Merry Christmas to all!

Jijo Kandamkulathy, CMF
Claretian Missionaries, Macau

In the beginning, the Christmas story was not very joyful. The word of God became flesh in a hostile world. It looked like the whole world conspired against the birth of Jesus as if an unwanted child was being born. The child would have been an easy prey for an abortion on many counts. A woman was pregnant unable to clearly point out who the father was. A father was housing a wife who carries the child of another. If that was not enough, now they are making a tedious journey with a maturing pregnancy, jeopardizing the life of the mother and the child. The whole world closed its doors against them not to get meddled into a birthing and all the following complications. Finally, they found a refuge among the animals.

When the infant was born, even the king was against it and sought to kill. He had a political reason to lay hands on a hapless child! Herod was a puppet king, not fully Jewish, and he was not well accepted by the Jewish society. The occupation force of the Roman empire was the one doing the actual governance. To hold on to his precarious position as a king he had to eliminate any possible threat from his society to please his imperial masters. So he was seeking to kill a child who the wise men from the east had prophesied to be a king. All the powers that be conspired to annihilate this child. But God’s plans succeeded. At every moment of anxiety, just before the evil fell, God whisked the child and the family off to a safer place.

When he grew up, the Jewish oligarchy and the imperial powers colluded and concluded that they had annihilated him forever. But the resurrection of the one they thought to have eliminated and the movement he began outlasted the kingdoms that attempted his annihilation. Strange are the historical predilections! In much the same way, Christmas happens in the middle of a hostile world this year with the ongoing wars in different parts of the world.

The most popular Christmas song in the world is the “Silent Night.” The silence referred to in the song is that of the rupture of a mother, nursing her new born child. Well! silence can be of different hues. There is a silence when people are silenced by instruments of power. There is an unforced silence in the cemetery, the silences of those who cannot speak anymore. There is an eerie silence of fear and anxiety in the face of an impending danger. There is also a silence of peace. The silence of a sleeping baby in the comfort of its mother’s bosom. This is the Christmas silence. There is another exciting meaning of silence in Christmas. The silence for listening, listening to the chorus of the angels:

“GLORIA IN EXCELSIS DEO ET IN TERRA PAX HOMINIBUS!”

Let us break our expectant silence now with the rupture of the angelic Gloria!
Merry Christmas to all!

© Claretian Publications, Macau
Cum Approbatione Ecclesiastica 2024