Given the sentimentality that often accompanies Christmas, it’s easy to see it only in the past tense, to view the Incarnation of God’s only begotten Son as history, as a quaint event that occurred a long time ago in a place far away. It is easy to make a sanitized memory a dreamy backdrop to your own cherished memories.
As a result of the pandemic sparked by the transmission of the sars-Cov-2 virus, this year has been a time of crisis. Like many words, “crisis” has several meanings: “time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger;” “a time when a difficult or important decision must be made.” In medical terms, a crisis “is a turning point of a disease when an important change takes place, indicating either recovery or death.”
Much later in Saint Luke’s Gospel than our reading tonight, Jesus tells Peter “Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat.”1 Pope Francis begins his newly published book by noting that “To enter a crisis is to be sifted” in this way.2 During a crisis, the Holy Father notes, “Your categories and ways of thinking get shaken up; your priorities and lifestyles are challenged.” 3
You either come through a crisis better than you were before or worse but never the same. Enduring life’s crises is revelatory. A crisis reveals how merciful your heart is, how big or how small it is.4 It is by passing through life's crises that your heart grows bigger and more merciful or smaller and more resentful. Tonight, let’s recognize that the Incarnation of the Son of God is nothing if not a crisis.
Whether or not you recover from the dis-ease that afflicts all humanity- death and its by-product, sin- very much depends on making a difficult and important decision. Of necessity, this difficult and important decision is made during a “time of intense difficulty” – your own life. The important decision is whether to follow Christ. This is the crisis the Son's Incarnation provokes for each of us.
In an important sense, choosing to follow Christ does not end your difficulties. From a certain perspective, following Christ is just the beginning of difficulties. When looked at from the perspective of God’s Kingdom, however, what are these difficulties but signs of blessedness? This is why Jesus teaches:
Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me5
The crises with which we are perpetually faced as followers of Jesus are perhaps best characterized by questions: Are you going to love your enemies, do good to them, and pray for them, or hate, seek revenge, and call down divine vengeance upon them, be bitter and resentful toward them, backbite against them? Are you going to help the widow, the orphan, and the stranger or remain indifferent to those in need? Are you going to reach out to the outcast or leave them to their fate?
Practicing these ways, even if imperfectly, is what trains us, to use the words of our New Testament reading from Paul's Letter to Titus, “to reject godless ways and worldly desires and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age.”6
The decision to follow Christ is the decision to love like God when he so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son and to love like God’s Son when, for us and for our salvation he was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and, taking the form of a slave, came in human likeness.7
What this translates into, practically speaking, is loving your neighbor as you love yourself. Being a follower of Jesus means, like the Good Samaritan, actively seeking to make yourself a neighbor to others and recognizing your neighbor as the person in difficulty who needs your help.
Just as it is easy to reduce the Incarnation of God to a historical event, I can also reduce my own salvation and that of the world (these cannot and must not be separated) as a one-off, over-and-done event, a matter of history. But doing this is an effort, even if an unintentional one, to reduce the mystery of the Incarnation to my own measure, which means insisting that I am saved on my own terms, in my own way, singularly without reference or relation to others.
While it’s right and just that we “visit” the manger on Christmas, we must not sentimentally linger there. We cannot contemplate “the glories of the incarnation without being pointed to the Passion ahead.”8 Just as Christ must be born again in us, we must never forget that in baptism we died, were buried, and rose with Christ to new life. We live this new life
On earth, still as pilgrims in a strange land, tracing in trial and in oppression the paths [Jesus] trod, we are made one with His sufferings like the body is one with the Head, suffering with Him, that with Him we may be glorified9Let’s not forget this soon that the overarching summons of the season of Advent, the purpose of which is not only to prepare us for this celebration, but to train us to remain awake, sober, and alert “as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”10 Or, in the words from the Prayer After Communion: "may [we] through an honorable way of life become worthy of union with [Christ]"11
1 Luke 22:31.↩
2 Pope Francis with Austin Inverleigh, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, 1.↩
3 Ibid.↩
4 Ibid.↩
5 Matthew 5:11.↩
6 Titus 2:12.↩
7 John 3:16; Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, sec. 18; Philippians 2:7.↩
8 Carys Walsh, Frequencies of God: Walking Through Advent with R.S. Thomas, 121.↩
9 Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church [Lumen Gentium], sec. 7.↩
10 Roman Missal, “The Order of Mass,” sec. 125.↩
11 Roman Missal, “The Nativity of the Lord: At the Mass during the Night.”↩
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