Jesus was born into our humanity, our flesh and blood, precisely to give himself to us, to empty himself out for us: to be broken for us, as a loaf of bread, to satisfy our hunger; to be poured out for us, as a cup of wine, to slake our thirst. He came to us in the dark of night, to be our light. He came to us in obscurity, that we might find him in every place. He came to us as a helpless child, to meet us in our vulnerability. He came to us as one like us, that we not miss him. He came to us in poverty, that we might know he came for all. He came to us and suffered, that in him we might find all our hope. Christ Our Hope.
I wonder if there’s any gift Christ has to offer us today more precious than the gift of hope. And what is hope? Hope is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress us – is not the last word. Hope is the suspicion that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe; that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual; and that in a miraculous and unexplained way, life is opening up creative events opening the way to freedom and resurrection. But the two – suffering and hope – must live from each other. Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair. But, hope without suffering creates illusions and naivete.
But if we are to understand who is the Child whose birth we come to celebrate, if we are to receive the gifts he offers us; if we are to grasp what his birth portends for the hopes and fears of all the years in the heart of each of us today; if we are to grow as human beings through Christ, with Christ and in Christ: then we cannot allow ourselves to get stuck in the stable, gazing on an infant’s face. That’s the danger of Christmas. We can so easily get stuck in the stable. We forget that the stable was temporary housing for the Holy Family while they were in Bethlehem. Then it was back to Nazareth where life went on and Jesus grew up and began to teach and it’s in his words that we find our hope.
So my questions for us on Christmas morning are these: “What is the hunch, the hope that helps us weather the fears and trials of our life? Is it Jesus? What word, whosewords is the one that leads us to hope that the overwhelming brutality of our lives will not, in the end, have the final say? Is it the word of Jesus? Do we live, indeed, by the love of what we cannot yet see – but for which we hope? If we are stuck in the stable, we have not seen it all. No more than my birth or yours is the whole of our story, neither is the story of Christmas the whole of Christ’s message.
The stable is only where it begins. Christ’s story walks the path of truth, the path of healing, the path of suffering and the path of hope that is his gift to us. And Christ’s story leads us far from the stable to this table where once again, as he did 2,000 years ago, Jesus offers himself to us as a gift, in his Flesh and Blood in the Bread and Cup of the Eucharist. In him, and in him alone, let us find our hope this Christmas Day.
Paul A. Magnano
Pastor