Will you Welcome Him?

By Bp. Rocco Florenza

There are many true life stories in the Old Testament that tell of a  God  who loves us and promises not to abandon his children.  At Christmas, on almost the first page of the New Testament, He delivered on that promise.  Yet, from the sights and sounds of today’s world, particularly during  Christmas, it would be very difficult to see how God revealed that love and made good on his promise.  In a culture where reality is what ever you want it to be, it’s easy to lose sight of and even forget the truth concerning Christmas. T.V. programming this year gave us the Christmas Story, once again, replete with the same old questions attached: is it true?  Did it really happen?  Thus, “The Word became flesh and the world new Him not”, is not a one-time-only, first century phenomenon, it is as true today as it was then.

To find the real story one must go back to the Christmas Crib and Go back in spirit to Bethlehem and that incredible, silent Night.

Yet the day had been anything but silent.

It was the time of the census and the little city was bursting with visitors and fellow travelers.

It bustled with activity and buzzed with excitement.  In the Bazaar, a forerunner to the modern shopping mall, merchants and customers could be seen and heard haggling over prices. In the streets peddlers went from door to door offering bargains from their baskets of wares.  On the street corners gypsies sang and danced and fought each other for the pennies tossed in their direction. The upper class rode by on their handsome steeds and horse drawn coaches, amused at what they saw, and yet, not one of them noticed the tired but determined peasant leading the grey donkey that carried a young maiden, who in turn carried in her womb, the unborn Christ.

Who would amidst all that commercialism? Nobody noticed. Did anyone even care.  For Joseph and Mary that first Christmas began with the saddest of all human feelings and emotions; the distinct sense of not being wanted by anyone, not being welcomed anywhere.

They were despised by the Romans because they were Jews and rejected by their own people because they were poor.

For them there was not only any room at the Inn, there wasn’t any room in the entire town. 

So, out of the town they went, seeking whatever form of shelter they could find.

In desperation, for it was Mary’s time to have her baby, they stumbled upon a stable-cave, carved out from the side of a hill, just below the city.   A place described by the author Chesterton, as “A place where only God was homeless but everyone else was at home.”  And there, while a tired and weary Mary rested, a bewildered and worried Joseph cleaned out one of the stalls, placed hay  on the floor, then left the cave and stood guard and waited at its entrance, as was the custom.

Mary, or Miriam as she was called in Aramaic, the spoken language of the day, should have had the help of a Mid-wife, but there was no time for that, so she probably delivered her child alone.

As soon as the child was born, she would summon Joseph and he would make a separate shelter, something resembling private quarters for mother and child.

But this was not the wonder of Christmas; not the birth itself, or that a virgin became a mother or that a village apprentice carpenter was chosen to be Guardian of God’s Son, the Savior of the World.

The Wonder of Christmas, the incredible miracle of Christmas was that God became one of us.

Recent scholarship reports that two planets did co-join or line up in the sky, Jupiter and Saturn, sometime during the year 7 B.C, to form a light so bright that the evening the Angles announced Christ’s birth to the shepherds in the fields, those fields became as bright as if it were high noon:  Light displacing the dark.

But, the wonder occurred not once but three times that very day!

This would have been enough to stir the curiosity of the philosopher-astrologers we refer to as the Magi - meaning men of science, learned men, well versed in the intellectual sciences as well as the natural - and they would have known the ancient prophecies recorded in the Jewish Scriptures.   But no one in that small town, perched just above the surface atop that hillside noticed.   This should come as no surprise.  The same attitude prevails today: there will always be people who see and those who don’t want to see.

There is a story told of an old wooden church which looked at the very point of crumbling and falling to pieces.  While traveling by it one day, the little church was brought to the attention of a statesmen, who happened to be an agnostic.  He shrugged and sneered:  “it’s good enough for someone born in a stable.”

No, it wasn’t.  Not the greatest cathedral on this earth, with stunning stained glass windows, and soaring lofty arches or spire stretching to the heavens is good enough for God. Nothing we give God is good enough for him. But, curiously enough there is something God does not have unless we, His children give it to him, and that is our love and loyal obedience.

Ponder the words “love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind,” and ask yourself what do they really and truly mean? The answer is found in a cave at Bethlehem and on a hill called Calvary. Jesus Christ, our king, savior, brother and friend gave his life for us because he loves us with all his heart, and all his soul and all his mind.   The sacrifice of God’s only son brings these words into sharp focus.

And yet, there was no room for him at the Inn.

Room enough for everything else today, but not the savior of the world.  Plenty of time and place for business and pleasure, family re-unions as people travel from all over the country, but no room for Jesus.

However, let us define the inn in spiritual terms. It is not a fixed place in time in some desert town of first century Palestine. It isn’t even geographical. No, the inn is the human heart.  Surely there is room for him there. Compare and contrast the comfort and warmth of one’s heart to the cold and bleak stable-cave.

Not much good cheer there. Little if any laughter, nor glad greetings; only the darkness and isolation of the winter night, a rough manger, meaning a wooden feeding trough, with a swatch of hay for its mattress; some sheep, a few cattle, a donkey and maybe a dog. But the church proclaims to anyone who will truly listen and take the time to understand, that joy was certainly present in that barren place.  The angels said so, the shepherds felt it, and later the Magi, men of superior knowledge and regal nobility, these kings would express it by lying prostrate before the scene that unfolded before them. For the first time since the disaster of Eden the eyes of man looked into the face of God.  As he snuggled there in his mother’s arms and nursed at her breast, here was God, the blessed saints and all the company of heaven.  A new day has begun. The Word of God leapt down from his heaven and was made flesh. God and man are now one again.

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