Christmas Eve

It's Christmas Eve. I am a bit overloaded with Hallmark-Christmas-movie-sentiment though. I am tired of hearing that family is what this time of the year is all about. I've watched more than my share of Christmas themed shows this season and have heard it over and over again. Don't get me wrong, I am looking forward to the family that will gather at my home tomorrow. It is a joy to get together but I have grown weary of so much focus on that aspect of Christmas at the expense of "the" event that is overlooked in a culture that is too politically correct to call this season what it is, a celebration of the birth of Jesus.

As this day has drawn closer I've spent some time reflecting on the accounts we have of His birth. We gravitate to Matthew and Luke's accounts with the poignant details of the birth in a barn attended to by only Joseph and Mary. Lowly shepherds are the only ones who receive an announcement and they heed the request to find the baby laying in a manger in swaddling clothes. How appropriate that these men of low class status are the ones angelically confronted by the birth, after all, He came for the outcast. He came as a shepherd for lost sheep. I have been captured once again by the simplicity, joy and mystery of Incarnate God, Emmanuel. The whole village of Bethlehem missed it, I will not. What must have Joseph and Mary thought when those shepherds showed up telling their story of angels declaring the birth. I will not miss this.

I've wandered around though in John's account. He didn't write much of the detail of those days but simply mentions, "The Word became flesh". I've placed this simple phrase in the midst of Matthew and Luke's account. The very Word made flesh is stunning if you think about it. God comes not as a book or a set of principles to study, to know, to practice but as a baby, to grow to be a man, to be known in relationship. He is not to be known primarily as a theological experiment to be tested but as a man to be known.

I am often reminded of some of His last words, "Lo, I am with you always", and then He left. Certainly He meant His presence to mean something other than what we normally think. Access to His presence, knowing Him, is an exercise of faith, an acknowledgement that we are not highly evolved animals but we are created to be spiritual beings as well as fleshly beings. Jesus coming to be fully man and fully God, the mystery of Incarnation, tells me I will never be fully human without exercising the faith to unlock the mystery of knowing this man who said He would never leave me, this man who started life as a human being in a manger, born in a barn, visited by lowly shepherds.