He’s coming!
The
Messiah, whose coming was awaited and prophesied for generations, is coming!
The psalms speak of Him as “… more beautiful than the children of men,” (Psalm
45). They venture that "... In his days the righteous will flourish;
prosperity will abound till the moon is no more. He will rule from sea to
sea... He will deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no-one to
help. He will take pity on the weak and the needy and save the needy from
death... and they will call him blessed" (Psalm 72).
This
was the King of Israel,
the mighty God, prince of peace, wonderful counsellor, Father forever, God with
us. He is the Way, the Truth and the Life, the Resurrection and the Life – He
was even mocked and abandoned for calling Himself the Bread of Life!
Yet,
He did not come down into a palace, but a lowly inn. He wasn’t born of a
righteous King, but a virgin orphan girl who said “yes” to God in the simplest
yet most spectacular and magnificent fashion.
On
the day He chose to take our lowly human flesh, the whole of creation was
quiet. Angels and demons as well as all created things on Heaven and on Earth
were awaiting her answer: “I am the handmaid of the Lord, let it be done unto
me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38). I can just picture Heaven (well, I can’t picture it) – I can imagine shouts of
jubilation and dancing. Imagine Abraham and the righteous forefathers and the
glee they knew would soon be theirs. I
can imagine St. Michael rejoicing with the Angels – she who would “crush the
head of the serpent” (Genesis 3:15) had said yes!!!
Thus,
God was conceived. The Word – the very “light of our path and lamp unto our
feet” (Psalm 109) has become… a baby.
Venerable
Archbishop Fulton Sheen (otherwise known as 3amou Fulty) tells us that “once He
appeared, He struck history
with such impact that He split it in two, dividing it into two periods: one
before His coming, the other after it.”
A
baby did all of this? God could have chosen any way to come down, but He became
a baby? Yes. He did. He became a baby. He
came down, took our flesh – our flesh that shall one day return to dust – in
order that He may raise us up on the last day.
What other faith can claim that their God is this
recklessly loving? This humble, this BEAUTIFUL?
See,
when we look at nativity sets we generally think of a neat little room covered
in hay and this beautifully built little wooden cradle. We imagine light either
coming from the ceiling leading to the Godchild or light emanating from Him. We
see Our Lady, all pretty and clean-looking, with the incredible St. Joseph
looking on. Even the animals are glorified. This is all well and good if we’re
talking Christmas decorations, because who would actually display the reality?
Jesus came to get messy. The room would have been full of poo. It would have
stunk. The manger was a feeding trough – dirty and just as smelly as that tiny
room. Our Lady had just come off a long journey with the man who was entrusted
with her dignity as well as protecting the life of the Son of God. I definitely
don’t claim to be a mystic, but I don’t think she would have been all white
skinned and pretty after an ordeal like the one she had just gone through. They
had knocked on every door in Bethlehem and been rejected. There had been "no
room for them in the inn" (Luke 2:7).
St.
Joseph went through the turmoil of not being able to find a place for his
beloved bride to give birth to the Redeemer of the world, the long awaited
Messiah. The Prince of Peace was about to become flesh and Joseph couldn’t
even find a simple room for Him to lay. Eventually, they resorted to a little
stable, the lowliest of places. God did not come to glorify things of the flesh. He did not want to come and give
honour to temporal or earthly things.
We
do the same thing to Our Lord every time we put sin ahead of our love for Him.
Christ is knocking on the door of our hearts and we tell Him there is no room
for Him there either. But, if only we knew the glory that will be ours should
be accept our Emmanuel in the room of their hearts, we would no sooner give him
everything, including our lives. We would live for Heaven alone.
How do we accept Him into our hearts? How
do we reincarnate Him into our souls everyday in order to give Him honour?
Peter
Kreeft tells us:
“If we speak Mary’s word, then the Word of God is born in our souls just as really as He was in Mary’s body and just as really as He is in the Eucharist. What happened in Bethlehem, what happens in our souls and what happens when we receive the Eucharist is the same event under three different modes… When you look at your Nativity set, at this most natural and ordinary thing in the word, a mother and a newborn baby, you are reading a pictorial newspaper headline that announces the most extraordinary event in the history… the Creator consented to come into His creature because she consented to have Him… Every time we consent to His perpetual proposal, every time we make an act of faith, and every time we receive the Eucharist, we redo Mary’s fiat and make Christmas happen.”
Our bodies, once a dirty stable,
smelly and unworthy, are infinitely more honoured than that little stable we
have seen for generations since, once we consume He who was born in a feeding
trough. He signified the most humble of all His endeavours by coming into the
world and laying in a manger, so that every
time we consume the Eucharist, our body, once a little inn, becomes
His palace.
One day, when we reach our Heavenly destiny, we can, in imitation of the humility of Christ and His Blessed Mother, also attribute all our good gifts to God the same way Our Lady did: “my soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour… for He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His name.” (Luke 1:46-49)
Welid el Masi7! Halleluia!
