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St. Augustine, contemplating the face of the Baby Jesus, exclaimed: “Immense in the form of God, tiny in the form of a slave.”
To describe the mystery of the Incarnation, Saint Macarius, the fourth-century monk and disciple of Saint Anthony Abbot, used the Greek verb, “smikryno,” to become small, to reduce to the bare minimum.
He says: “Listen attentively: the infinite, unapproachable and uncreated God in his immense and ineffable goodness has taken a body, and, I dare say, infinitely diminished his glory.”
Christmas is thus the feast of the loving humility of God, of the God who upsets our logical expectations, the established order, the order of the dialectician and the mathematician.
In this upset lies all the richness of God’s own thinking, which overturns our limited human ways of thinking (cf. Isaiah 55:8-9).
As Romano Guardini said: “What a reversal of all existing values—also divine! In truth, this God destroys everything that man, in the pride of his revolt, constructs of his own inspiration.”
At Christmas, we are called to say “yes” with our faith, not to the Master of the Universe, nor even to the most noble of ideas, but precisely to this God who is the humble lover.
Blessed [now “St.”] Paul VI, on Christmas 1971, said: “God could have come wrapped in glory, splendour, light and power, to instil fear, to make us rub our eyes in amazement. Instead he came as the smallest, the frailest and weakest of beings.
“Why? So that no one would be ashamed to approach him, so that no one would be afraid, so that all would feel close to him and draw near him, so that there would be no distance between us and him.
“God made the effort to plunge, to dive deep within us, so that each of us, each of you, could speak intimately with him, trust him, draw near him and realize that he thinks of you and loves you. He loves you! Think about what this means!
If you understand this, if you remember what I am saying, you will have understood the whole of Christianity.”
God chose to be born a little child, because he wanted to be loved. Here we see, as it were, how the logic of Christmas is the reversal of worldly logic, of the mentality of power and might, the thinking of the Pharisees and those who see things merely in terms of causality or determinism.
Excerpted from the Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia, December 22, 2016
