Let us align our ways to God’s ways

As disciples of Jesus Christ, we may find ourselves somewhat conflicted at this time of year. We are in the final days of Advent and stand at the threshold of the Christmas season, which begins with the Solemnity of the Lord’s Nativity.
 
This time of year, we’re often immersed in festive cultural and commercial trappings that adorn our homes, stores and public spaces. The challenge lies in remembering the origin and purpose of the many cultural expressions associated with Christmastime. While the two may be connected, the feast is far greater than most of the ways we have come to celebrate it.

The danger is to mistake the reality of the Christian mystery, which is the birth of Jesus the Son of God and our Savior, for the enchanting trappings of light displays, eggnog and stocking stuffers. We must avoid the temptation to tame the mystery of Christmas and settle for something less earthshaking than the incredible truth that God has come to live with us and shares our very human nature.

The incarnation of God in the person of a little baby teaches us important lessons about how God chooses to come to us and remain with us. The birth of the Son of God in human flesh illustrates God’s own preference for humility and littleness.

The humility of God present in the feast of Christmas should truly shock us! The God who is omnipotent, infinite and eternal chooses to enter our history as a vulnerable baby. He was born into a family that was poor – long before any modern comforts – and at a time in history when his people lived under the oppression of a foreign occupation. 

He was not born in a center of power, but in a remote and insignificant village. He was not born in Rome or even Jerusalem, but in Bethlehem. The God who breathed life into Adam’s lungs after forming him from the dust of the earth freely chose to be a vulnerable child who depended on others to meet his most basic needs. God still chooses to come to us in humble ways.

The incarnation is the greatest event since God created everything out of nothing, yet God chooses to come in the littlest way imaginable. There is an axiom from the Ignatian tradition of Catholic spirituality that states, “Not to be confined by the greatest, and yet to be contained within the tiniest, that is divine.” 

God is greater than the universe, yet is swaddled in a tiny cloth. God is the creator of heaven and earth, yet is present on the altar under the appearance of simple bread and wine. God is the Eternal Word, the Logos, which orders and forms the cosmos, yet gives himself to us in the written word of Sacred Scripture. 

God holds everything in the palm of his hand yet whatever is done for the least of these is done for him. God still chooses to come to us in ways of littleness.

God does not choose what would seem to be the most efficient, most effective or most convenient path to accomplish his designs. The archangel Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that God had chosen her for such a special mission astonishes the young teenager. She is a virgin, and Joseph, who she intended to marry, had not yet taken her into his home. 

The birth of Jesus comes at a time when this young couple must make a difficult journey to the town of Joseph’s forefathers, which makes an already precarious event like labor and delivery all the more risky. 

The Roman census leaves Mary and Joseph without a place to lodge in the crowded town of Bethlehem, so Jesus is born in a stable and placed in a manger. All of this reminds me of the saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” God still chooses to come in seemingly inconvenient and certainly unexpected ways.

The Solemnity of the Lord’s Nativity invites us to reflect on how God chooses to enter our lives today. Our reflection can expand our hearts and prepare us to receive God in the manner he chooses. 

God’s ways are not our ways. This is a holy mystery that cannot be tamed. God desires to abide in us and for us to abide in him. We bend low each year to marvel at his humility and littleness as we venerate his image placed in the manger. If we let this change us, we will live with him for all eternity.