The celebration of the feast of the incarnation is one of the most profound experiences we can have as Christians. Sadly, we tend to confine our celebration and appreciation of it to the festivities over the few days of the Christmas season, when in all truth, it should be centre stage for everything we do. If we really think about It, we begin to understand just what an awesome revelation the incarnation is. The sheer strangeness of what has happened is hard to take on board, because it seems so preposterous. God becomes as we are. Why? The whole realisation of what has taken place causes us to ask the deep and important questions about life, relationship, and purpose.
We live in a contingent world of cause and effect. We are not therefore isolated nor remote from our surroundings or from each other. We cannot survive without being connected and interactive with all that is around us. We influence others and others influence us. We could of course seek to ignore that influence and at the same time negate the effect we have on others. We could try and live without a thought for anyone or anything else and simply live in our own bubbles but what a sterile and awful place such a world would be. It would be a world without love, a world without compassion, a world devoid of feelings and a world in which everyone and everything was vying for their own needs and ignoring the plight of the other. Such a world would never flourish. It would through its own ignorance perish.
The gift we have been given and through which we are able to overcome our own ignorance is the incarnate love of God made visible in the person of Jesus. In the prologue to his Gospel, the evangelist John portrays with deep insight and comprehension, that God’s love is not time bound or restrictive. But that for a moment in our history, it became enfleshed, in Jesus, his Son who lived out the fulness of this love, offering and showing it to the world in all its different and diverse ways. His life is the revealing of God’s love. His every thought, act and deed, are the expression of how we are called to come to understand the meaning and purpose of relationship, both with God and with each other. And that through him, every thought, act and deed, are extensions of Gods’ love reaching out into the world and into our lives.
It begins, as with every act of love, with a birth. Let us welcome the new born love once again and continue to welcome it as it grows in us, through us and around us, in all that we say and do, for the Word is made flesh and lives amongst us.
Happy Christmas
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