Christmas Cribs beautifully remind us
that God so loved the world He sent His Son, born of Mary.
Some are suggesting, even as I write, that the traumatic wickedness of
this year would make light-heart Christmas joy a complete charade!
This couldn’t be so! Jesus did not
come into the word to create a pretext for party-time! Joseph, who was to assume the role of the father
of Jesus, was made to know that this would be very serious business. The Angel
Gabriel instructed him, ‘you must name Him Jesus, because He is the one who is to
save His people from their sins.' (Mt.1.21)
In the crib we are to look for and find, the ‘Face
of Jesus,’ which is the ‘Face of God,’ which is the ‘Face of Mercy.’ God would
have us know that the greatest of all mercies is surely the forgiveness of sins. By sending His Son to us God is stating
clearly He wants to forgive those want to be forgiven. And He would want to
bring all of to the point of this being our
deepest desire.
This salvation would come about through Mary’s
child, Jesus, many years later dying on the cross and rising from the dead.
This urgent need for mercy – the forgiveness
of sin – first arose from that moment when the
Original Parents (Adam and Eve) chose ‘going it alone’ as their kind of life, rather than live under the Lordship of God,
their Creator.
This! After He had granted them the
supreme privilege of being His intimate friends! He had even drawn them into
the beauty of His own divine holiness. What is more, this precious gift was to
be passed down to all their descendants until the end of time. This glorious heritage was forfeited by their one
bad choice.
Rather than say, ‘Finished with the lot of you!’ God decided upon a Salvation History that would eventually climax in this avalanche of merciful love, ‘When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born
of a woman,’ (Gal, 4.4). The Angel Gabriel would tell Mary, a young woman of Nazareth, The Holy
Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most
High will cover you with its shadow. And so the
child will be holy and will be called Son of God,’ (Lk. 1.15).
Mary, being thus favoured to be Mother
of God, simply had to be clothed in that
beauty of untarnished holiness that Adam and Eve had enjoyed before they dragged themselves and their
descendants down into the wretched state
of being estranged from God. And so God
caused an elderly couple, Joachim and Ann, to conceived a child, Mary, who
would never, ever, be contaminated by sin. The Immaculate Conception of Mary!
Now
think of the crib, if possible look at a crib, and there
recognize the beauty of Divine Mercy
– in the preservation of Mother Mary from all sin; Divine mercy in the very Son of God taking
flesh, dwelling among us, and out of
mercy dying for us, rising for – for our
salvation.
As I reflect on the sublime peacefulness of the
Nativity Scene I feel the urgent need for God’s mercy…immediately! In these
days of excessive terrorism, of
thousands upon thousands of fright-filled-families taking flight from
their homelands, of so much heartless domestic cruelty, it is surely most
fitting that we chant,
“For the sake of the Sacred Passion,have mercy
on us and on the whole world,”
as well as recite the ancient ‘Jesus Prayer,’
"O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner have mercy on all of us
sinners, !"
The Jubilee Year of Mercy commences on
the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception; the Advent Season leads towards the celebration of the birth of the One whose name means ‘Saviour.’
I’ve just prayed before my simple
crib, “Jesus, in your mercy rescue the world from the madness of its badness!”
I wish you all a peace-filled, blessed
Christmas.
Peter Clarke, O.P.
.
Lovely, Father.
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