Incarnation

Christmas (25 December 2018)

There are four sets of masses/readings for the Solemnity of the Nativity: Vigil, Midnight, Dawn and Day Masses.

Please click the following link for the readings http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/122518.cfm.

These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses;

And the rest is prayer, observance, discipline,

Thought and action.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood,

Is Incarnation.

- T.S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages."

Incarnation is a contradiction. It is the impossible union of God and Human, of Spirit and Matter, of God revealing His fulness in matter. It is a mystery that we are called to live and participate in, it is a mystery that we are called to understand more and more.

Christmas celebrates the mystery of incarnation in which God reveals Himself in Jesus. Love becomes a tangible human person. This is an instance of what Walter Brueggemann would call “the scandal of the particular.” He says in fact the entire biblical revelation is built on “the scandal of the particular.” Everything falls in place in one ordinary, concrete moment. We need to struggle with it there, fight with it there, resist it there, fall in love with it there. It’s a scandal precisely because it’s so ordinary. What is true in one place finally ends up being true everywhere.

God is always given, incarnate in every moment and present to those who know how to be present themselves. Strangely enough, it is often imperfect people and people in quite secular settings who encounter this Mystery of Presence. For it was to shepherds that the angelic message of Christmas was given. Forget all your religiously romantic ideas about shepherds. Shepherds were too dishonest and too smelly to be allowed into synagogue or temple services. They were among the outcasts. It is to them that God reveals Himself as an Infant.

That's the contradiciton of your lives. If you think you are pious, fervent and committed to a religion, then most probably you'll be slow to understand God's message. But if you think you're outside the structures of religion, then you may be one of the first to experience God. Therefore, people who can simply be present will know about God, union and even ecstasy, and they would not think of denying God's availability in the material world.

Therefore, God perfectly hides Himself in the material world, but also perfectly reveals Himself in this material world. This is incarnation. This is Christmas. Our God is an Incarnate God, Emmanuel, God-with-us always. (Please read again: Not just for 33 years, but ALWAYS!) Our heaven begins right here on earth right now!

Let us break this idea that God is far away, that God is not here. Authentic Christianity overcame this “God-is-elsewhere” idea through the Incarnation, God in Jesus became flesh—God visibly moved in with the material world—and through God as Holy Spirit, who is precisely known as an indwelling and vitalizing presence. We need to start believing this.

As T.S. Eliot in the above-quoted verse says, all these are only hints and guesses. We know and we don't know at the same time. The only adequate response to the Mystery of Incarnation is humility and adoration. In front of life's contradictions and mysteries, we humble ourselves, we adore this Mystery whom we call God.

Moreover, as Incarnation teaches us, being human is good, flesh is good, matter is good, sexuality is good, human desires are good. We are able to meet God in our sinful bodies. We are able to encounter the divine in the mess of our human lives.

But very many times the problem is that we don't like being what we are; and worse, we always want to be someone else. We're envious. We want to imitate someone else. We want to be a carbon copy of something or someone else. We've traded our instincts for aspirations, wishing we were thinner, or taller, or more handsome, or whatever, anything other than this little incarnation that we are for one gorgeous moment in time. We have a hard time finding grace in "just this"!

All I can give back to God, and all that God wants, is what God has first given to me: this little moment of incarnation, my little "I am" that echoes the great and eternal I AM in grateful awareness.

In the busy-ness of Christmas, don't forget to be conscious of God being incarnate in the every cell of YOU!