Every day all over the world women are giving birth, it is a natural occurrence, but for each family involved in each particular birth it is a special, a very special, event. Although medical science has cut down drastically the mortality rate of both children and mothers in the western world, the reality of labour and childbirth still puts us in touch with the fragility and vulnerability of life. I can vividly remember being at the birth of both my children and the overwhelming sense of relief when they were safely in the world and their mother was ok. I can also remember looking at my children new born and wondering what they would become in the years ahead.
The Christmas Story as we have it in two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, wonderfully captures these two elements, vulnerability and potentiality. The infant Christ is born in a filthy stable with all the inherent dangers of infection and disease and into a dangerous world of military occupation where those who rebelled were harshly eliminated. He narrowly escapes certain death when the paranoid King Herod orders all the firstborn sons killed and he becomes a refugee in Egypt. These dramatic events are brought about by the visit of the Kings or Wise Men who tell Herod of the birth of a new King of the Jews. The gifts they present to him hint at His future destiny: gold representing kingship, frankincense indicating a priestly function, and myrrh casting the brooding shadow of death over him. One wonders what Mary and Joseph must have been feeling, perhaps a mixture of fear and hope.
The image of the child is a powerful one and thus has symbolic significance for each of us over and above the physical facts, and experience, of actual childbirth. The child symbolises both vulnerability and potentiality in our own lives. Often we seek to cover up our vulnerability and put on a brave front to the world and to some extent at least this is a necessary defence. However whilst we are displaying a macho front to the world we can feel attacked and demoralised in the inner and private world of our emotions. Sometimes, like Herod, we lash out; sometimes, like the Holy Family, we run for it and end up feeling rather alienated in a place which feels foreign and strange.
The Christmas story reminds us that it is into this fractured world that God enters in the form of a vulnerable child. It is because the creator enters His creation taking responsibility for the way it has developed that human vulnerability is shot through with potentiality. Mother Teresa of Calcutta had what she described as a “Second Calling” whilst she was on a train journey to a retreat. She felt that Christ was saying to her that although she was weak and helpless yet she should give up her teaching job and go to minister to the poor and dying in the slums. She realised the truth of what St Paul meant when he wrote “when I am weak then I am strong”. The rest as they say is history.
So as we contemplate the infant in the crib this Christmas let us admit to ourselves our sense of vulnerability in an uncertain world but, in sensing it, realise that, because God is in us, our vulnerability is in fact also our strength. The angels in the Christmas story called the infant Jesus, “Immanuel”; and through naming him thus assure us that, come what may, God is with us”.
A happy Christmas to you all – Fr Mick