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In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
In imagination we think ourselves 2000 years back. What wonder should
fill us: a week, and the world has become different. The world that had
been for thousands of years like the lost sheep was now the sheep found,
taken upon His shoulders by the Son of God become the son of man. The
unbridgeable gap that sin had created between God and man was now at
least incipiently bridged; God had entered into history, God Himself had
become man. God had taken flesh and all things visible, what we perceive
in our blindness as dead, inert matter, could in His body recognise
itself in glory. Something absolutely new had occurred; the world was no
longer the same.
Moreover, there is another aspect to the Incarnation. God had become
man, but God in Christ had spoken words of truth, that was decisive,
that gradually like yeast dropped into dough was to change the world;
God had revealed to us the greatness of man. Christ becoming man was
evidence, is and will remain forever evidence, that man is so vast, so
deep, so mysteriously deep, that he can not only contain the divine
presence as a temple, but unite himself with God, “become partaker of
the divine nature”, as St. Peter puts it in his Epistle. And again that
man is great, and that however far we fall away from our vocation,
however unworthy we may become of it, God will never re-establish with
us a relationship which is less than that of His fatherhood and our
condition of sons and daughters of the Most High. The prodigal son was
asking his father to receive him as a hireling now that he was unworthy
of being called a son; but the father did not accept it. When the son
made his confession, the father stopped him before he could even
pronounce those words, because God does not accept our debasement, we
are no slaves and no hirelings. Has not Christ said to His disciples, "I
no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know the will of
his master, and lo, I have told you everything."
Again, the proclamation in Christ and by Him that what matters supremely
is every person, that He lives and dies for every one of us, that it is
not collective units that matter, but each of us. Each of us, tells us
the Book of Revelation, possesses for God a name, a name which will be
revealed to us at the end of time, but a name which no one can know but
God and he who receives it, because this name is our relationship to
God, unique, unrepeatable. Each of us is unique for Him. What a wonder!
The ancient world knew of nations and races, it knew of slaves and
owners, it knew of categories of people, exactly in the same way in
which the modern world that is gradually becoming not only secular but
pagan, distinguishes categories and types and groups; God knows only
living men and women.
And then a new justice was introduced, or rather proclaimed by Him, not
the distributive and retributive justice of the law, another justice.
When Christ says to us, "let your justice be beyond that of the scribes
and pharisees," He speaks of the way in which God treats each of us. He
accepts each of us as we are. He accepts good and evil, He rejoices in
the good, and He dies because of and for
the sake of what is evil. And that is what God calls us to remember, and
how He calls us to be and to behave - not only within our Christian
circle but in the whole world, to look at every person with that kind of
justice; not judging and condemning, but seeing in each person the
beauty which God has impressed upon it and which we call "the image of
God in man". Venerate this beauty, work for this beauty to shine in all
glory, dispelling what is evil and dark and making it possible, by the
recognition of beauty in each other, for this beauty to become reality
and to conquer.
He has taught us also about love which the ancient world did not know,
and the modern world, like the old one, is so afraid of: A love that
accepted to be vulnerable, helpless, giving, sacrificial; a love that
gives without counting, a love that gives not only what it possesses,
but itself. That is what the Gospel, that is what the Incarnation
brought into the world, and this has remained in the world. Christ said
that "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot
comprehend it," but it cannot put it out either. And this light shines
and shall shine, but it will conquer only if we undertake to be its
heralds and the doers of these commandments of justice and of love, if
we accept God's vision of the world and bring to it our faith, that is,
our certainty and our hope, which is the only power that can help others
to start anew; but to start anew they must see newness in us. The world
has become incipiently new by the union of God with man, when the Word
became flesh; it is for us to be a revelation of this newness, the
resplendence and shining of God in the darkness or the dusk of this
world.
May God grant us courage and love and greatness of heart to be His
messengers and His witnesses, and may the blessing of the Lord be upon
you by His grace and love towards mankind always, now and forever and
world without end. Amen. |
