(Lk 2:1-20)

The (humanising) quantum leap of the Incarnation

(Lk 2:1-14)

In ancient literature, only the events of public life were considered significant, certainly not those of childhood - even of the greats of history.

Paul and Mark, the earliest New Testament authors, did not consider it appropriate to refer to the events of the Lord's human birth, adolescence and hidden life.

In the earliest times, the sole and substantial reference was the presence of God through the new and authentic Passover, now in Christ completely devoid of sensational epics.

Even for the last of the Gospels, God's dwelling among men and his elevation (on the scaffold of rejection) has nothing glorifying and luminous in a trivial and marginal sense. Rather of permanent depth.

But the early Christians were faced with major objections: thus they were forced to give a theological answer, and present the centre of the churches' Message [salvation in Christ] in a different way.

The first objection, raised by the followers of the Baptist; in short: "You say that Jesus is the true Messiah, but do you not remember that he was a pupil of our teacher?".

The second, from the pagans: "You claim that Jesus is the Son of God, but how is it that he was born like all other men, in a normal way, of a woman?".

The need then arose for an apologetic on the part of the family and non-public story of Christ, prior to his Manifestation.

The Infancy Gospels are not intended to provide historical news and details - as some apocryphal gospels fancifully do. They are testimony to popular faith consolidated in community liturgies.

The new Word is a proclamation of a News to us that encompasses the entire life of the Master.

In His all-human life He revealed the divine condition - right from His Baptism, with the testimony of the rent heavens; and from His birth itself.

But the entire narrative and literary background is used by the evangelists to outline a kind of synthetic narrative of 'circumstances' designed to convey the meaning of the figure of the 'Son of Man'.

In this way, in fact, he liked to call himself Jesus - who became Lord: as he was announced in the apostolic preaching, and lived in the communities.

In this logic, Lk leads us to Bethlehem, the village of Israel's promises - to emphasise a contrast with the expected Davidic Messiah.

Christ is [paradoxically] his descendant - yet alone, abandoned in the unclean place of a manger.

The Message for those far from the ceremonial also breaks the mould of greatness: 'a Saviour has been born for you today' (v.11).

A call for all the little ones of the earth, and an appeal-happy news also for the unnamed.

In several passages, in order to emphasise the Lord as the culmination and overcoming of the First Testament, Lk and Jn parallel Christ and the Baptist.

Here too the purpose is to proclaim the superiority of the Son of God over the last of the prophets, anchored in the 'religious' idea of the Most High as Lawgiver and Judge.

The Father does not annotate or make enquiries: he only transmits life and continues to generate it, always new.

God, the Creator and Redeemer of our intelligence and freedom, is revealed in his whole story, meaning, and Word, already from Christmas and not only from the beginning of public life.

With Him we are no longer bound to a subordinate relationship of blind obedience, but one of sympathy, collaboration, resemblance.

In the Child with open arms, it is the Father himself who winks at us and recognises himself in our helpless precariousness, poor among the poor; even an accomplice.

Not mighty sullen, equipped with everything, watchful and pretentious.

A revelation unthinkable for ancient philosophies and religions, including the albeit dignified thinking of John [the Baptizer was famous and considered more convincing than Jesus himself - even when he took off].

On the level of the Faith that was to overcome devout or rigid ideologies, the new Rebbe proposed an unbelievable identification with any institution or creed.

He proclaimed the identity between the divine condition and the fullness of humanisation.

The belligerent instincts of the violent and triumphant had nothing to do with God. Rather, He recognised Himself in the class of the helpless and voiceless.

Therefore, the Father could not be a protector who demanded recognition, but a Parent who always wants to grow.

By recognising and uniting with us, the Eternal One expands life; He does not humiliate it, nor does He shrink it.

This is what we call Incarnation, in the proper sense.

Every gift of Heaven does not fall by the sympathy of the gods, blind fortune, or their random predilection; nor by merit and fulfilment, but by need. 

Now the needs of woman and man drive the Exodus and pass through a dimension of completion, of fullness of being that exceeds the pre-human, revealing a God among us and with us.

The Eternal One who comes down, comes, and knocks, asks to be welcomed, not obeyed.

The face of a disembodied, sympathetic, welcoming Child - sometimes in tears - is the trait of the authentic person, who replaces the old man, all of a piece, resembling the god of war.

The Most High does not demand submission, nor does he demand that we meet him halfway, setting up useless scaffolding to climb us to Heaven - as with the tower-of-Babel type religion, inexorably destined to collapse.

With the unveiling of the new Face of the true God and true man, new times begin.

We are no longer called to live according to the Almighty: we live of the Father and in Him, with the Son, for us and our brothers.

Here is the Light from below and above together, which pierces the darkness of this night.

That Child breaks the artificial veins, puts us back in touch with the energies of the primordial.

It extinguishes the thoughts and torments that perhaps [by "demerit"] we had to endure.

It breaks the isolation; it opens the dreaming part of the old, chronic, closed man, who would not want the leap.

In such an open gaze, Jesus the brother comes to find our consciousness.

The divine condition breaks through to position itself in the imagination.

It demands space... to make us lose our minds - so it pushes away from continuities and rigid controls, offering a full, new existence.

Christmas aurora

The place for us

(Lk 2:15-20)

In the cages of our devotion, perhaps there is still no place for Jesus who offers himself. He continues to be born a child like the others, distant and poor, rejected.

Only those on the margins of society seem capable of waiting, openness to the mystery, and searching: keeping watch at night (v.8), passing by and seeing (v.15), coming in haste (v.16), praising (v.20).

The Mother is already making her way from the religiosity of the fathers to the Faith in the Father: Contemplative who listens, meets her deepest states and tries not to miss anything.

Those who are nobodies but feel anxious searching and prayerful hearts can sing a new song.

In this way, he will be able to decipher the signs of the divine Presence inscribed in events, and welcome Christ into his inner dwelling (v.7) [cf. commentary on the Prologue of John].

In the simplicity of the Son - in the Freedom of children - the Eternal God points out to the wretched and abandoned multitudes a new Way, capable of valuing the limits and even the eccentricities of each one.

Throughout the first century, both in Palestine and Asia Minor [Johannine and Lucan churches] the different schools of theology and servants of God - of traditional Judaism, of Jesus, of the Baptist - confronted each other in alternative ways.

Where there were communities of Jews, there was no lack of controversy between Christians and various (more or less radical) observers of the religion of the fathers - as well as people who had been baptised by John, or at least in contact with his pupils. The Master and the first apostles had also been.

Rather than confusion, there was real competition between the group of Christ's disciples and those of the Baptizer.

This, even though both proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom of God, and proposed social justice and the forgiveness of sins in practical life - instead of through rituals and sacrificial gestures at the Temple in Jerusalem.

Yet, thanks to the Son of God, the apostles grasped the depth of the Father's heart, which never resembles a justicialist, but works exclusively for the good and the promotion of life.

Hence in Faith they themselves achieved inexplicable recoveries - precisely by gratuitously integrating people's weak sides - without works of mortification of the insecure woman and man, nor claiming impossible preventive perfections.

Even today, precisely from the dark sides of our personality, the Father creates in the Spirit of the Beatitudes his Newness, which turns the tables.

A completely unexpected change, impossible to imagine and propose; at least on the basis of prejudices or established ideas - all of which compete with self-esteem and joie de vivre.

The God of unconditional and guilt-dispelling love was precisely the exclusive prerogative of the new people of Faith in Christ, who had overcome the accusatory, moralistic and fussy cloaks of tradition.

Even then, diversity brought into play the question of the purifications required by creeds and identity rites.

Jesus seemed completely alien to the mentality of cultic ablutions.

It was the habit of life with Him that regenerated souls in the round, even from the eccentricities of each one.

Precious uniquenesses, interpreted as a sign of vocational exceptionality. 

He taught the wretched and those condemned by religion how to get back on their feet by appealing to the possibility of encountering the different faces lurking in each one's soul: taking them on and investing them rather than denying them.

Personalities all... not pre-emptively sterilised; even by the extravagant expressions, or by the unconscious, shaky, unexpressed sides - in which Jesus taught to discover the traits of the personal missionary Call.

And it is from here - it seems incredible - that we too are sent to the Annunciation.

All this remains fundamental every day.

Indeed, the pious proposals may present themselves in very dignified forms - but they remain only outposts of the new quality leap.

The latter, capable of astonishment and all humanising: without the tare of feeling marked for life by external opinions.

Obviously, these forms of familial looseness and immediacy towards the Eternal God aroused the envy of the veterans still caged in the old fears of retribution and the heap of works of law.

In no fulfilment, but only in Christ, did his friends and brothers recognise the Voice of the loving God.

He does not distinguish between the pure and the impure, the able and the unable, friend and foe; veterans, the elect, the predestined, and the not.

In short, in our real life we do not wait for a phenomenon that continually disturbs and oppresses us, filling us with fears and deviations to be corrected [that sap all energies].

Let us only look for a Friend who allows us to express ourselves in an unprecedented way and have a long - even undeserved - hope.

Let us be like the shepherds: no one has ever understood what convinced them, except the astonishment of the unpredictable gratuitousness (vv.15-18.20).

Paradoxically ready to found a new people - without too many regulations - starting from how and where each one found himself.

By now we too no longer need the imprimatur of sectarianism.

Our most childish oddities [cf. commentary on the Prologue of John] can bring the human condition closer to the divine condition.

So they have the approval of the Lord of all cosmos.