Love is Born Today

Let us be a Christmas people and offer, through the witness of our lives, the greatest gift of all, Jesus Christ, to a world waiting to be born. Love is born today.

LOS ANGELES (Catholic Online) - God has a human face, the face of the Christ child.

Our scriptures, proclaimed at the Christmas Liturgy, tell us the wonderful story. By rooting this great event, the Nativity of the Lord, in the real family history and lineage of David, the Gospel writer is showing us that all of the aspirations, hopes and promises of the Old Testament are fulfilled in this Child, the One named Jesus; born of the Virgin whose name was Mary.

St. Paul, writing to the Christians in Corinth told them: "As God is faithful, our word to you is not "yes" and "no." For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was proclaimed to you by us, Silvanus and Timothy and me, was not "yes" and "no," but "yes" has been in him. For however many are the promises of God, their Yes is in him; therefore, the Amen from us also goes through him to God for glory." (2 Corinthians 1:18-20)

The Eternal Word entered into human history, into time, and opened it to eternity. In His Incarnation, His Nativity, His saving Life, Death and Resurrection, the "YES" of God is given to the whole world.

Love is born today

The Mass of Christmas day uses the Gospel of St. John to express the mystery of the Nativity, in these profound words:

"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.... AND THE WORD BECAME FLESH AND DWELT AMONG US "John 1:1 and 14

Johns' Gospel is the most theological of the four Gospels. Probably the latest to be written, it contains the inspired mature reflection of the early Church. Within these pregnant words are unpacked a mystery which lies at the heart of the great event we celebrate this Christmas.

The words rendered in English "dwelt among us" are literally translated "He pitched His tent among us." The God of the whole universe who dwelt in inaccessible light, whom no man had ever seen and lived, became a man. He became a vulnerable baby. He lived (He lives) among us. He became one of us, a human person and made His home with us.

The author of the letter to the Hebrews tells us:
"For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are-yet was without sin" (Hebrews 4:15)

The Eternal Word, coexistent with the Father and the Spirit in the perfect unity that is Trinitarian Love, became a real man in real time and real history. He understands who we are. He truly entered into the human experience and in Him it is forever transformed.

Love is born today.

And the world is born again through this wonderful Birth.As a pre-born child, Jesus sanctified all mother's wombs by dwelling within the first temple of His beloved self-chosen mother. This is the greatest argument against the horror of abortion for a Christian.God Incarnate, Jesus, lived in a womb. There was a Redeemer in the womb.

In Eastern Christian iconography Mary usually appears with the child in her womb blessing the whole world. The Icon is called "Platytera" (She who is more spacious than the heavens).

The Icon bespeaks the real heart of the mystery. Mary's womb became the Ark of the New Covenant. And, at the Nativity she placed her Child in the Crčche; now a throne for the promised Christ.

And this holy Child was born into a real human family.
That is what the genealogy passages we hear today are telling us. This Child is the fulfillment of every promise to Israel. He will transform the entire human experience through living in His sacred humanity the stages of all of our own lives- just as we do and as our children continue to do.

He was "a kid"; He was a "teenager", He, to use the misnomer, "grew up" within the hearth that is the family home. The scriptures tell us that He "grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and all men."(Luke 2:52)

The Christian Gospel proclaims that God is more than an idea; more than the summit of all the aspirations of the human heart. He is more than a first mover who got it all started and remains distant. Rather, our Gospel proclaims that our God can be known and wants to be in communion with us. He gives Himself to us.

God is love, wrote the beloved Apostle John. (1 John 4:7-9)And this Love gives Himself for us. Love always gives itself away to the beloved.

Our God is a Father who so loved the world He created that when, through sin, it became separated from Love, He sent the Incarnate Word, His Son, who came among us as a helpless, dependent and vulnerable child.

He pitched His tent among us. He became like us, so that we can become like Him and live for eternity in an intimate family relationship with Him.

Love is Born today

The One whose birth we commemorate understands who we are.This Jesus, in His Sacred humanity, had friends, some of whom hurt and betrayed Him. He had fun. He laughed and rejoiced as a real human person! He was comfortable celebrating at a wedding.

This child whom we adore in the manger grew and became a man with a passionate love for the entire human race.
His Sacred heart broke from the pain and loss occasioned by our alienation from Him caused by our own sin, our choices against Love.

He wept over Jerusalem! He wept at a friends' funeral. He understands the pain of betrayal because He himself was betrayed. He even, in a real sense, struggles with doubt and fear in His holy humanity. He had fears. That's right- doubt and fear are not sin. They present us with an opportunity for the exercise of our human freedom.

Our struggles in life are an invitation, through our choices, to live out the hope we celebrate today. They present us with a field of choice, inviting us to believe and to trust that God is God and we are not. To say to the Father with the One whose Birth we remember today "Nevertheless, not my Will but yours be done."

That is what the agony in the Garden was all about; Jesus in His sacred humanity showing us the way of love.

This wonderful loving Savior who came into our midst and pitched His tent, had room for everyone within His loving embrace! He loved ALL men and women-not just the "loveable", or the "pious" In fact, He was known to associate with "sinners", like everyone of us. And in that association, give us the grace we need to overcome, to be converted, made new.

He was fully human and fully Divine. His bodi-liness was not some ruse-- He pitched His tent among us. He lived the fullness of the human experience in a very real body. He perspired. He felt fatigue. In fact, He is now at the "right hand" of the Father in a Resurrected Body! That is the Christian claim.

It is also what sets our wonderful faith apart from every other major religious tradition. We proclaim the salvation of the whole person and the entire cosmos transformed at His return.

Do we understand the implications of this? Or do we live the Christian life as though our bodies and the created order are somehow "bad" or less "spiritual". We profess in our ancient Creed that we believe that we will live in resurrected bodies on a new heaven and a new earth for all eternity. Yet we live as though the physical is divorced from the spiritual. It is not.

The "flesh" (in Greek, sarx) that the scripture warns of as a source of temptation is not our body, which is good, but our tendency to sin. The "world" that we are warned not to befriend in the letter of St. James (James 4:4) is not the created order (which God made as a wonderful gift for us and called "good") but a system that attempts to squeeze the Creator out of His creation and invites man to live as though he does not exist.

At its core, "sin" is an abuse of the freedom to choose given to us by God. (par. 1733, CCC) The capacity to freely choose to love is what constitutes the "Imago Dei", the image of God in each one of us. God did not create us as robots but as persons.

That capacity to choose has been deeply affected by the "original sin", the great rebellion. Because of sin, all men and women now tend to make wrong choices, because of what classical theology called concupiscence. Sin wounded us-- and it disrupted the harmony of the world in which we now live. We could not overcome its effects on our own.We needed to be "saved" by One like us.

Because He has been born, we are now given a new Way on which to walk. We are invited to live our entire lives "in Him". We have been given what the beloved disciple John calls the "power to become the children of God" (John 1:12)By grace we now have the capacity to choose Love and to be transformed into the Image, and the likeness, of Him who is Love incarnate, Jesus Christ.

Christmas invites us to live a unity of life; to become comfortable "in our skin", so to speak, by being fully human, enjoying life and loving as Jesus loved. Sometimes, Christians live lives that are perceived as anything but fully human. Who is drawn to a man or woman whom they feel will not have empathy for their own weakness?
However, they were, and they are, drawn to Jesus.

Love is Born today

This Christmas reminds us that in the "fullness of time" God came among us. Heaven touched earth and earth has been elevated through this encounter! The all- powerful God who made both heaven and earth became a vulnerable baby and chose to give Himself to His creation in order to create it anew.

The eternal entered time and time has been forever sanctified. The separation between the entire human race and the One who fashioned us for Himself has now been bridged. This Child whom we come to adore is our Redeemer, Our Savior, and Our Deliverer. He, through His Saving Life Death and Resurrection begins the New Creation.

Oh the mystery of this moment, the grandeur of this Feast of the Nativity!

Too often we miss another profound foundational truth of the entire Christian Mystery. The Incarnation continues through the Body of Christ, the Church and in each of its members!

The Word still "becomes flesh" in and through each of us who have been baptized into Him, into His Body. His tent is still being "pitched" among all men and women. That tent is His Body, His Church.

Together we who are now incorporated into Him through Baptism, are called to spread the tent-pegs and make room in the tent of the Church for the entire human race. The same Word through whom the Universe was made is the Word through whom it is now being redeemed and re-created.

That transformation will finally be completed when all things are reconstituted in Him in the new Heaven and New Earth.

So on this wonderful day called Christ-Mass, the world pauses. The great event of the Nativity of the Lord touches every man, woman and child. The world is again presented with the Christian claim---"the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."

Let those of us who have embraced the truth of this claim, we who bear the name Christian, manifest- in our daily lives and in our families- the fruits of the Incarnation and the deeper meaning of the Nativity of Jesus.

Let us be a Christmas people and offer, through the witness of our lives, the greatest gift of all, Jesus Christ, to a world waiting to be born.

Love is born today.

Merry Christmas.

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