Today we wish each other a happy Christmas. We have prepared for this important feast spiritual and material. Through the holy mass and gathering in the church we express our joy of Christmas and feel its happiness. The reason for this celebration is our faith in God. God is among us. Emmanuel. Christmas conveys the message that God can be experienced, God is understandable, and God can be imagined with names and images. God became man, God appears and reveals himself in a poor little child. Him, Jesus in the manger, the new born child in Bethlehem, we greet in our midst, with Joseph and Mary and we celebrate his presence in this celebration of the Eucharist. In our celebration we especially include the sick and elderly in our community and everyone who cannot come to this celebration for certain reasons.
Scientists say that Adam and Eve, the first people in the creation story of the Old Testament, lived in Central Asia around 300,000 years before Christ. They say also that heir forefathers migrated from Africa to Arabia, southern India and from there to Australia 100,000 years earlier. Humans developed belief in God in different areas of the world, e.g. in Egypt, Babylonia, India or Greece and this belief was passed down through mythologies and paintings. The culmination of this development of belief in God was the concept of God as one who has no name, who cannot be imagined in images, who is not conceptual. It cannot be touched, cannot be seen, cannot be heard, it is a secret that we know absolutely nothing about. This understanding of God as a concept that is far away from us, unknown and unrecognized, still shapes several religions today.
But the message of Christmas is the opposite. At Christmas we celebrate the incarnation of God two thousand years ago. We experience God as a child, as a human being with flesh and blood, as my fellow human being. We celebrate this great change in people’s concept of God at Christmas. We experience God in humanity and in human words, deeds and gestures. God appears to us in human form: This was unimaginable for most people and that is why this new teaching was even called blasphemy and was even given as a reason to crucify Jesus.
Christians believe and proclaim that we can imagine God as a child, a fellow human being, a brother and a servant. This revelation of God in human form is the confession of Christianity. We just heard about this confession in the Christmas Gospel, about the search for the inn by Mary and Joseph, the birth of Jesus in a stable, the announcement of the angels to the shepherds with the news of great joy to all peoples and the angels’ song of praise: “Glorified is God in the highest and on earth is peace, and his grace is with men“.
The Christmas carol by Joseph Mohr and Franz Gruber, “Silent Night, Holy Night,” expresses this concept of God in human form in great detail. We have been singing this song from Oberndorf near Salzburg for 200 years at Christmas services and at many Christmas celebrations; the lyrics are now translated into over 320 languages.
This unique teaching of Christianity about the experience of God in human form is further developed in the Gospels and letters of the Apostle when it is said: „God is love“. Human feelings and human positive qualities and positive energy of people are called God and God’s attribute. Attention, care, respect, willingness to help, truthfulness, loyalty are compared to divine beings and understood as divine beings.
We can be proud of our humane belief in God, of our experience of the human form of God and of comparing human positive thinking, actions and feelings with God’s quality and with God himself. The incarnation of Jesus Christ and our faith in this human God teaches us to see God in our fellow human beings, in human voice, in human color, in human smile. We have different opportunities to do this every day. Then every day becomes Christmas for us, every day God is born in us, in our hearts. Then every day will be Christmas in every family, in every community.
When we celebrate the incarnation of God at Christmas and when we believe that God became man and we see him in human form, we should begin to become human.
God who became man asks us today, have you become human, are you really a human being, with human qualities of love, care, loyalty, willingness to help and the effort to forgive: Become human. That is the Christmas message.
God became human, we should also become human.
Fr. Joseph Pandiappallil MCBS