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It’s Christmas Eve, we gather to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Christ-child, God the Son become human. It’s a fairly nostalgic moment that we share – a time to appreciate beauty in song and in the seasonal aesthetics (decorations), a time of warmth in reunion with family and friends, a time of giving and a realization that we need to do more for those in need, and it’s a time to receive. We gather to worship in an effort to let God know we haven’t forgotten the reason for the season – somehow this Baby Jesus changes us; saves us; saves everything; changes everything.
To say why God has done what God has done for us in, through, and as Jesus is fairly easy. God is love and so God loves. God loves his very good creation. God loves us. God loves each of us. Yet, something has gone terribly wrong in God’s good creation, in us, in each of us. There is good and there is evil. There is futility and there is death. The root of it is a disease called sin. We all have it. God in love has decided to heal us.
Our disease is not a naive either/or problem where we simply know the difference between what is good and what is evil and at times do good and at times do evil. When we speak of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Book of Genesis from which Adam and Eve eat, it is not the Tree of the Knowledge of Good or Evil, but rather Good and Evil. Good and Evil are not juxtaposed but mixed. So often we do Good and it winds being Evil or we have to do what we know is Evil to bring about Good, war being an example. Good and Evil are confused and entwined within us. We cannot just do one without doing the other because we are both at the same time.
We are sick with a disease that is killing us, indeed killing the Creation. We are as good as dead; dead though we live, doing things that lead to death. The only cure for our disease is that God infuse us, indeed the whole Creation, with God’s very self and so we talk about God becoming human. Infusion is like putting a drop of red food coloring into a glass a water. At first the drop is quite noticeable, but in time the red coloring bonds to all the water molecules changing the whole glass to be red water. The water is changed. It has been infused with the color red which diffused throughout the glass changing everything. It’s not just a glass of clear water anymore. It’s now a glass of red water. God the Son became human as the man Jesus of Nazareth. God took upon himself our sin diseased state of existence and as one of us he lived a life in communion with God and with us, a life in which he did no evil.
In this way God infused himself to humanity and truly to the entire Creation and has changed the water, so to speak, in such a way as to begin to heal it. This infusion, Jesus, began the healing. When Jesus had become sick to death at the evil of his crucifixion, that was actually God diffusing himself into death in order to heal his very Good Creation even of death. Jesus’ death once and for all removes the disease of sin from humanity like a tea bag drawing the infection from an infected wound. Jesus’ resurrection set in motion the rubrics of a new humanity, a new creation in which Sin and Death will be no more. In the fullness of time, whenever that will be, whenever God decides to say “Enough!”, we will either simply be changed if we’re still around or resurrected from the dead to live anew in a bodily existence that neither sins nor suffers nor dies but is rather filled with, infused with the living presence of God right down to every subatomic particle from which we are made. As Jesus was bodily raised so will we be bodily raised.
Until then, God has poured his Spirit upon those whom has called to follow Jesus as proof of what is to come. The Spirit is at work in us changing us to become like Jesus. The Holy Spirit does the work of diffusing God’s presence into us and the creation. St. Athanasius of Alexandria who lived at the same time said, “He became what we are that we might become what he is” meaning a new humanity, human beings filled with the very life of God. In Christ we exist at the same time as sinners and dead but healed and alive.
This all probably sounds like metaphysics until you realize that it is love we are talking about and our relationship with God and one another in the love that God has shown in Jesus and given us in the Holy Spirit. Not that warm, fuzzy, nostalgic, feel-good stuff; but rather the kind of love in which we put ourselves aside and moved with compassion we act doing things like making sure the people who live on our street, in our town, in our county, in our province, in our nation, in our world have enough to eat and if they don’t we take food from our tables to feed them, and then we’re going to find out why there’s not enough food to around when there should be abundantly enough, and get governments to stop protecting what seems to be the inalienable right of food-hoarders to make money off of starving people and rather just simply for compassions sake feed people and restore to them what is the inalienable right of being able to grow your own food.
Love in God’s very good creation looks like food for the hungry, clean water for the thirsty, homes for the stranger, clothes for the ill-clothed, health-care for the sick, hospitality and proper care for even those who have broken the law and our trust. It looks like forgiveness, compassion, generosity, and the absence of trauma. When we start thinking about and doing unconditional, selfless, sacrificial love in action then the diffusion of God’s infusion of himself into his very good Creation as this vulnerable baby laying in a nasty feeding trough starts to become real. That’s about all I got. Merry Christmas. Amen.
