| 'Everything is Grace' |
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| Friday, 12 January 2007 02:54 | |||
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We are now entering, indeed almost immersed in, another Advent-Christmas season, which recalls an event which crucially altered the course of world history, so much so that nothing remained the same. The Father’s eternally begotten Son assumed human nature, and having been conceived miraculously in the womb of the Virgin Mary, was born at Bethlehem for love of us as our Redeeming Savior.
“Vertically downward,” wrote one great theologian, came the incalculable Mercy of God. Nothing the world had done, nothing the world could do, merited this divine intervention. God’s descent into our world was totally gratuitous. Grace is everything; everything is grace. The long night occasioned by Original Sin had finally ended; “O Holy Night” is so descriptive a name for what the English language terms “Christmas,” the Solemnity of Christ’s Nativity. The sin of Adam, Cain’s sin, the countless sins of mankind recorded in world history, were in principle now atoned for; the divine good will was showered upon the human race in the birth of the Word Incarnate, Jesus of Nazareth. The Virgin Birth is, again, all God’s doing. As Karl Barth expressed it in an unforgettable phrase: “God, God alone, God himself.” (Gott, Gott allein, Gott selbst). Thus each Christmas offers us a new beginning. Despite our personal deficits, despite our mistakes in life, despite the ghosts that may haunt us, we can begin anew with absolute confidence that the God who created us has determined to save us, simply as a gesture of mercy. All we need do is open our hearts to his invitation of loving repentance and resolution. Hence we owe everything to Christmas, everything that essentially matters in life. If this sounds so simple, it is precisely because the history of salvation is, in the final analysis, quite simple. It is ultimately reducible to the one Biblical datum: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...” (Jn 3:16) This sounds, of course, so alien to the contemporary world, which holds that — as Pope John Paul II observed in his Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994) – “the world is self-sufficient.” Yet, as he added, the world is clearly not capable of making people happy. The world cannot save us “from evil, in all of its types and forms – illness, epidemics, cataclysms, catastrophes...” Nor can it save us from suffering, or from death. Moreover, immortality “is not a part of this world. Immortality can come to man exclusively from God.” (ibid.) The way to salvation, as well as the means, is Christ, born at Bethlehem. He is the only way. Pope Benedict XVI explained, while still a theology professor (in perhaps his most influential book, Introduction to Christianity). Vertically downward,” wrote one great theologian, came the incalculable Mercy of God. Nothing the world had done, nothing the world could do, merited this divine intervention. God’s descent into our world was totally gratuitous. Grace is everything; everything is grace. The long night occasioned by Original Sin had finally ended; “O Holy Night” is so descriptive a name for what the English language terms “Christmas,” the Solemnity of Christ’s Nativity. The sin of Adam, Cain’s sin, the countless sins of mankind recorded in world history, were in principle now atoned for; the divine good will was showered upon the human race in the birth of the Word Incarnate, Jesus of Nazareth. The Virgin Birth is, again, all God’s doing. As Karl Barth expressed it in an unforgettable phrase: “God, God alone, God himself.” (Gott, Gott allein, Gott selbst). Thus each Christmas offers us a new beginning. Despite our personal deficits, despite our mistakes in life, despite the ghosts that may haunt us, we can begin anew with absolute confidence that the God who created us has determined to save us, simply as a gesture of mercy. All we need do is open our hearts to his invitation of loving repentance and resolution. Hence we owe everything to Christmas, everything that essentially matters in life. If this sounds so simple, it is precisely because the history of salvation is, in the final analysis, quite simple. It is ultimately reducible to the one Biblical datum: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...” (Jn 3:16) This sounds, of course, so alien to the contemporary world, which holds that — as Pope John Paul II observed on his Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994) – “the world is self-sufficient.” Yet, as he added, the world is clearly not capable of making people happy. The world cannot save us “from evil, in all of its types and forms – illness, epidemics, cataclysms, catastrophes...” Nor can it save us from suffering, or from death. Moreover, immortality “is not a part of this world. Immortality can come to man exclusively from God.” (ibid.) The way to salvation, as well as the means, is Christ, born at Bethlehem. He is the only way. Pope Benedict XVI explained, while still a theology professor (in perhaps his most influential book, Introduction to Christianity), although people like to say that “with a little bit of good will, everything in the world would be fine,” the truth remains that “it is the tragedy of mankind that it does not possess the strength for this very thing.” Here Cardinal Ratzinger returned to the closing sentence of novelist Georges Bernanos’s masterpiece, The Diary of a Country Priest; namely, “Grace is everywhere.” Christmas each year fixes all these truths in sharp focus. Surely we would be no more than ingrates were we unwilling and unready to affirm all of the above. But what about reluctance to resist the trend in society today to convert Christmas, and all that it really means, merely to a secular holiday for shopping or vacationing, or partying, or simply wassailing? And what of Christians who, chiefly for motives of monetary gain or social pressure, strive to minimize or even eradicate any religious references to Christmas? In a “lightning meditation” written during World War II by the incomparable Monsignor Ronald Knox for the Sunday Times, we are reminded: “To us Christians, the first Christmas Day is the solstice or bottleneck of history. Things got worse then, ever since we had lost Paradise; things are to get better since then, till we reach Paradise once more. History is shaped like an X.” To which we can add that Christ is the Lord of history.
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