What did you go out to Bethlehem to see?

With lot of joy, we go near the crib to re-experience the Bethlehem event. What do we see there?

Here God reveals, not in the expected glory and power but in smallness of human limitations. God is present there in need of caring presence of others. He happily allows that dependency, not just at the manger, perhaps always and everywhere. That is why God is known as Emmanuel - God with us. 

God is with us, taking our human nature, and living in our human conditions, in all our ordinariness. At the manger we find no great wonder and miracle;  nor a great hero, it is just simple human life. 

It is a great surprise too, because we  do not expect God to reveal himself in smallness. We assume definite ways of God's revelation, especially in incomprehensible realities, inexhaustible light and magnificent glory, and we do not find him. We also cannot find God in any of our claims too. Our religious performance, righteousness claims, none of those can make God reveal in the way we want. We open our heart and our eyes and we will see God and God is present to us in our daily lives. Perhaps within our struggle and pain, temptation and sin, there is a feeble cry of  God that a Messiah may be born in us. At our meeting we can offer whatever we have. Often it may be emptiness and pain. Yet in us a Messiah may be being born when we trust on to Him. 

Take courage, there is a consolation from God for us. He says: Do not doubt, but have faith, do not be afraid but have courage, do not be saddened but rejoice. If we can count on this promise from God, we can see God as a companion to our life journey. God may not be a miracle worker all the time, but God is truly limping with the lame and groping with the blind. This little baby in the manger is the meaning for us to live.

Can you cage your God?

God reveals his plans in ways unknown to us. As life has its own newness and freshness all the time, God the giver of life too has freshness of love and action. Pharisees and Scribes in the New Testament of the Bible were so sure of how God was to work, that they even could control what God would say and do. Too well they knew God that they would not allow even God to take another way than what they thought. 

Others simply realised their need for God in their life. They acknowledged that they were weak, and when they received life, there was always freshness in them. There is also a responsible belonging; an experience of 'being received'. 

They have no sure claim; fasting, vigils, and a manifested holy life. Their hope is only in God. God could do great things in their life, nothing so special but live the ordinariness of life with God cheerfully. We  wait for God in unusual miracles. Why can we not see that God who is always with us in our everyday lives?

Those claimed to be righteous could not do this because they could never see God. True, they never searched for God. They wanted what they thought of God to be real for ever. Unknowingly they made their idols. Idols are not made by wood and metals but by our narrow definitions of God. 

We often want to define God as we want, we frame it, chain it and cage it may be to guard our religions. We want our words to be parroted by 'our gods' and 'I' become the faithful messenger for 'my god'. 

The early we can recognise our closed heart to God, the deeper we can come to know the real heart of God; and then our our own heart where we can welcome God in God's own ways. 

Surprise!

Being Found: Great Consolation and Joy

The wastelands will see the glory of God, and the deserts will begin to sprout and flower. They are signs of hope. Hoping is a strength received from trusting in freedom.
Human lives also may be left desolate, an unattended garden though we desire to live our lives in its fullness.

Strengthen all weary hands,

steady all trembling knees

and say to all faint hearts,

‘Courage! Do not be afraid (Is 35/3,4)

Perhaps we are not opened to such a possibility of transformation, but rather stagnated in the customary practices, especially of religion. Often we are not able to grow from the religious practices to living of faith. So the voice crying out in the wilderness remains a mere sound, not understood as a word. It is a deep pain.

When the Lord says, “Comfort my people,” the consolation primarily we require is that of being freed from such stagnation and suffocation. ‘Being found’ is a tremendous experience of consolation. We shall never be called ‘forsaken,’ but there is a new experience of belonging. As we await the saviour, the waiting, being ready to be consoled, is itself joyous. This is the way the voice asking us to prepare for him.

The ultimate consolation is the coming of the Saviour, revealed and realised in us (individually and as one body of the faithful). How consoling experience it is! That will surely happen, we being found and consoled by God with affirming words, “You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”
Lumen Gentium 48 tells of it as, "already the final age of the world has come upon us (Cf 1 Cor. 10. 11.) and the renovation of the world is irrevocably decreed and is already anticipated in some kind of a real way." It is the work of Christ himself; leading all people to himself, filling them with His Spirit, and through the church joining all more closely to himself. When we know it, realise it, that will be the powerful experience of the coming of the Messiah.