December 19, 2004

Christmas: God participates in the human family

Over the last few months, I’ve written about the various ways we participate in the life of the Church; but we can participate in the Church only because God participates in the human family. That divine participation in the human condition through Jesus, who is truly God and truly man, means that we are never alone. Christmas is a family feast, and God is “part” of the family.

Christmas brings together little people and big visions. It’s all quite joyful but also scandalous. How can the almighty, the infinite and eternal God become one with our fallen nature in a single individual? Jesus truly participated in our human nature in a very individual and concrete fashion. With his mother Mary and his foster father Joseph, with his carpenter’s work and his Aramaic mother tongue and Hebrew Scriptures, with his band of uneducated disciples and his Jewish convictions about the reign of God, this man who was executed under Pontius Pilate is the Son of the most high God, the center of universal history and the meaning of human existence.

The first letter of St. John explains that salvation comes to the world in “what we have heard, in what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands.” (I John 1:1) Pope John Paul preached years ago, early in his pontificate: “Christ is the key to the understanding of that great and fundamental reality which human beings are. For human beings cannot be understood without Christ. Or rather, human beings cannot thoroughly understand themselves without Christ. They can neither understand who they are, nor in what their true dignity consists, nor the nature of their calling and their final destiny. Without Christ, men and women find all this incomprehensible.” The Pope was speaking against the pretensions of Communist Poland’s atheistic government to control all of life in Poland, to the exclusion of Christ and his Church; but the Pope believes that Christ is the key to understanding human nature as such and human destiny everywhere, no matter one’s status or citizenship.

For some, it is a great comfort to realize that we are never alone. God is always with us because the Son of God is one with us. God’s love becomes enough to complete and fulfill whoever we are. For others, however, such closeness is a threat to human autonomy. God’s intimacy with us is dangerous. If God is inside our nature and our history, he can take over our lives. What is an opportunity for believers—finding freedom in surrendering our lives and our selves to God—is overwhelming and demeaning for others. And it is true that to invite Jesus into one’s life is to be changed. Christ breaks down our defenses, including the habits of ordinary life.

In the most ordinary way, through bread and wine, Christ comes to us daily in the Holy Eucharist. Christmas 2004 is the Nativity of the Year of the Eucharist, proclaimed by Pope John Paul to last from October 2004 to October 2005. The Pope would like us to recapture a sense of amazement before the gift of the Eucharist. Eucharistic amazement, born of faith, depends, however, upon amazement before the baby of Bethlehem.

We look at the crib, so common and ordinary. We look at our own hearts, so filled with distraction and dismay. When we see with eyes of faith, we can recognize God himself in the infant Jesus and eternal life in us through the reception of Christ’s body in the Eucharist. Receiving Holy Communion at Christmas Mass brings everything together. In those moments after Communion, we know that we are never alone and, far from threatened, we rejoice in God’s goodness.

At Communion this Christmas, pray for those from whom you feel separated, pray for this world at war, pray for those who are farthest from the experience of God’s love. I will pray for you and ask that you pray for me. We are never alone. A blessed Christmas to you and those you love.

 

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

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