GOD INCARNATE
Christmas forces us to revise the ideas and images we usually have about God, but that keep us from coming close to God’s true face. God doesn’t allow Self to be boxed in by our schemes and ways of thinking. God doesn’t follow the paths we mark out for God. God is unpredictable.
We imagine God to be strong and mighty, majestic and all-powerful, but God presents Self to us in the fragility of a weak child, born in the most absolute simplicity and poverty. We locate God almost always in what’s extraordinary, miraculous and surprising, but God presents Self to us in what’s everyday, what’s normal and ordinary. We imagine God to be great and distant, and God makes Self small and near to us.
No. This God incarnate in the child of Bethlehem isn’t the one that we would have expected. God’s not in the height of what we would have imagined. This God can deceive us. However, isn’t it precisely this close God the one that we need next to us? Isn’t this nearness to what’s human the best revelation of the true mystery of God? Isn’t God’s true greatness what’s shown forth in the weakness of this child?
Christmas reminds us that God’s presence doesn’t always respond to our expectations, since God offers Self to us where we least expect God. Certainly we need to seek God in prayer and silence, in the overcoming of selfishness, in the life that is faithful and obedient to God’s will; but God can offer Self to us when God wants to and the way God wants to, including in what’s most ordinary and common in life.
Now we know that we can encounter God in any defenseless and weak being that needs our welcoming. God can be in the tears of a child or in the loneliness of the elderly. In the face of any brother or sister we can discover the presence of that God who has desired to become incarnate in what’s human.
This is the revolutionary faith of Christmas, the greatest scandal of Christianity, expressed in a concise manner by Paul: «Christ, being in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped. But he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are» (Phil 2,6-7).
The Christian God isn’t a disincarnate God, far away and inaccessible. God is an incarnate God, near and close. A God we can always touch in the way we touch what’s human.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
