There is a wonderful inclusiveness in the Christmas story. Although it does not know it, the whole world is present. The birth of Christ is the point at which the Kairos of God’s history and the Chronos of our history converge. Like an underground stream, it breaks ground, and we suddenly realise that what we had prayed for and hoped for was present all along. No matter what happens, it cannot be hidden again but can only flow through all that is and has still to be.
No matter how much human history is broken or subjected to suffering and oppression, that river of healing, salvation and life can never be stopped or diverted. It is always there for us; to refresh us, to wash our scarred and wounded souls and bodies, to revive us when we are weary and have lost our strength. Whatever the length or the depth of the droughts that afflict us, we never lose the sense of its waters and where they may be found.
In this season it leads us to Bethlehem and then on to calvary and the empty tomb; it takes to the empty tomb and the encounter in the garden before carrying us on to the living flame of the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost. But let’s stay for a while in this moment, here, before the newborn Christ-child, his mother and Joseph. There are no security guards protecting them, no passes or visas are required to enter, no faith-checks or doubt-checks only the desire and maybe the need to see them. Their situation is so poor and vulnerable that anyone can come.
The shepherds bring what gifts they can. The world may not think much of them for of what value are the gifts of the poor? But, somehow, these gifts are precious, just because they are the gifts of the poor. In a strange way, here, in the stable, everything changes value for we begin to see it in the light of truth.
Then there are the magi – the wise, foolish ones, who trusted in a star. They knew how to read the signs of creation; how to outwit the devious pseudo questions of those in power, who deal in the currency of violence and death. They found to find their way to stable but they returned by another way. They would not let their knowledge -their new knowledge – be co-opted into the schemes of emperors and tyrants. They had found the one they were looking for and recognised him, even though it wasn’t as they had expected. He was a king, a saviour, homeless and in a stable; it was something their wisdom had not divined, but they came. A little late perhaps, but like all latecomers welcome because they too had something to bring. Not just their prophetic gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh but themselves and the peoples they represented – all the seekers after signs and latecomers from every nation.
And maybe these ‘wise ones’ were so caught up in the strangeness and wonder of what they found, its poverty, ordinariness that they didn’t notice the smell of the animals and the shepherds who had got there before them because they trusted another heavenly source. In a way the magi might even have recognised that in that stable the whole of creation was represented.
Gathered around this new-born child, they might have seen that just for a moment that somehow rested between time and eternity they were part of a new community, ‘heaven and earth in little space…’. And they grew in another sort of wisdom: here all are welcome, all invited, the only gift that is needed is the gift of one’s self. It doesn’t matter if you are poor, illiterate, wise, an earlier arrival or a latecomer, from the fields or the cities, palaces or favellas, we all have a place here; our own place, this and every year for as long as time lasts.
As so this year begins our Holy Year of ‘Hope.’ As we make our way to Bethlehem, each one of us is invited to be a pilgrim and carrier of hope. Hope is not a matter of personal disposition like optimism. It is a matter of faith. The same faith that brings us to the stable and waits for the new daybreak of Easter morning. Not faith in ourselves, our sciences or ingenuity but in the new life and way that Christ opens for us even in the midst of the ‘slaughter bench of history.’ In the great Easter sequence, Victimae Paschali Laudes, it is Mary Magdalen who teaches us this way of hope, “surrexit Christus spes mea” – the risen Christ is my hope!
This Hope is not a flight from the horrors of our world and callous suffering of so many innocents. In this Hope we take up the responsibilities that we have to each other and refuse to abandon the community we became part of at Bethlehem and rediscovered at the foot of the Cross; the community of the ‘little ones’, the community of suffering, injustice, poverty, persecution and exploitation. Christian Hope is a judgement upon all misuse of power; it is the refusal to hand ourselves and our world over to despair. Despair is the death of the human spirit. Like Herod, every dictator or emperor or political system will want to remove the threat of God’s promise either by colonising it or destroying it. To fall into despair is to surrender ourselves and our planet into the hands of those who would enslave us. The hope that is built on Christ is the refusal to surrender to all the powers of death whatever promises they make or clothes they wear.
The gift of hope which comes in Bethlehem and on Easter morning is our freedom with which we claim another path for life and society. It is our ‘yes’ echoing God’s ‘yes’ in the face of violence, suffering and despair which commitment us to bring that new life into reality (Phil.4:13). For, even more than the magi, we have seen a greater light ‘ that has shone in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it’ (Jn 1:5) ‘full of grace and truth’.
And so with the shepherds, the magi, and the whole of creation we, too, make our pilgrimage to Bethlehem. However, we arrive, we will find something – someone – we did not expect. Yet our surprise, and maybe even confusion, will give way to joy and hope as we discover how welcome we are. It is where we have always longed to be and where we were meant to be from the foundation of the world: home.
