The Christmas Gift

Want did you really want for Christmas this year? Did you get it? If so, how big a difference will it make in your life a week from now, a month, a year, 20 years?

What about the gift of Christ himself? Did you truly receive into your heart him who is always available to us? Not just as a cute little infant born in a stable more than 2,000 years ago, but as Savior of the world—the Word Made Flesh who later died for your sins and mine? The Christ who will come again, when we least expect it, at the Final Judgment? And perhaps most importantly, the Christ who beckons each one of us at every moment?

Deep within our hearts, he calls out, day and night: “I stand at the door and knock. Whoever hears my voice and opens the door, I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20).

Did you hear his call this Christmas? Did you open the door? And whether or not you received him into your heart, what difference will it make to you tomorrow, and the day after, and the next day … at the end of time?

OPEN THE GIFT

CHRISTMAS BLESSINGS TO ALL

The Master's crib

While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.  -- Luke 2:6-7

 

W

hen I was a child visiting my grandparents in northwest Indiana, my brother, cousins and I looked forward to accompanying Grandpa when it was time to feed the cows out in the fields. He would drive the tractor, and we would ride atop the flatbed trailer filled with bales of hay. Once we arrived alongside the feeding trough, Grandpa would start cutting the bales of hay and tossing them in.

The cows never had to be called for dinner. They came galloping to meet us. They knew what the sight of the tractor meant, and what the trough was for. They knew who fed them.

Compare this image to these words from the prophet Isaiah, lamenting on God’s behalf: “The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s crib [or feeding trough]; but Israel does not know, my people do not understand” (Isaiah 1:3). That’s quite an indictment! In other words, stupid and stubborn beasts know who feeds them, but God’s own people, created in his image, do not.

Luke’s Gospel proclaims that, with the birth of Jesus, this woeful situation has been reversed for all who heed such good news. The symbolism of the manger is important for Luke. After giving birth, he writes, Mary laid the infant Jesus in a manger (2:7). Luke goes on to mention this detail two more times—when nearby shepherds hear from an angel the good news of the Messiah’s birth, and then go to Bethlehem to see for themselves the child in the manger (Luke 2:12, 16).

Beginning with those shepherds, God’s people now know their “master’s crib.” And it is God himself—in the Word Made Flesh who came among us, and who is with us always in his Holy Spirit—who closed the gap of understanding. In so doing, he began fulfilling Jeremiah’s prophecy of a new covenant: “I will be their God and they shall be my people … They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:33-34). This movement by God was finalized some 30 years later with Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, and continues today in the church’s faithful.

The manger, the ox and the ass in the Nativity scene serve as a reminder: It is God who feeds us, both spiritually and physically.

Preparing for Christmas

NOTE: Good advice here from Erik Varden, OCSO, a Norwegian bishop and Trappist monk, when asked what spiritual practice he would recommend to Christians preparing for Christmas. -- Br. Francis

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I would recommend sitting in a chair for five minutes — 10, if you have time — every day without doing anything. Simply being still, listening to the stillness.

That is one of the great liturgical motifs of Christmas, that in the midnight silence, when everything was still, the Word came. The Word didn’t come with a huge cry. But the Word came as an infant. In Latin, “infans” means “speechless.” Again, that’s one of those great paradoxes that the Fathers loved: that the Word chose to be among us as someone, as any infant is, deprived of speech.

Recovering, and perhaps even discovering, that deep silence within ourselves will help to make us realize that that isn’t an emptily resonant space, but in fact, it is an inhabited space, and a space of openness, and we could almost say of hospitality, because all of us yearn for that receptivity to the Word coming among us and coming to you and coming to me.

-- Excerpted from an interview published in The Pillar