[The] Gospels state that God has embraced humanity and entered into its suffering with unimaginable love. His Christ is the one who arrives not in royal purple but in silence and simplicity, far from the cheers that attend Augustus and Herod. A king he surely is—hence the swaddling bands and the treasures that are his due—but a new sort of king who makes no claim to worldly authority. In infancy as during his life on earth (and since), he arouses antipathy and even, by his person and message, provokes outright hostility from those who covet earthly supremacy. He comes to the shepherds, to the dissolute, to impolite society—thus, from the start, identifying himself with outcasts, the poor and the humble.
This is the Jesus whom Luke proclaims throughout his Gospel and announces in the first chapters. Instead of bestowing the great titles (King, Lord, Son of God) invented for earthly potentates, they are ascribed by Matthew and Luke to this humble child who, the authors knew, was later known to be God’s ultimate spokesman, the healer, the one who utterly transforms human expectations and human destiny. To reduce the Christmas message to a comforting story of a baby, therefore, is to rob the Bible narratives of their strength and of their revolutionary character. The paradox of it all is precisely the message: real power lies not where the world either values or sees it.
In the event we celebrate each Christmas, it is indeed a historical moment that is honored—but no historical account, even if we had the eyewitness details, could do justice to an event that can only be perceived through faith. In Jesus’ entrance into history, God has once and for all broken the clouds of obscurity and entered concretely into history. The self-disclosure of God, which began in creation, continued through the call of the patriarchs, accompanied the wandering of the people and was heard in the cries of the prophets and the longing of the psalmists—that revelation reached its zenith in the enfleshment of God in human nature.
And herein lies the crucial distinction between the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the other great religions of the world. Only in the continuum that reaches its fulfillment in Jesus is the relationship between God and man a downward motion. This is of course patently metaphoric language, but by it is indicated something quite real, quite concrete: that God enters definitively into the sphere of the human—that He takes seriously the reality of what He has made. God acts within history, not apart from it in splendid, transcendent isolation. He takes human suffering seriously, too.
And in Jesus of Nazareth God shows a human face. With tenderness that is literally unimaginable, He shines on the world an infinite compassion. Despite all the greed, political chaos, social dissension, great deceptions and local hostilities that characterized life then and continue to infect it now, mercy arrives like the stillness of night.
Nor is our suffering, our selfishness, our perversity—all of it emblematic of our need of God—trivialized by Him. God comes in silence, shrouded in darkness, to a world sunk in enmities whose sources it scarcely remembers. He claims us for His own and promises a final triumph—which, the Gospels announce and faith proclaims, has already been achieved and awaits only our acceptance.
~Adapted from Donald Spoto, The Hidden Jesus: A New Life
