Christmas heals our perception

For years I have accepted Easter to be the greatest feast Christians have. And it is. Christmas is just a feast that brings unity, peace, joy and celebrations. And that’s great as well. But since by time it has become just a seasonal festivity, I may have failed to allow its powerful message to be revealed in my heart.

Therefore, Christmas is more than just a nice celebration. It has a message that should rock the world and tell us that such good news should change everything.

• In our human experience of a great God out there, we always considered ourselves unworthy of this presence. We always thought that we’re somehow evil and this perception created a great distance between us and God. He belongs to heaven. We belong here on this earth. He is good. We’re not. So we can never be together. But then again we try our best to prove to God that we are good and, hopefully, He’ll accept us in heaven when we get rid of this sinful body.
• When we think of sin, we surely believe this body of ours is to be blamed. It’s always this body that puts us to shame. For years we considered this body as sinful, evil and dirty. And we tried to be more holy by punishing the body in many different ways.
• Besides, our life on earth is only temporal, so we just try our best to end this life good with God in order to attain heaven. So our duty on this earth seems to be just to work out an evacuation plan to the next, as Brian McLaren puts it. It’s almost a necessary evil.

But Christmas tells us a very different story. A different message. It’s the best way God could find to show us that it’s good to be human with all its reality. It points out to us that this body is good; otherwise He would not have taken it Himself. And living on this earth can be a fulfilling life, very abundant.

Christmas also shows us that the distance between God and man, between heaven and earth, what is holy and profane, is only made-up. At least, the God-made-man Jesus proves to us that this distance does not exist. The faraway God has become one of us. The spirit has taken matter. The infinite has embraced the finite. The gap, if ever existed, has been bridged.

A child, a tiny baby, has spoken to us in ways that we had never thought before. It reveals to us a message that has a great mystery. So let’s allow this great paradox to continue to talk to us longer and allow it to take us where we’ve never been.