Florida Catholic | Bishop Wenski's Column

Christmas: celebrating God’s gift of love

December 21, 2007

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” This baby in the manger — so small, so helpless, so vulnerable, this child is the Son of the Most High God. The darkness of a long night — when God seemed so distant and his voice so silent — is lifted by the brilliant glow of a chorus of angels singing joyfully the good news: in Mary’s child, God and sinner would be reconciled.

In the prologue to John’s Gospel (John 1:1-18), read at Mass during Christmas Day, the complete fullness of God’s plan of salvation is spread out before us. The One who was with God at the beginning before the whole world and who, as God, created, brought into life and enlightened everything in the world, has entered into the world — and he does so not in a grand style that would intimidate us, but in humility. He comes in the poverty of Bethlehem, born of a woman. He comes to us small and weak, so that we can draw near to him without fear, so that we can embrace him without hesitation.

A world without God, Pope Benedict tells us in “Spe Salvi,” is a world without hope. Such a world is a world grown cold — and dark. And such is the world of those who would live without God; or, worse, against God.

Yet, because of that child wrapped in swaddling clothes, surrounded by animals and ignorant shepherds, we dare to hope. “Christ does not save us from our humanity, but through it; he does not save us from the world, but he came into the world, so that through him the world might be saved” (Pope Benedict XVI, “Urbi et Orbi,” 2006).

In the birth of Christ, the hope of mankind is restored. For this reason, at Christmas — more than any other time of the year — we can look toward the future with renewed confidence. Despite our sinfulness, despite our greed, our pride, our lust, our envy — these things that are at the root of human misery, poverty and war — we are not lost. God refuses to give up on his creation: It was through love he created us; and in love we are redeemed.

God has spoken. “At various times in the past and in different ways, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets” (Hebrews 1:1). But who could have guessed that one day God would speak a Word like Jesus? His, as John tells us in his prologue, is the “glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth”: truth, because in Jesus we see what God is really like; grace, because in Him God is pure love freely given.

We dare to hope because God has given us his Word, who is now and forever, Emmanuel — God with us. Christmas is not only about his birth; for as St. John tells us, “But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God.” Christmas, then, is also about our birth in him “not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision but of God.”

Though the Son of God Most High, he is the Son of Mary. That is, true God but still true man. And so, in this Child, God gives the standard by which all humanity shall live. Christmas is, for us, a festival of gifts, precisely because we are to imitate God who has given himself as his gift to us. God, our Father, has shown us his merciful love in the Birth of his only begotten Son — and he calls on each of us to follow his steps and turn our lives — as He did — into a gift of love.

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