Tag Archives: Nativity

God-Is-With-Us: A Christmas Eve Meditation

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creche1-copyTonight, we celebrate the birth of a child. Usually, there is rejoicing when a child is born. One of my family stories is that my grandmother was so excited about my birth that she burned two pots of beans.

When we celebrate a birth, we celebrate the fact that a baby is. The simple act of coming to be is a cause of wonder and joy. So it is that we celebrate Jesus before he did anything at all except come out of his mother’s womb and maybe cry a bit and suckle some milk. As a friend of mine said once about newborn babies: “They don’t do much at that age.” We also celebrate our hopes for the future and for the future of that child. We know that in the case of Jesus, the future wasn’t all rosy. That Jesus was born in a stable because there was no room for him and his family and that Herod would be out to get him as soon as he found out about him shows that there was cause for anxiety from the very start. Unfortunately, many babies being born right now are born into much the same sort of anxiety that is mingled with hopes for the child. So not every birth leads to unequivocal rejoicing. Such anxiety is exacerbated by our tendency to focus on those who stir up fear in us, goading us on to adding further fuel to the violence growing all around us. We can see in news reports, Twitter, and Facebook that we are locked in violent systems of condemnation that stoke our fears exponentially.

Although we celebrate tonight the very being of Jesus, that Jesus is, when Jesus was apparently not doing much, God was and is already doing a great thing, an unprecedented thing: God had entered humanity. God chose to share, in frail human flesh, the very threats and anxieties that we all share. God has not left us to the human powers over which we have little or no control, powers we doubt we can trust with our well-being. Moreover, God shares the vulnerability other humans suffer from us on account of our fears and our own violence that we cannot see. In this way, God, in Jesus, lives up to the name: Emmanuel, which means “God is with us.”

God’s presence among us means many things. Tonight I will touch on one of them. By entering humanity, God has opened our human nature to God’s nature. We are no longer as trapped in our own human fear and violence as we often think we are. Later in life, Jesus spoke about God coming “like a thief in the night” but at the time of Jesus’ birth, God had already broken into the household of our humanity and started to sneak around, taking away bits of fear and violence and leaving bits of love behind.

This Christmas, let us celebrate the sneaky child who is already crawling around in the dark places of our lives, taking away the things we need to lose and giving us the gifts we need the most.

The Name of Names

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crecheOne important feature of a name is that it identifies us and sets us apart from other people. Names do not just identify us individually; they also give us context, such as where we come from. Medieval names such as Francis of Assisi were like this. Names also identify the culture we live in and come depending on where we have German names, Japanese names or Scottish names such as mine. Within a national identity, our names tell others what families we come from such as the Smith family or the Bach family. Not only the surname but our first and middle names often repeat names used in the family. My baptismal name Robert is also my father’s name, for example. In mythology, deities tend to have names such as Zeus, Thor or Vishnu. These names designate distinctive personalities which are basically human, if writ large. The thing about names in all these cases is that each person who has a name, whether a dog, a human, or a deity is finite, a part of the world.

When it comes to speculating about what being may have created the world, we suddenly become very shy about names. We might use a term such as The Father Who Made us All or a term such as God which precludes having a particular name such as Zeus. When Moses asked the deity who spoke to him out of the burning bush for a name, the answer was Yahweh, which really was a non-name as it meant something along the lines of: “I am being what I am being.”

These considerations make the following verse from Luke’s Gospel astounding: “And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” This boy was/is also the Logos who was with God in the beginning and without whom nothing was made that was made according to the Prolog to John’s Gospel. The term Logos is another example of not naming the unnameable creator of the universe and yet this same Person without a name “emptied himself” as Paul said in Philippians, so as to be born as a human being. As a human baby, the unnameable was named, a name stamping him with a particular culture and a particular family. The circumcision of this body is yet one more cultural marker.

So deep was the Word’s immersion in humanity, that he humbled himself and was “obedient unto death, even the death of a cross.” The result of this descent was that the crucified Logos was raised up and the ordinary Jewish name he bore has become “a name above every name,” a name to which all humans should bow. And yet it is because the unnameable became human and nameable that this name is so exalted and awesome to us, all the more awesome in that we resist the lowliness of the Logos through whom we ourselves were made.

Outcasts at the Manger

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altarXmasStar1We like to be insiders and hate to be outsiders, don’t we? Well, let’s look at some insiders and outsiders in the Christmas story. The people who stayed at the inn in Bethlehem were insiders. A betrothed couple and their newborn baby were outsiders. Shepherds were outsiders, hated and distrusted by all. So why would the angel of the Lord show such bad taste in revealing the birth of the Savior to them?

The Magi were highly-placed insiders in their own country, most likely top advisors of royalty. So why would they travel to another land where they were outsiders? If the star was up there for all to see, why did these foreigners from without and outcasts from within Jewish society respond when others did not?

The Magi, used to being insiders, went straight to the top, to the ultimate insider, King Herod, to inquire about which newborn child the star was indicating. Ironically, Herod was an Idumean, not a full-blooded Jew. He had power, but he was an outsider. Herod’s reaction to the Magi’s inquiry showed Herod to be an outsider to humanitarian feelings once he thought his power was threatened. Mixed racial background aside, being rich and powerful pushes one to the margins of society as much as the poverty of the despised shepherds.

These days, we easily see Herod as an outsider, an intrusive foreign element entering the story only to stir up trouble and grief. The shepherds and the Magi are insiders, like us. How did that happen?

There is a certain sleight of hand that turns us and certain chosen others into insiders when it suits us. Not only do we not wish to be outsiders, we don’t like to be challenged by outsiders. If we realize that the shepherds and Magi and the Holy Family themselves are outsiders, our identities are shaken at a deep level. If it is outsiders who appreciated the richness of the Christ Child, maybe the same thing happens today. After all, some nonbelievers care more about the poor than rich Christians and a Hindu early in the twentieth century believed in the Sermon on the Mount more than the Christians of his time.

The greatest irony is that Christ was born to save all people, to make insiders of all of us. The problem is, we don’t want to be insiders with those who are outsiders and we certainly don’t want outsiders to join us. After all, what would we do if there were no outsiders?

The Word Became Vulnerable Flesh

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creche1When St. John says that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, he is sharing a mystery so deep that we don’t know what to say. The mystery only deepens when we recall that the Word was with God “in the beginning” and without the Word, nothing was made. What is more, the Word was God. Which is to say, the Word is God for all time.

So why would the Word enter into the Creation that the Word shaped? Isn’t that a case of ultimate downward mobility? Later in his Gospel, John says that God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son who died on the cross. Suddenly, the Word who in the beginning was with God and was God is much more concrete and understandable. Except why would God and the Word love us so much that they would do that? Looking around at ourselves, there seems to be no accounting for taste.

What is so amazing is that God, who we might think is the ultimate in invulnerability, chooses to be vulnerable. God’s vulnerability is attested by the prophets who spoke of God’s distress over human waywardness and infidelity. But even then, “the boots tramped in battle” in Isaiah didn’t trample the Word who was with God and was God. But once the Word was born in the flesh of a human mother and laid in a manger, the Word had become just as vulnerable to trampling boots and automatic rifles as the children at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut and the children slaughtered in Bethlehem by order of King Herod.

Here is where the mystery deepens so profoundly as to escape comprehension. It goes against what we think are our deepest instincts. We do everything to make ourselves less vulnerable from putting on plated armor, to hardening our feelings to buying weapons to defend us for the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” to quote Hamlet. If the Word without whom nothing was made that was made is willing to be so defenseless, than perhaps it isn’t really our deepest instinct to defend ourselves so aggressively after all.

Perhaps if we, like Mary, would treasure these things and ponder them deeply in our hearts, we will find within ourselves a Love created by God that loves so abundantly that it melts all our defenses and we no longer worry about accounting for God’s taste in so loving the world.