Christmas: The Message from the Manger Fr. Stan Chu Ilo Originally published in Issue IX of Vulgata, December, 2002.

Christmas marks the celebration and the ritual commemoration of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the liturgy of the Church and in the hearts of all the faithful. This is a truth, which needs to be emphasized in our world today. According to Dell de Chant, a professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida, the secular side of Christmas has become a religion itself, eclipsing the meaning of Christmas. For many retailers today, Santa Claus represents the new business saviour who provides a springboard for economic progress. This is not peculiar to the Western economies; it is also the case in developing countries. In my country Nigeria, the message of the Knights of Columbus: “ Keep Christ at Christmas” is also germane in trying to focus the attention of the people on the real spiritual meaning of Christmas. What is happening to Christmas celebration is a metaphor of what is happening to the Christian religion. There is a gradual and steady loss of the spiritual values of our Christian faith, in the face of the challenges posed by other world religions and the counter-cultural currents of modern societies. Thus, planting in the heart and soul of the Christian faithful the values of the Kingdom of God is both a challenge and a mission for contemporary Christians. It is in this light that we must look at the manger and see what message the Lord wishes to offer us this Christmas.

Christmas celebrates the eternal will of God to share his Eternal Trinitarian Divine life with men and women. From the beginning of creation, God longed to give men and women the inconceivable gift of becoming Children of God. This he does through his covenants, in which God commits himself to creation in an irrevocable manner. The word used for this kind of disposition of God is hesed, which indicates a profound attitude of goodness. When this is established between two individuals, they do not just wish each other well; they are also faithful to each other by virtue of an interior commitment, and also by virtue of faithfulness to themselves. Since hesed also means grace or love, this occurs precisely on the basis of this fidelity. The fact that the commitment has both a moral and juridical character highlights the depth of the bond of friendship and the perpetual and sacral quality of this bond. When in the Old Testament the word hesed is used of the Lord, this always occurs in relation to his covenant to Israel. This covenant was on the part of God, a gift and a grace to his chosen people. In harmony with the covenant entered into, God made a commitment to respect it; hesed acquired a legal character as a binding relationship. The juridical commitment on the part of God ceased to oblige once Israel broke the covenant by disobeying God. But it is at this point that hesed, in ceasing to be a juridical obligation, revealed its deeper aspect: it showed itself as a love that is more powerful than betrayal, grace stronger than sin. This is well brought out in the following promise of God “ The Lord a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity, continuing his kindness for a thousand generations, forgiving wickedness and crimes and sins…” (Exodus 34:6-7). The fruit of hesed are love, forgiveness, restoration to grace and reestablishment of interior covenant. God’s love is also presented in the Old Testament as an anxious love similar to the pangs of birth of mothers. Thus God’s commitment to grant good things to us is for the sake of his name (Exodus 36:22); for the purpose of effecting in creation it's original goodness and eternal destiny. Going in search of men and women, God wishes to persuade us to abandon the paths of evil by making us understand that we are away from our true home. Overcoming evil is the meaning of salvation; it is the reason why God sent his only Son, that all who believe in him will no longer be under the clutches of evil, but will have liberation (John 3:16)

Jesus came among us in order to search out for all the scattered children of God. God goes in search of us because we are created in his image and likeness for the purpose of sharing in the Trinitarian communion of love. God goes in search of us because we are his special possession and anybody who loses his valuable possession goes out in search of it. Like Adam, we often hide from God when moved by our sense of sufficiency we set our hearts on our selfish ambitions and projects (Genesis 3:5-13). Jesus came to provide the ultimate answer, to the yearning for life and for the infinite, which His Heavenly Father had poured into our hearts when, He created us. At the climax of revelation, the Incarnate Word (Christ) proclaims, “ I am the life” (John 14:6) and “ I came that they might have life “ (John 10:10). The life that Jesus wishes to give humanity is the very life of God, which surpasses all human expectation (1 Corinthians 2:9). Our daily experience tells us that life is marked by sin and threatened by death, despite the desire for good, which beats in our hearts, and the desire for life which courses in our veins. However, little heed we pay to ourselves and to the frustrations of daily life, we discover that everything within us impels us to go beyond ourselves; to overcome the temptation of hiding under our masks. Left to ourselves, we could not achieve the ends for which we have been created. Within us there is a promise, which we find we are incapable of attaining. But the Son who came among us has given us his personal assurance: “ I am the way, and the truth and the Life” (John 14:16). As St Augustine so strikingly puts it by coming among us as a man God wishes to create a place in which it is possible for all people to find true life. The place is his Body and his Spirit in which the whole human life, redeemed and forgiven is renewed and made divine. Jesus, by his birth among us as man, offers all who believe in him the wonderful prospect of becoming the children of God (John 3: 1: John 1: 12).

Christmas is the celebration of joy to the whole world. When the news of the birth of Christ was announced to the shepherds, the angel said: ‘ I bring you Good News of joy, which will be to all people” (Luke 2:10). The shepherd rejoiced because with the coming of Christ God has visited his people. With coming of Christ a principle of joy and hope has been planted into human history that frees men and women from fear, opening a horizon of expectation for them. A dynamic of love has overshadowed humanity, showing men and women that life in not a meaningless and endless strife, but a meaning-filled experience that finds its fulfillment when it is given up as a gift to God and to others. By the birth of Christ a foundation of faith has been established upon which men and women can anchor their lives. The joy of being a Christian arises from this unique experience of Christ as one who remains in human history the same yesterday, today and tomorrow as Lord and Saviour.

Christmas calls on all Christians to deepen their faith in Christ and to seek a more intimate relationship with him. Who is Christ for us today? We can find who he is by fixing our minds once more on the person of Christ found in the manger. The manger represents the path through which every Christian must pass. In the first place it was a gift given to Mary and Joseph as there was no place in the inn for Mary to have the child Jesus. Today there appears to be no room for Jesus in the hearts of many people. Many people admire the qualities of Jesus, but find it difficult to make the commitment of faith. A world that is everyday shown the failure of the works of men and women to protect lives still finds it hard to believe in mystery and transcendence. The bitterness of modern times is born of despair. We look for things that would make us happy and independent, we long to be left to ourselves, we desire freedom without restraint and responsibility. All these however leave us impoverished, dependent and enslaved. Many people today are dependent on drugs, on power, pleasure, wealth, computers, pornography, movies; but these are all unfulfilling ends, which leave them empty at the end of the day. We are losing the most basic freedom-the commitment to go beyond ourselves and to be connected to love, truth, beauty and inner harmony, which we find in God. The manger of Jesus was a gift and looking at it invites us to learn to give. It is not enough to give Christmas gifts: gifts are only signs of an inner reality of self-giving. We must learn to let go of ourselves, especially in our relationships. We must learn to accept the fact that things can not always work the way we want. This is perhaps the greatest gift lacking in many families; the capacity to accept the fact that sometimes we fail and to accept the failure of others as probative. Jesus invites us this Holy Season to discover the real significance of giving. The manger is also a poor and humble place; those who visit it must learn to bow in humble adoration. No one can be filled with the blessing of God without humility, that is accepting the fact that we are created and limited and that our lives are not our own, hence the need to place our lives to the opened and inviting arms of the child Jesus laying in the manger, so that we can find the true taste of existence and our ultimate destiny.

Finally, Jesus comes to us in the ordinary circumstances of life, as he came to the poor Shepherd who received the Good News in the field. We are living in God’s time and with the coming of Christ, time has become the condition for the possibility of salvation for all Christians as well as the whole world. The coming of Christ altered the course of history. Human history has become divine history; human time has become divine history and human life has received the power and grace of being divinised. Indeed, we are changing from one glory to another. In Christ there is a meeting of the old and the new, of the human and divine. He is the link of time; all events before him pointed to him and every event after him can only be properly explained in the light of his message and person. Every moment of life has become a moment for miracle. However, the greatest miracle, the taking of human nature by Christ, has given us the assurance that God is with us always and that we remain in God’s time of Redemption and deliverance, even when we think that we are alone.