgear of battle, every cloak
rolled in blood would be burned (Is 9:1, 3-4).
God
has appeared – as a child. It is in this guise that he pits himself
against all violence and brings a message that is peace. At this hour,
when the world is continually threatened by violence in so many places
and in so many different ways, when over and over again there are
oppressors’ rods and bloodstained cloaks, we cry out to the Lord: O
mighty God, you have appeared as a child and you have revealed yourself
to us as the One who loves us, the One through whom love will triumph.
And you have shown us that we must be peacemakers with you. We love your
childish estate, your powerlessness, but we suffer from the continuing
presence of violence in the world, and so we also ask you: manifest your
power, O God. In this time of ours, in this world of ours, cause the
oppressors’ rods, the cloaks rolled in blood and the footgear of battle
to be burned, so that your peace may triumph in this world of ours.
Christmas
is an epiphany – the appearing of God and of his great light in a child
that is born for us. Born in a stable in Bethlehem, not in the palaces
of kings. In 1223, when Saint Francis of Assisi celebrated Christmas in
Greccio with an ox and an ass and a manger full of hay, a new dimension
of the mystery of Christmas came to light. Saint Francis of Assisi
called Christmas “the feast of feasts” – above all other feasts – and he
celebrated it with “unutterable devotion” (2 Celano 199; Fonti Francescane,
787). He kissed images of the Christ-child with great devotion and he
stammered tender words such as children say, so Thomas of Celano tells
us (ibid.). For the early Church, the feast of feasts was Easter:
in the Resurrection Christ had flung open the doors of death and in so
doing had radically changed the world: he had made a place for man in
God himself. Now, Francis neither changed nor intended to change this
objective order of precedence among the feasts, the inner structure of
the faith centred on the Paschal Mystery. And yet through him and the
character of his faith, something new took place: Francis discovered
Jesus’ humanity in an entirely new depth. This human existence of God
became most visible to him at the moment when God’s Son, born of the
Virgin Mary, was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. The
Resurrection presupposes the Incarnation. For God’s Son to take the form
of a child, a truly human child, made a profound impression on the
heart of the Saint of Assisi, transforming faith into love. “The
kindness and love of God our Saviour for mankind were revealed” – this
phrase of Saint Paul now acquired an entirely new depth. In the child
born in the stable at Bethlehem, we can as it were touch and caress God.
And so the liturgical year acquired a second focus in a feast that is
above all a feast of the heart.
This
has nothing to do with sentimentality. It is right here, in this new
experience of the reality of Jesus’ humanity that the great mystery of
faith is revealed. Francis loved the child Jesus, because for him it was
in this childish estate that God’s humility shone forth. God became
poor. His Son was born in the poverty of the stable. In the child Jesus,
God made himself dependent, in need of human love, he put himself in
the position of asking for human love – our love. Today Christmas has
become a commercial celebration, whose bright lights hide the mystery of
God’s humility, which in turn calls us to humility and simplicity. Let
us ask the Lord to help us see through the superficial glitter of this
season, and to discover behind it the child in the stable in Bethlehem,
so as to find true joy and true light.
Francis arranged for Mass to be celebrated on the manger that stood between the ox and the ass (cf. 1 Celano 85; Fonti
469). Later, an altar was built over this manger, so that where animals
had once fed on hay, men could now receive the flesh of the spotless
lamb Jesus Christ, for the salvation of soul and body, as Thomas of
Celano tells us (cf. 1 Celano 87; Fonti 471). Francis
himself, as a deacon, had sung the Christmas Gospel on the holy night in
Greccio with resounding voice. Through the friars’ radiant Christmas
singing, the whole celebration seemed to be a great outburst of joy (1 Celano 85.86; Fonti 469, 470). It was the encounter with God’s humility that caused this joy – his goodness creates the true feast.
Today,
anyone wishing to enter the Church of Jesus’ Nativity in Bethlehem will
find that the doorway five and a half metres high, through which
emperors and caliphs used to enter the building, is now largely walled
up. Only a low opening of one and a half metres has remained. The
intention was probably to provide the church with better protection from
attack, but above all to prevent people from entering God’s house on
horseback. Anyone wishing to enter the place of Jesus’ birth has to
bend down. It seems to me that a deeper truth is revealed here, which
should touch our hearts on this holy night: if we want to find the God
who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of
our “enlightened” reason. We must set aside our false certainties, our
intellectual pride, which prevents us from recognizing God’s closeness.
We must follow the interior path of Saint Francis – the path leading to
that ultimate outward and inward simplicity which enables the heart to
see. We must bend down, spiritually we must as it were go on foot, in
order to pass through the portal of faith and encounter the God who is
so different from our prejudices and opinions – the God who conceals
himself in the humility of a newborn baby. In this spirit let us
celebrate the liturgy of the holy night, let us strip away our fixation
on what is material, on what can be measured and grasped. Let us allow
ourselves to be made simple by the God who reveals himself to the simple
of heart. And let us also pray especially at this hour for all who have
to celebrate Christmas in poverty, in suffering, as migrants, that a
ray of God’s kindness may shine upon them, that they – and we – may be
touched by the kindness that God chose to bring into the world through
the birth of his Son in a stable. Amen.
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