Blog # 423 Christmas a Beginning

Blog # 423   Christmas a Beginning

            Generally we are accustomed to celebrate Christmas with the whole focus of our attention on the infant Jesus.  We are impressed and appreciative that the All-Powerful, Almighty God came among us as a newborn baby like our very selves, one of whom we need not be afraid and to whom our hearts and affections are naturally attracted.

             However, it seems to me that if we fail to connect the birth event in the life of Jesus with the remainder of His life on earth we can hardly understand and appreciate the full meaning of that birth.
The Eternal Word of God was sent to earth with a message to proclaim, a promise to be fulfilled, and a mission to accomplish. His life death and resurrection was to be the fulfillment of His Father's promise to our first parents of a savior, our Messiah. He was to tell us of our Father-Creator's love and to respond in his human freedom to that love in all of the time and circumstances of  His life. This was to be accomplished through perfect obedience to the Father's will for Him

                He would tell us He was sent for this, and further that just as the Father had sent Him so He was to send us to do the same Father's will.

                  A human body had to be made available to the Word to speak and live the message and mission that was to be accomplished.  That is the story of Christmas.

                   Christmas, however, was only the beginning.  He would grow to be a man. And it was all connected. Always and everywhere Jesus would be conscious of being sent. He would always and everywhere think speak and act according to the Father' will for Him, not in some totally divine way but in a unique humanly-divine way, in circumstances just like our own  In the end, He lived out His human unconditional trust and total love for the Father in giving over to the Father's will His entire life in His death on the Cross.

                    With Christmas as the beginning, if we fail to see the rest of the story and the connection of the beginning to the rest of His life we miss an essential element in the meaning of HIs birth.  And in this we fail to see an essential element in our own rebirth through faith and Baptism whereby we are made one with Jesus as branches on a vine, called by the Father and sent by Jesus to live and die in union with Jesus in constant obedient love.  As Baptized Christian believers we have more to do than 'get to Heaven'.  In Him we are sent to proclaim the message and live the love He brought from Heaven and shares with us, always, and everywhere.

                  "What will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus ?"  (Rom. 8:35 - 39,  Rom. 6: 3 - 5).  That is a good question for anyone who wants to be a Christian.  It is a good 'Christmas
 question'.