There was once a teacher who assigned an art project to her kindergarten class.  Walking past their desks, she saw one little girl working with great intensity and focus.  So the teacher asked her: “What are you drawing, dear?”  “I’m drawing God!” the little girl answered.  The teacher said, “But no one knows what God looks like!”  “They will in a minute!” she exclaimed.

Like the girl in the story, God the Father, the Author of all Creation, shows us in Jesus the face of God.  Not just a sketch, an approximation, but a perfect image.  Yet the world into which Jesus entered – like our own world today – was anything but perfect.  Although Jesus could have come in power and wealth and glory, he comes instead as an infant, into poverty and vulnerability: an act of self-emptying, disarming love.  This mystery of the Incarnation, of God come to us in human flesh, is what Christmas is really all about. 

To kneel before the Christ child, to sing “O Come, let us adore Him”, is to kneel before the mystery of the Master of the Universe, who became small for our sake.  In Jesus, the Father speaks his eternal Word in a language accessible to us: we can now see God with our own eyes, hear God with our own ears, touch God with our own hands.  In the stirring words of the cosmic Christmas story, the Prologue of John’s Gospel, “the Word became flesh, and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth.”

In a beautiful image, Pope Francis has invited us to think of the Incarnation as God going out in search of us.  Jesus came into our world to embody a God who searches for us especially in our darkness, to pour out a cascade of consolation, of forgiveness, of tenderness.  As the year of Mercy announced by Pope Francis draws to a close, we are reassured by the Christmas story that God’s mercy indeed endures forever.  That the message spoken by the angels to the shepherds, “Glory to God in the highest, and Peace on earth to those of good will”, echoes throughout our world today, even in the darkest places of human suffering. From the ruins of Aleppo to the blown-out Berlin Christmas market, from the homeless shelters, food banks and hospital wards of our own city, Jesus’ message and example of peace, of consolation, of courage, of tenderness endure forever. 

For many people, Christmas is a time of great joy.  It conjures up positive memories of family gatherings, of time spent with friends, of celebration.  But for many of us, it can also be a time of pain, or sorrow, or stress.  I really resonated when I read this message from Jesuit Fr. James Martin on FB recently:

If you're overwhelmed by Christmas stress, or anxiety, or frustration, or loneliness, or sadness, remember that only one thing is necessary: You need only to open the door of your heart to God. God loves you more than you can know.  And God will enter your heart in a new way this Christmas. Just open.

“Just open.”  Easier said than done, isn’t it?!  Yet in the end, what other option do we have? We can remain closed in on ourselves, depend on our own self-sufficiency, pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, and keep going.  But eventually, our efforts will fail.  We cannot do it by ourselves.  This is why we need a Redeemer, a Saviour.  But Jesus doesn’t come as a superhero, rescuing us from our own humanity, lifting us out of it.  Rather, Christmas tells us that God loves what is human, that God embraces this human condition that we so often struggle with. God loves what he has created so much, that he is willing to become what he has created; to become one of us, to draw near to us.  He shares our struggles, our fears, our hopes, our joys.  “What if God was one of us?”  In Jesus, He is.  

In the Incarnation, we learn of the infinite dignity of what it is to be human: for being human is the language God uses to speak, to communicate his very self.  The designs and dreams of God are woven into the fabric of what it is to be human.  And if this is the case, there must be some purpose to our existence, some reason for us to be here, some divine calling we are called to fulfill. God draws us through our humanity.

This is not a new idea.  Over 800 years ago, the Cistercian mystic St. Aelred of Rievaulx, expressed it this way: “Until Jesus was born, we could only say “God above us, God before us, God greater than us.”  With his birth, we come to know him as “God with us! God who takes on hands, flesh, in order to be with us.

Today he is God with us in our nature, with us in his grace; with us in our weakness, with us in his goodness; with us in our misery, with us in his mercy; with us through love, through ties of family, through his tenderness and compassion.... How could he be more with me than he is? Small as I am, weak as I am, naked as I am, poor as I am, he has become like me in everything, taking what is mine and giving what is his.  Today, he has ‘placed his face on my face, his hands on my hands’; he has become Emmanuel, God with us!” (Sermon on the Annunciation). 

“What an extraordinary image for the Incarnation, for the mystery we celebrate at Christmas!  God comes to search us out, pressing against the human race, and breathing life into our weary bodies, shining his light into our darkness, taking on hands in order to save us with his redeeming touch.”

Because of the intense commercialization surrounding Christmas, in our secular and in many ways “post-Christian” society, I have found it helpful in recent years to really live Advent to the full as a time of desire and expectation, and resist the temptation to start celebrating Christmas in late November.  In fact, I discovered that in many ways, I enjoy Advent more than Christmas!  One of my favourite Advent hymns is “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”, whose verses are inspired by the “O Antiphons”, seven ancient prayers invoking the coming Christ by one of his many titles: O Wisdom, O Ruler of Ancient Israel, O Root of Jesse, O Key of David, O Rising Sun, O King of the Nations, and finally, O Emmanuel.  

The Anglican priest and mystic Malcolm Guite has written a series of sonnets inspired by these ancient prayers which I have been reading each day since December 17^th, and the final one, “O Emmanuel” is especially beautiful and relevant to what we anticipate in Advent, and celebrate at Christmas.

O Emmanuel

O come, O come, and be our God-with-us

O long-sought With-ness for a world without,

O secret seed, O hidden spring of light.

Come to us Wisdom, come unspoken Name

Come Root, and Key, and King, and holy Flame,

O quickened little wick so tightly curled,

Be folded with us into time and place,

Unfold for us the mystery of grace

And make a womb of all this wounded world.

O heart of heaven beating in the earth,

O tiny hope within our hopelessness

Come to be born, to bear us to our birth,

To touch a dying world with new-made hands

And make these rags of time our swaddling bands.

So come, let us kneel in a moment of silent wonder before the God who comes in search of us, who loves us into life, who becomes one of us.  Let us love our broken world, initiating what Pope Francis has called a “revolution of tenderness”. As we kneel before Christ in the manger, acknowledging him as Emmanuel, God-with-us, let us also kneel before Christ present in the vulnerable and wounded in our midst.  Let us accept his invitation to bring God’s gentleness and mercy to the lonely, the alienated, the stranger, the refugee, the sick, the dying, the suffering: to all those whose souls, like our own, stand in need of that divine embrace, the gift of God’s infinite and unconditional love.  May we find God's own joy this Christmas by being bearers of that joy and hope to others.

To the lost Christ shows his face,

to the unloved he gives his embrace,

to those who cry in pain or disgrace

Christ makes, with his friends, a touching place. (John Bell)

 

 Feliz Navidad.  Buon Natale.  Joyeux Noel.  Merry Christmas.