Sunday, December 24, 2006 Mercado: Living room crib By Juan L. Mercado
(These are excerpts from a Christmas Eve homily given by Fr. Catalino Arevalo, SJ, of Ateneo University. The talk remains as relevant as when delivered, was it five years ago? Merry Christmas-–JLM )
Some years back, the Belgian theologian Edward Schillebeeckx was asked in a magazine interview: Where did you learn your deepest Christology? Schillebeeckx had just finished his monumental three-volume work on Jesus. The interviewer expected him to name the renowned theological centers where he studied and taught: Leuven? Paris (Le Saulchoir)? Maybe Nijmegen?
At home, he said, in my childhood, in the Christmas crib in our living room. “My father spent time telling us about the stable of Bethlehem, and Luke’s story, and how the babe in the manger was Mary’s son and God’s very own son, and how he became a babe because he loved each one of us, because God wanted to give his life for, and to, the world, to share his joy with us.”
After 20 years of absence from the subject, I was asked to teach Christology again at the Loyola School of Theology. I had to read books, written after 1974, on the mystery of Christ, not just to fill 10-minute homilies, but many hours of class. (This required going) back to the theme that exercised medieval scholastic theologians, and the Church Fathers before them: de motivo incarnationis.
What was behind the mystery of the Incarnation? Why did God become man? Why was he born? Why, Nazareth? Why the teaching-preaching-healing ministry? Why the Cross and resurrection?
For a whole school of the Fathers, our redemption was already in the incarnation-–a mighty torrent of light flowing from the mystery of God-made-man, whose first shining forth is Bethlehem, whose first Epiphany was the Child in the manger, the Child we call Jesus because he would save his people from sin, the boy called Emmanuel which means God is with us.
“Don’t we wonder,” the German theologian Karl Rahner asks, “that for ages on end, we begged God to come, to save us from our terror, our wars and genocides, all the hells we continually create for ourselves?” For centuries, we’ve asked him to come and change all this.
And he came, so we believe. And he didn’t change all this. And yet, year after year, we fill our Advents with the same longing, the same petitions, the same demands.” Come (we say) and rescue us from all the harm and ruin that is of our making. Halina, Hesus, halina. “Come, Lord Jesus, come.” We who have faith believe that he comes, again and again, in answer to our asking.
And yet, things haven’t really changed. In fact, it seems things have gone from bad to worse with us here: where (cities have) become polluted parking lots, where greed sinks (overloaded) ferryboats, tradpols grow fat from jueteng money and brothers keep killing brothers in (Sulu) and other “more nearby” places.
And when Advent comes around, we say-–is it with such naivete?---“come.” Always with longing hearts, with never-tiring prayers, even when nothing better seems to happen.
And yet, he has come, truly.
Only we keep wanting him to do what he didn’t intend, and doesn’t intend, to do. Not all by himself, at any rate, but only with us, together with us. Nobiscum. For what he has come to be is Emmanuel. He wants to be with us, no matter what, no matter where. To be with us is to enter “as immanently as possible” into our own life-stories.
(The child in the crib) is our Emmanuel: that is what it means. God who is not only beside us always, but God within us always, as love---unconditional, unwavering, unwearying love, that will never abandon us, never leave us.
Is this still too abstract? What shall we say?
It means, in faith, that God has really entered the world in Jesus. It means, in faith, that he has given us his word of mercy and compassion, nearness and sharing, his word of love. He has spoken it into the world, into all human history, into all our lives.
He has given it in such wise that he cannot ever take it back. It means that every thought in our brains and every beat of our hearts is his also. He has taken them over in his own life--–keeping them, if you will, in his brain, in his sinews, in his heart.
Somehow, he inhabits now every moment of our days, the roar of our laughter and the whimper of our pain, the leaping of the heart in love, the groan of fear and the tightening in the pit of our guts.It is only our sin he cannot take over, because sin moves in the regions of death and he, to his core, is life.
Even our own weaknesses and temptation, he makes his own: tears at a friend Lazarus’ dying, sweat of terror–--thick as blood--–there in the garden, under the trees. Nothing of our human experience but he has made it his own.
“Emmanuel” means there is nothing more in human life and joy and pain, and even dying, but God is in it also. “There are no more unvisited places in our lives,” John Shea likes to say.
But we should remember that Christmas is about God coming down to be one of us, and one with us, going as deep into our lives as he can, and as deeply as we will let him. As the old Latin hymns used to say it: Puer natus est nobis; filius datus est nobis. “Unto us a Child is born, unto us a son is given.”
To all our darkness and sin, our perplexity and despair, to all our questioning and fears, our longings and hopes, there is a God who is near us--–who loves us beyond measure and imagination--–a God who gives one answer today, one only: “Listen, for the word is spoken” look…behold my son is born.”
