Reflection - A Coincidence of Events

Of course, Christmas is a joyous occasion. Jesus Christ is born. God has taken on human form. God condescended to become one of us. As difficult a concept as this is to understand, one cannot help but be gladdened, even flattered, that this is what our Faith asks us to believe. Yet, the postings of January regarding Balthasar's last chapter in his book Prayer, and two sermons serving as readings for the Office of Readings for Friday, January 8 (from Christian Prayer: The Liturgy of the Hours, Catholic Book Publishing Co.), indicate that this is not a complete picture of the joy and the peace that we celebrate at Christmas.

In a Christmas day sermon Leo the Great closes the sermon with the following:

"Through the sacrament of baptism you have become a temple of the Holy Spirit. Do not drive away so great a guest by evil conduct and become again a slave to the devil, for your liberty was bought by the blood of Christ."

Peter Chrysologus in a sermon entitled "The sacrament of Christ's incarnation", ends his sermon thus:

"and so Christ is born that by his birth he might restore our nature. He became a child, was fed, and grew that he might inaugurate the one perfect age to remain forever as he had created it. He supports man that man might no longer fall. And the creature he had formed of earth he now makes heavenly; and what he had endowed with the human soul he now vivifies to become a heavenly spirit. In this way he fully raised man to God, and left in him neither sin, nor death, nor travail, nor pain, nor anything earthly, with the grace of our Lord Christ Jesus…. Amen."

 

In the coincidence of reading these sermons and their connection with Balthasar's reflections on the Cross and Resurrection it became clear to me that the birth of Jesus, the joy of the Christmas season and the love and peace it promises, is not complete until we make that connection between Christ's birth and the birth of the new man, his death on the Cross and our death to ourselves, and Jesus’ resurrection and our resurrection to that divinized recreation.