Fourth Christmas Meditation
The Lord is born as a child! God has chosen this way to come close to us and also to make Himself understandable for us! The child awakens joy, tenderness and love as well as the need to protect it! No one is afraid of a child! Even otherwise closed people can often meet children freely!
The child can awaken the best in people!
It is like a memory – especially in the very early phase – which still tells us something about paradise, about the original innocence of man, even if original sin leaves its shadow in every human being!
But this shadow is not present in the Lord!
The divine Child is the messenger of heaven! In him heaven comes to us, the lost paradise! We can approach him completely and give him our tenderness!
There is no darkness in this divine Child, but the shadow descends on the Child! Herod, hungry for power, has already sent his followers to kill the Child, to erase the testimony of God’s loving presence! He was probably driven by the same evil spirit that drives people today to kill the unborn children in order to destroy the testimony of the special presence of God in the child!
The divine Child also increases in age and wisdom (cf. Lk 2,52) and follows the path of development that God has planned for our lives! God, as the Incarnate Word, wanted to penetrate our whole life and sanctify all its areas!
Thus there is a special message for all people in the birth of Jesus: God comes in the beauty, but also in the weakness of a child! He entrusts himself to us human beings. He does not show himself as a powerful ruler who submits everything to Himself by force, but as someone who asks for our love, who as a child wants to awaken our hearts as only a child can!
It is foreign to the Lord to establish His reign here on earth by force! Even if man is obliged to follow the truth and every rejection of the truth has its consequences, the Lord does not force us to love him! He draws us to Himself, the love and truth of God should convince man!
God does not want to frighten us, just as the Child of Bethlehem does not! The Child of Bethlehem, whom we later recognize as the Lamb of God, remains faithful to himself! Even when Jesus is an adult, it is the love of God that courts man!
Also today God entrusts Himself to us – in other people, especially in the little ones and those people who are dependent on our help! And He has placed the children under our special protection, also to be taught by their openness!
Woe to him who is guilty of seduction: “It would be better for such a person to be thrown into the sea with a millstone round the neck than to be the downfall of a single one of these little ones.” (Lk 17,2).
Then He said, ‘In truth I tell you, unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven (Mt 18,3).
The Lord also entrusts Himself to people in His Word and in the sacraments. We do not simply serve the order of a ruler who otherwise takes little notice of us!
God entrusts to us the most important thing: himself, in the Child of Bethlehem; and He entrusts to us his great heart’s desire: to help leading humanity home to the Kingdom of the Father!