Let Us Go Now to Bethlehem
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - December 24, 2004
It is the night of our dear Savior's birth, the night when "he appeared and the soul felt its worth."
Those words from "O Holy Night," like the lyrics from most treasured Christmas hymns, are enough to fill our souls with awe and our minds with memories of the exhilarating graces of past Christmases.
But the reality of the words is even more awesome than the thrilling associations they evoke: Christmas shows our true worth. So great is our value to God that he took on our humanity so that we might take on his divinity.
The love of the Lord is shown in how low he was willing to go to save us.
The King of Kings was born not in a palace, but in a stable. He was clothed not in fine royal purple, but in poor swaddling clothes. He was placed not in a regal bedroom but in an animal trough. He was surrounded not by princely courtiers but by animals.
And that was just the beginning.
He would be hunted down by assassins while he still nursed, an illegal alien in Egypt before he could walk, a seemingly-unexceptional Nazarene carpenter until 30, and then an itinerant preacher who did not even have borrowed stable to lay his head (Mt 8:20).
When his hour finally came, he would take a towel and wash feet, be betrayed by one of his closest friends, framed by the leaders of his people, rejected by the crowds in favor of a murderer, and publicly executed between two thieves by soldiers he had formed in their mothers' wombs.
He was, as Bishop Sheen summarized, "born in a stranger's cave and buried in a stranger's grave." From the beginning to the end, his incessant humility manifested both his love and our dignity.
But he didn't even stop there.
The final step of his abasement and our exaltation was indelibly brought home to me during my first Christmas Mass as a priest — on September 21, 1999, a few months after my priestly ordination.
I was in Bethlehem, with two seminary classmates, on a pilgrimage to thank God for the gift of the priesthood. At each of the sacred sites throughout the Holy Land, the Mass proper for the site is celebrated: in Nazareth, the Annunciation; in the Upper Room, Holy Thursday; at the empty tomb, Easter Sunday. In the city of David, we had the privilege to celebrate Christmas Mass for the first time.
Before Mass, we prayed in the grotto where Christ was born. After descending to the nethermost parts of the Basilica of the Nativity, we, like all pilgrims, dropped to our knees and crawled underneath the altar in the grotto, where there is a silver star, fixed to the floor, that exposes the stable's original ground. On the star there was a Latin inscription that brought home to us the historical and geographical reality of Christ's birth:
Hic de Virgine Maria Iesus Christus natus est.
"Here from the Virgin Mary Jesus Christ was born."
A short time later, we offered Mass in a nearby chapel. It was such a great joy to celebrate the Christmas mysteries where they actually occurred. But the most unforgettable moment came right after the three of us pronounced the words of consecration. One of my priest friends illicitly but devoutly uttered words that are not found in the ritual:
HIC Iesus Christus natus est.
"HERE — he stressed — Jesus Christ is born."
The truth he couldn't contain was that the same Jesus whom Mary wrapped in diapers we had just placed on the altar. Bethlehem, literally the "house of bread," was again the house of the "Living Bread come down from heaven"(Jn 6:51).
For the rest of the Mass, we experienced, I think, a little of the amazement Mary and Joseph must have felt in the same spot 2000 years before.
Five years later, the Vicar of Christ has called all of us to live an "intensely Eucharistic" year. This means that he is encouraging us to live an intensely Eucharistic Christmas.
In his beautiful 2002 encyclical on the Eucharist, he urged us to model our "Eucharistic amazement" on Mary's Christmas awe:
"Is not the enraptured gaze of Mary as she contemplated the face of the newborn Christ and cradled him in her arms that unparalleled model of love which should inspire us every time we receive Eucharistic communion?"
The greatest manifestation of God's humility and love — and our worth! — is the Eucharist, when He whom the angels, shepherds, and magi adored becomes our very food.
Emmanuel, God-with-us, is still with us.
The tabernacle is the modern manger.
This is "good news of great joy for all the people."
Come, let us adore him!
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
