“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”1 These words, written some seven centuries before the Lord’s birth describe well what his coming into the world meant and continues to mean. “[U]pon those dwelt in a land of gloom a light has shone,” the oracle continues.2 Didn’t entering into the Church this evening, coming into this warm, bright, welcoming place from a cold dark night, give you an inkling as to what these words mean?
It is easy to lose sight of the wonder of the Incarnation, of the birth of the Father’s only begotten Son through the Virgin Mary in the humblest of circumstances. Jesus’s birth did not happen in a warm, well-lit place. It happened in a cave that served as a barn. After his birth, he was cleaned, wrapped in rags, and laid in a feeding trough. The phrase "swaddling clothes" is just a sophisticated way of saying "rags."
Jesus, son of Mary, was born a marginal man, among a marginal people, in a marginal, if troublesome part, of the Roman Empire. This is what the kenotic hymn, found in Saint Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, alludes to when it tells us the Son of God, Jesus Christ, “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness.”3
As Pope Francis said this week: “the mystery of Christmas is the mystery of God who enters the world by the path of humility.”4 Saint Luke’s Nativity portrays, the Holy Father continued, “a scene of poverty and austerity, unsuited to sheltering a woman about to give birth.”5 Nonetheless, God enters the world not by creating a huge spectacle, “but by causing a mysterious pull in the hearts of those who feel the thrilling presence of something completely new, something on the verge of changing history.”6
Humility, the Pontiff insisted, is the doorway through which God enters the world. On Christmas, Christ invites us through the doorway of humility. Because pride plays some role in nearly every sin, it is impossible to advance spiritually without humility. Being humble means knowing how to be human. It’s been observed: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is thinking of yourself less.”
Humility requires that we accept our frailty, our need, the poverty that constitutes our humanity. Refusal to do this is tantamount to insisting that you do not need a Savior. Humility, noted Pope Francis, means
to look upon our poverty with the same love and tenderness with which we look upon a little child, vulnerable and in need of everything. Lacking humility, we will look for things that can reassure us, and perhaps find them, but we will surely not find what saves us, what can heal us7
The Nativity, by Sandro Botticelli, ca, 1473-1475
Our reading from the Saint Paul's Letter to Titus, which is quietly slipped between Isaiah’s great oracle, the ending of which puts many of us in mind of that glorious passage from Handel’s Messiah, and Luke’s wonderful telling of Jesus’s birth, puts some flesh on the bones of what it means to “have seen a great light.”
This passage from Paul's Letter to Titus focuses our attention not on Jesus’s birth or his passion and death, but on his glorious return and, by implication, his resurrection, and our ultimate destiny. He refers to Jesus Christ as “God’s grace.”8 Indeed, Jesus is grace in the flesh. Jesus saves us. As Catholics, we believe that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. By the power of the Holy Spirit (the seven fruits of the Holy Spirit can be summed as the virtues that make one humble), the Lord trains
us to reject godless ways and worldly desires and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age, as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of the great God and of our savior Jesus Christ9Living temperately, devoutly, and justly in this age with an eye on the age to come is the spirit of Christmas. The true spirit of Christmas is the Spirit of Christ, that is, the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
After being visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, a humbled, if not humiliated, Ebeneezer Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’s most Christian of books, A Christmas Carol, swears to the Ghost of Christmas Future: “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.”10 Essentially, Scrooge vows to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, who humbly came to us as a child in Bethlehem, who comes to us now in word, sacrament, as well as in our neighbor, especially the person in need, and who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
The final paragraph of A Christmas Carol reports that Scrooge “knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”11 To this Dickens adds, “May that be truly said of us, and all of us!”12 May we all accept the Lord’s summons to enter through the door of humility, the passage to life eternal.
1 Isaiah 9:1.↩
2 Isaiah 9:1.↩
3 Philippians 2:7.↩
4 Pope Francis, "Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia." 23 December 2021↩
5 Ibid.↩
6 Ibid.↩
7 Ibid.↩
8 Titus 2:11.↩
9 Titus 2:12.↩
10 Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol, Stave IV, “The Last of the Spirits. Project Gutenberg.↩
11 A Christmas Carol, Stave V, “The End of It.”↩
12 Ibid.↩
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