The created order, according to Christianity, is not an illusion, not a vague representation of another perfect world, nor a dream that will one day vanish into oblivion when a sleeping deity awakens. No, it is a matter of something far more specific. God is the ground and basis of all reality—one might say that He is the ultimately real reality, alive and dynamic in everything that is. God provides the world and everything and everyone in it with a reference point, a goal and a meaning. He does not accompany the world alongside it, much less “above” it: from creation to the present, God acts within history, and within the most intimate points of our lives and activities.
That is the meaning of the incarnation, the enfleshment of God in the human dimension. “From Him we come,” wrote the medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich, “in Him we are enfolded, to Him we return.” That is the complete cycle: creation, incarnation, salvation. God makes, He takes what He has made for His own, He loves what He has made and saves it forever. That is gospel: good news.
Christmas is not, then, a time when we merely offer and receive material gifts: it is a season to acknowledge that God makes Himself His gift to us—and not just once but each day, each moment of always, and especially when our inner life grows old and jaded and seems to die. Whenever we turn to this reality, we know the good news to be true: we are forever befriended. Two words of Luke’s nativity account (with no parallel in Matthew’s) are often ignored, but they are full of meaning. When the shepherds learn of the birth of Jesus, they are keeping watch over their flocks “by night.”
The background for this small detail is the ancient Hebrew experience of God’s saving act in their history. On the first Passover night, when God acted to save His people from destruction by liberating them from Egyptian slavery, He sent His omnipotent, salvific word—the “agent” of the divine judgment: “While gentle silence enveloped all things,” we read in the Wisdom of Solomon, “and night in its swift course was now half gone, your all-powerful word leaped down from heaven, from the royal throne.”
Jesus’ birth at night thus marks the moment of God’s ultimate “leap” from obscurity to full disclosure. And his birth, life and death are (in the words of Ignatius of Antioch, writing at the end of the first century) “resounding mysteries, wrought in the silence of God.” A “mystery,” it is worth pointing out, is not something infinitely unknowable or forever incomprehensible—it is, quite the contrary, something always to be further grasped, more deeply known. To put it another way, a “mystery of God” is something of the divine that knows and grasps you and me, that invites us into the life of God.
Good old Ignatius of Antioch: he knew something of the “silence of God,” which speaks more loudly that any human speech or music or noise. Perhaps he had in mind the words of the New Testament’s Letter to the Colossians, which referred to “the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed” to those who make themselves accessible to God’s whisper—those who heed God in silence. This deserves some reflection, for the moments when God acts in history on our behalf, and the moments in which we reach out to Him, seem to occur mostly in silence.
~Adapted from Donald Spoto, The Hidden Jesus: A New Life
