Hope that Shines for Us – Christmas 2024
A Happy and a Holy Christmas! This day naturally fills us with immense joy, for it is a birth that we celebrate, and not just any birth of any person, it is the birth of the Saviour who is born to give new meaning to every one of our birth, and our life. Yesterday, in that moving ceremony, the Holy Father opened for us the Holy Year, the Jubilee Year, the Year of Hope – and what a beautiful moment to initiate a pilgrimage of hope, on the day when the hope of the universe was born in the form of a human being! Hope is without any mediation translated here into life, with the Divine incarnating into human person, amidst us and alike us! It is indeed a moment of thanksgiving and a moment of reembarking on our journey, the journey of finding meaning and experiencing salvation, the journey of hope.
The Liturgy of the Word on the day of Christmas presents us with three images to contemplate – the feet, the light and the Word!
How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the one who brings good news, who heralds peace, brings happiness, proclaims salvation, promises hope and calls us to eternal joy! The feet here are certainly referring to those tender feet jetting out of that manger, those tender feet that would soon traverse the streets and gullies of Galilee, symbolically thus traversing the length and the breadth of the globe, taking God to humanity and bringing humanity to God. They are referring also to those feet that are today challenged to cover the distance that could divide persons some from the others, the distance that could divide the Divine and the human, the distance that could keep joy and peace away from our daily experiences. It is about reducing the distances that create discord, promote dissonance, preserve animosity, increase misunderstanding, and celebrate unforgiveness. The Christ, who comes today, comes to join the heaven and the earth, just to put us to shame for thinking that the distances we find here amidst us are insuperable. May the world today witness more and more pairs of feet that go all the distance, to bridge gaps, demolish walls and unite hearts. That is the ministry of hope that we are called to offer the world today, as people of God and as people of the Reign.
The second imagery is that of Light, the radiant light of God’s glory, that enables the world to see the salvation of our God. The world seems to prefer darkness sometimes, because it is cozy and convenient. It shirks responsibility of having to change and renew, finding comfort in repeating over and over again the same meaningless exercises in the name of customs, traditions and conventions, without really understanding the call to come into light, and look for the true meaning that can come only from the ultimate source of all wisdom. The Saviour today comes as a light, a light that shines in the dark, a light that darkness could not overpower. The Lord is that ultimate light, that we have with us. How senseless it would be for us to choose darkness over light, ignorance over wisdom, slavery over true freedom and death over eternal life! The Lord has chosen us, that we could be enabled to chose the Lord. The Light has chosen us that we have the light to see the right things at the right time, to make the right decisions in the right direction. I am the Light, the Lord declared, and has invited us to be lights, after His Light!
The third imagery, the overarching image and theme for the rest of this season is, the Word. We come across at least three typologies of this word – the spoken Word, announced and heard; the transformed Word that is seen and beheld; the Living Word that comes to stay with us. The spoken word announced for centuries and heard by us in varied ways even today signifies the religious experience that we are called to take to heart and follow in our ways. But that would not be sufficient, and hence the transformed Word that outlines a new way of life that we are taught by our faith journey, our baptismal promises and the vocation that we have received from the Lord for our daily living. The third is the Living Word who has come down to make His home amidst us, who continuously keeps speaking to us in events and persons, experiences and life-events, calling us to fidelity and prophecy on a daily basis. We are called and challenged to live in the presence of this Word, encounter this Word and live in communion with this Word, so that we can become the children of God, announcers of this Word, persons transformed by this Word and persons who make this Word come alive in many others in turn… that is the ongoing incarnation, the progressive revelation, the coming of the Lord into this world, the establishment of the Reign, the reconciliation of the entire creation in Christ, the living Word.
Celebrating Incarnation today, we celebrate the feet that take this goodnews to the world, the light that challenges that world to see the Lord who is present amidst us and the Word that is the Lord who takes our form and comes to live within us. Our pilgrimage of hope is summarized in this – that we get in touch with this Word and take this Word to the entire world. May our celebration of Christmas enable us to become the signs, witnesses and representations of the Word made flesh.
