The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. (Jn. 1:14)

O Come, O come, Emmanuel. (19th Century Carol)

Let’s be clear about one thing: Christmas is more than God becoming a little baby. At the heart of Christmas is the saving (that is, life-giving) mystery of the incarnation. For Christians, the significance, power, and implications of the incarnation and the mystery of the hinged seasons of Advent / Christmas expand far beyond the little town of Bethlehem. It is not just that Jesus is the physical embodiment and the incarnated expression of God’s solidarity and love for us (which he is). Hildegard of Bingen referred to the incarnation as “divinity aimed at humanity.” Dutch theologian Edward Schillibeeckx referred to Jesus as “the sacrament of the encounter with God.” It is not even that by becoming human God reminds us of our sacred worth (which God does), declares each and every human person valuable and precious (as if that weren’t incredible enough). It is that in the incarnation God reiterates the sacredness of all life, and reveals again that all matter is holy and infused with the animating presence of the divine. All is gift, all is given, all is graced, all is of God. Always has been and always will be, which is what we mean when about God’s glory we proclaim “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.” The incarnation is the embodiment of divine presence and the presence is the extravagance of God’s love.

God’s glory refers to God’s presence which is by nature a dynamic, active, “oneing,” and saving presence. I say “by nature” to mean natural and native to God. Salvation refers to the vivifying, unifying, and liberating love-life of God poured out to others. Salvation is the enlivening love of God given. This salvation or love-life-given is not something initiated in the feeding trough in Bethlehem or unleashed for the first time on the executioners cross on Golgotha. Nor does it refer mainly or solely to an afterlife. It is rather the one original, always present, and eternally life-giving reality at the heart of all reality; the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so-help-us-God-reality in which we are invited to participate and to which God longs for us to say, “Amen.” It is this awe-filled, grateful, joyful, and embodied response of assent that is the defining Carol of Christmas and the heart of the Christened life.

The infant in the feeding trough before whom the representative hodge-podge of humankind comes to kneel, behold, and whisper “Yes” is a living reminder and incarnation of the original resplendence that was infused and spread out in the luminous starfields from the very beginning. As the psalmist knew, “The heavens are telling the glory of God.” Emmanuel (God-with-us), to whom we pleadingly sing “O come, O come,” is the human enfleshment of the one, same divine presence that has been from the beginning but to which humans have a habit of becoming blind. Christ makes God present in the historical, in the commonplace, not by re-infusing the ordinary and the earthly with the divine presence as if there were a leak somewhere in the universe through which it all seeped out, but rather by reawakening us to the original, ever-present, and eternal divinity contained and concealed within all creation, and yes, within each and all of us. The annunciation of the season is that it is the glory-of-God-given and the solidarity of God present that is the one enduring truth despite any sign to the contrary. Sing with me, won’t you? “Amen. Amen. Again, Amen..”