The meaning of Christmas
A reflection by Professor Peter Hunter
Christmas means different things to different people. For the young children of families who can afford it, it is primarily a time of presents. For many young Catholics, Christmas will also be remembered, from year to year, for the events in church: Midnight Mass, a crib, candles, carols.
If their religious upbringing has been sound, young Christians will be developing their sense of a real and loving God. This season provides great opportunities for helping the young to deepen their understanding of what that reality means for their lives and the lives of those around them.
For those of us with experience of the buffetings and delights of adulthood, the Christmas liturgy and the homilies of the season provide a stimulus for a renewing and deepening of our awareness of the truly staggering fact of God made man, and what this implies for us as individuals, for humanity as a whole, for our planet and for the whole of creation.
The birth at Bethlehem revealed for the first time our God in human form, beginning an exemplary, sinless and heroic life, redemptive for us.
Probably for most people, God in this human-as-well-as-divine manifestation, subject to struggles and to suffering, has been more comprehensible and more directly accessible than the God of the Old Testament.
During his public years Jesus taught his disciples and many others through parables, miracles, through the value statements biblically grouped as the Sermon on the Mount, and through direct guidance on the nature of God and his relationship to us.
As regards traditional Jewish Law, Jesus’ teaching often implied interpretations deeper and less legalistic than those current in his time. Through all this he taught us how to live our lives.
The central message is that God loves us; that we should love and worship God; that we should love and help our fellow-humans; and that we should care for all of God’s creation.
To take just one part of that message, what does the reference to fellow-humans mean for us? In his recent book Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom, Fr Albert Nolan OP writes: “Nothing characterises our experience of life more honestly and comprehensively than our experience of suffering, our own suffering and that of others—together with our habit of making one another suffer.”
This suffering may come from our individual circumstances, or from shared experience — of poverty, war, oppression, a pandemic such as Aids, or natural disasters such as a tsunami.
In recent times, many people have become more aware of the intensity and widespread nature of human suffering. There has also been a growth in compassionate response, for example in the international reaction to the tsunami two years ago, and a growth of national and global movements directed not merely to relief for tragic situations, but also to increasing the power of deprived peoples to influence policies which affect them. This is a sign of hope.
The Christian message requires a positive reaction to human need and suffering. At the personal level, the message calls clearly for a response by each of us to human needs in family, work-place, neighbourhood or larger-scale situations.
May we all experience the love of God at this time.
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