“Behold. Behold the God who is infinitely more humble than those who pray to him, more stripped, more emptied, more self-outpouring… The scandal of the Incarnation is not that we are naked before Emmanuel, God with us, but that God is named before us and, in utter silence, given over into our hands and hearts.” (Maggie Ross).
See what the Magi saw: “they saw the young child with Mary his mother” (Mt. 2.11). This is how Jesus wants to be known, how the Spirit makes him knowable. “They acknowledge and adore, not only God made man, but the whole mystery of love between God and man. It is always ‘in his Mother’s arms’ that Jesus is found, that is to say, in the act whereby God gives himself to man and man gives himself to God in a reciprocal embrace” (Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis).
See they are at work in a stable, not reclining in a palace. "Christ does not seek comfort; he goes only to places where divine battles are fought" (Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis).
See the cow unmuzzled, eating its fill, wholly satisfied; she is not being fatted for the kill. And neither is the kid. “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but you have given me an open ear” (Ps. 40.6).
See the naked child toddling, arms outstretched—prefiguring his death. Weigh what it means for God, all-determining and unchangeable, to have been exposed, immature, needy, at risk. “Having experienced our sufferings even before he suffered on the cross, he condescended to assume our flesh. For if he had not suffered, he would not have come to live on the level of human life. First, he suffered; then he came down and was seen. What is this suffering that he suffered for us? It is the suffering of love... Even the Father is not without suffering” (Origen).
See the veiled mother’s face. Is that sorrow? Fear? Determination? Is her heart already pierced? “There is only one face in the whole world that is absolutely beautiful: the face of Christ,” Dostoevsky said (meaning, really, the Russian Christ). But he was wrong. Or he was right only in the sense that every face is Christ’s.
See he looks to his mom, this child, not yet able to speak. “The little child opens wide eyes at the world. What he sees… he does not comprehend [because] his self is not yet disclosed to him... Now this is the true miracle among all these miracles of the beginning: that one day the mother’s smile is recognized by the child as a sign of his acceptance in the world and that the center of his own self is disclosed to him as he returns the smile. He finds himself because he has been found” (Hans Urs von Balthasar). The Lord becomes himself because his mother loves him as he is.
See she sets aside her work to care for him, devoting herself to the one needful thing. She needs him, but no more than he needs her. “The calling of Mary is to be the teacher of God” (Willie Jennings).
See she not only looks after him, not only looks to him, but actually sees him as he is—and so becomes like him. “It is in the beholding itself that Mary conceives and we also” (Maggie Ross). Feel, then, the deep wonder of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany: the Son became a child of his mother so we might become children of his Father; he obeyed her so we might obey him, growing down into his childlikeness.
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