by : Derwin Pereira
There is something about Jesus Christ that defies easy assumptions about the day of his birth. Christmas has become in many ways a secular festival that is celebrated in some households with more drinking than praying, as the laughing confession goes. Even without the drinking, Christmas is associated with its eponymous tree, gifts, carols, Santa Claus and snow, depending on where one lives. There is no harm at all in these latter varieties of enjoyment, particularly for children who await this time of year with the most eager of expectations. Children deserve to be happy.
However, a visit to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem provides a profoundly spiritual reminder of the humble physical surroundings in which Jesus was born. Therein lies the grandeur of who he was and what he did on earth. A partisan of the weak, a defender of children and women against the grip of every economy of exclusion, every temporal state and every patriarchal society, Jesus remains radically above and beyond conventional appropriations of his message of unconditional love. It is the same unconditional love with which God sent Jesus, his only son, to die on earth for the sins of man so that fallen humans might find salvation.
That is in the next life. In this life, my Christmas this year is put in troubled perspective by the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, by the suffering of children, women and the old – the most vulnerable witnesses of the human condition – and by the ceaseless mangling of the environment that goes by the name of development. I do not accept this state of affairs as being natural: Instead, it offends my sense of myself as a human being.
That is when I turn, this Christmas, to Jesus in the humility of my failure to repair his world. I acknowledge my human limitations – some imposed on me and others of my own making. I am happy, of course, that he was born and that he lives. However, I am laid low by how low the world continues to fall.
Pull me up by the hand, my kind Jesus. Tell me that humans can still win, my warrior Jesus. Tell me that I am worthy of your love, my forgiving Jesus.
Jesus, be mine, this Christmas and every other Christmas that I shall see. Because I live to see Christmas. Happy Birthday!
