Year A / Christmas / Christmas Day
Readings Isaiah 52.7-10 / Psalm 97.1,2-3ab, 3cd-4, 5-6 (R/v 3) / Hebrews 1.1-6 / John 1.1-5, 9-14
Have you ever wondered about the paper that wraps our Christmas gifts?
Its color delights us. Its design makes us smile. But we’re more eagerly focused on the gift. We shake it and feel it, sometimes we smell it, to try and guess what the wrapping paper and trimmings hide. At best, the wrapping paper completes the whole package making it Christmassy. Almost all us, especially children, then simply rip and tear and pull apart the wrapping paper to get to the gift.
It’s all about the gift, isn’t it? The paper is useless—simply decorative, simply ornamental, simply unimportant. No one pays much attention to it. After it is ripped and torn apart, it’s useless. It’s done its job. It’s thrown away.
Don’t we throw away much more than Christmas wrapping paper in our lives? Throw away someone else’s forgiveness, care and love by being ungrateful and uncharitable in return. Throw away ordinary things and moments that are our daily bread by believing that the expensive, the superficial, the passing provide. Throw away countless opportunities for a fuller, happier life by being calculative, jealous, miserable, frighten. Yes, may be, even throw way God and God’s wishes for us, now and again, by insisting that our self-centered, self-righteous, self-preserving ways are best. And don’t we sometimes feel like thrown away paper—unappreciated, undervalued, unloved?
Today, we celebrate Jesus’ birth. In him, God reminds us that we are meant for God, not to be to be thrown away because of sin and cast into the dung heap of death. God gives us Jesus as our hope-filled joy that we are his. How does God do this? We hear it in our gospel reading: “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (John 1.14).
Christian scripture, song and art always presents the new born Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes. But God became human, like you and me, by wrapping himself in human skin. It is in human skin first and foremost that our God wraps himself up to dwell amongst so as to love us and to serve us in Jesus.
Does this shock you? That God wrapped in human skin? Wrapped himself in human skin, so prone to disease and death, to sinfulness and evil? What can it mean for us that God choose to wrap himself in human skin? Nothing more, nothing less than the goodness of human skin, our skin, for God.
In birth, Jesus reveals the glory of God as fullness of grace of who we are to God. By wrapping himself in human skin, God acknowledges that it is frail, and that our humanity can be as sinful as it can be saintly, but more than this, that we are in our skin, warts and all, always good enough for God. Jesus coming daily into our lives proclaims this.
In birth, Jesus also reveals the glory of God in the truth of who God is and how God wants to interact with us. God wishes to be with us, not throw us away. God desires this because “everything in Jesus speaks of God’s mercy; nothing in him is devoid of God’s compassion” for us (Pope Francis, Misericordiae Vultus, 8). By choosing to wrap himself up in our skin, so often scarred by infirmity and weakness, yet also traced with hopes and joys, God very clearly wants to get involve with and in our lives.
By meeting us in human skin, God in Jesus allows us to meet him in our skin. We can touch him, as we can also speak with him, hear him, see him, know him, live with him. Yes, God has come to us in Jesus to abide in us, so that we can abide in him (John 15.4). This indeed is reason for Christmas celebration because as Paul writes in his letter to the Hebrews it is now in our time that God no longer speaks in partial and various ways, through prophets of old, but fully through Jesus who comes to redeem us for God (Hebrews 1.1-3).
Part of exchanging gifts is acknowledging what we receive. We say “thank you”. We shake hands in thanksgiving. We give an embrace in appreciation. We kiss in the love of being loved, and we smile in gratefulness.
God gives Himself to us in Jesus. He is God’s gift. We visibly represent this in the baby Jesus in the manger. As we stand or kneel before Jesus in the manger, what will we say or do to express thanks? How shall we respond to God who comes to us wrapped in our very skin?
Many will welcome Jesus with words of thanksgiving and greet him with praise. Some will ask for graces such as the grace to be generous and make promises to follow and serve better.
There is another way to acknowledge God’s gift of Jesus. An Ignatian way. Anyone who has done the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola would have prayed the final contemplation. It invites us to love God and love others more in deeds than in words.
A deed we can make this Christmas is to let Jesus wrap us in God’s very skin. And what is God’s skin but love? In the Letter to the Colossians, Paul urges Christians to put on love, God’s love that binds all together in perfect unity (Colossians 3.14). To put on such love, you and I must wrap ourselves in the very skin of God, God who is Love and Love that is God’s way to live.
Does it scare you to want to put on God’s skin and make it your own? I think you, like me, are afraid because we honestly know how unworthy we are to do this and how weak we are to accomplish it.
Jesus however can do this for us. So, let us be audacious as we humble ourselves before Jesus in the manger, and beg him to wrap us anew in God. Let us have the holy boldness to plead for this from him in whom God has redeemed, transformed, and made whole again human skin, our skin. Indeed, let us be as confident as St Ireneaus who understands that Jesus’ coming brings all the newness for us to live with God more fully, more hopefully, more joyfully.
If God wraps himself in human skin in Jesus, then it is only in Jesus that we will be enfolded into God’s skin. In Jesus, God touches humanity in skin that enfleshes God’s mercy, God’s love, God’s life. In Jesus, God calls us to do likewise. This is why every time we reach out in Jesus’ name to touch another’s skin, especially, skin we fear because of disease and colour, difference and vice, corruption and sinfulness, we let him wrap us more and more in the love of God.
I believe we all want to live and serve like Jesus. But we struggle because we are so wrapped up in our own skin. We need new skin, God’s skin, to wrap us anew. At Christmas, God becomes what we are in order to make us what he is himself. To make us what he is himself—there is no other way this can happen unless we take on God’s skin, take on his love so as to love like him. This is how human skin can be stretched, reshaped, made new by Jesus who comes so that "we become fully human…by letting God bring us beyond ourselves" (Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, 8).
At the manger, then, let us offer ourselves as gifts to God, not perfect, not saintly, but just as we are. Let us let Jesus wrap us up for God, wrap us in nothing better than in the same human skin he has wrapped himself in—skin that he has redeemed and renewed through the Incarnation. For, like the wiser, older family ones who gingerly peel back the scotch tape to save the wrapping paper for another gift, another occasion, let us let God save us and use us anew. Yes, this action is also what Christmas joy must be about: that today God makes all things we throw away very valuable again in Jesus.
Preached at St Ignatius Parish, Singapore
photo: from the Internet (scripture for today. bloodspot.com)
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