Where would we be now without the first Christmas?
2025 years ago, God became man, and it changed everything. We take the beloved manger scene for granted, but what if there was no creche with its shepherds and wise men? We might survive the absence of eggnog and mistletoe, but what about Emmanuel, the one who makes God to be “with us”?
St. Paul gives us a taste of the stark reality of life without the savior as he reminds the Ephesians of their state before baptism:
You were dead through trespasses and sins . . . following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air . . . in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of body and mind, and so we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. . . . dead through our trespasses. . . . having no hope and without God in the world. (Eph 2:1-5, 12)
We would simply be lost in a dark world, abandoned to our own meager resources.
The sin of Adam and Eve turned the world upside down. They were established in a protected place with all their needs fulfilled, especially their deepest desire for communion with God. But they wanted more, grasping after forbidden knowledge, wanting to become like God on their own terms. And so the lower things of life, meant to be subordinate to the higher, rebelled, pulling our attention downward into the darkness. Fallen humanity now looks primarily to “me,” to the fulfillment of our own desires more than anything else, essentially making an idol of self.
Christmas rightens things out by teaching us the reverse logic of sacrificial gift. Jesus, the Son of God who is the fullness of life, emptied himself, becoming a servant to his rebellious creatures. St. Paul also gives us the good news, teaching us how Christmas, the birth of God’s Son into this dark world, lifts us out of this slavery to self: “Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves.Let each of you look not only to his own interests but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Phil 2:3-7). Without Christmas, we’d be stuck within a futile will to power, groping blindly to create an identity and meaning for ourselves.
“Who am I?” and “Why do I exist?” These are the key human questions. Animals do not ask these questions; only beings who think and shape their destiny through free choice. Though ageless questions, they have taken on much greater urgency in the modern world where past markers of identity, taken from Church, family and culture, have worn thin. This is why we must experience the revelation of the Son of God’s entrance into the world anew.
When we struggle to answer life’s most fundamental questions, we grow restless and can even despair in the face of seeming meaninglessness. Only by looking into the manger can we answer them. We may have abandoned God, but the Christ child proves he has not abandoned us. We might come up with rational definitions of what it means to be a human being, such as “a rational animal,” but words fall short of expressing the reality-altering event of Christmas. To be a human being is to be loved by God so much that the infinite one would abase himself to draw us back into communion with him. Only on our knees, gazing at the Word made flesh, can we discover how much God cherishes us and invites us to enter into his eternal life.
The manger offers a sign for the whole world of what human life means — radical self-emptying love — a stumbling block for many, just like the Cross. Herod represents the mighty of the world who still live by violent self-exertion, vainly striving to build an enduring kingdom for himself. Christmas teaches us that the little ones triumph in the end. Herod’s innocent victims, murdered in his search for the Messiah, now reign in glory. The poor, unlearned shepherds received the first proclamation of the Good News of history’s turning point. In turn, they became the first to proclaim it to others: “And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them” (Lk 2:20).
We call Jesus the Prince of Peace. He may have changed history and our understanding of what it means to be human, but we, too, need to experience it for ourselves. Can we find satisfaction for our restless hearts this Christmas? It’s one thing to enjoy the celebration, harkening back to the more innocent time of our childhood, and quite another to lay down our restless quest to forge an identity and legacy for ourselves. Isn’t the creche enough with its divine exchange? “God became man so that man might become God,” St. Athanasius explains.
But to accept this exchange, we must become like little children, receiving from the Father his essential gift: incorporating into his divine Son as members of his Body. This is who we were made to become at the core of our identity. It is the greatest truth imaginable and the only one that can turn this world right-side up again.
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The decision to move from love of self to love of God is radical. Differing in comparison to our love for a woman, or a woman for man, loving God requires abandonment, complete trust in the infinite good that is God. For a man to similarly surrender himself to a woman is idolatry [atheist Martha Nussbaum acknowledges that belief in God tempers our passions and avoids that idolatrous violence], as it is to surrender himself to wealth, pleasure. Although as Augustine acknowledges God made us for himself and only in him can our innate desire for fulfillment be completed.
That inability to find complete satisfaction [remember Mick Jagger I can’t get no satisfaction] leads to hatred of what we strive for and failure to find fulfillment explaining violence toward the object sought often the horror of murder. A widespread phenomenon in our sex intoxicated world.
For the person who loves himself the end game can be self destruction frequently suicide. Staudt then makes a well argued point in turning the world upside down by our love for the innocent, vulnerable Christ child who is the all powerful God and infinite love.
We read: ” For a man to similarly surrender himself to a woman is idolatry.” Say what? To avoid possible misunderstanding, this needs a touch more editing…
Why is it that Christ’s love for His Church is understood as “nuptial”? And, why is it that all of the Christian life (including marriage?) is portrayed like Christ’s love for his Church: “The entire Christian life bears the mark of the spousal [!] love of Christ for the Church” (CCC 1617).
And, why do we hear from St. Paul: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25)? Isn’t it true that marriage is really a personal and surrendering vocation [!], too, and even a sacrament? Something categorically different from simply “complete satisfaction,” or Mick Jagger’s “can’t get no satisfaction.”
If Man is the only creature God created for his own sake (Vatican II), then loving one another—for the sake of the other—might be incarnational and Christian, rather than “idolatry.” By the freely given will and the grace of God, the mutual “I do” co-creates a new and indissoluble reality.
An entree to explain Christian marriage? Not.
Regardez! “Loving God requires abandonment, complete trust in the infinite good that is God”. We worship and adore God alone. Not a woman. Even a loving woman in Christian marriage inclusive of indissolubility inclusive of the vows. Theologically and practically we must distinguish between love of God and the love for his creatures. A wife however virtuous and holy can never be placed on an equal basis with the love, adoration and worship that’s owed God.
Yes, a distinction, but “idolatry”?
When we are admonished to “hate” all else but God, I have read that this is a poor translation (I am no linguist) of the original which means, as you say, to still love–but to love less.”If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).
Peter. In anticipation of your response, whether you decline to further a well thought, referenced response, I wish to give some thoughts.
Allow me to express my sincere admiration of the great love you shared with the woman who was that indelible part of your life. And who remains so. Love knows no barriers. That love as you referenced it found its depth in God’s love. In that sense there’s a valid affinity. The difference I wish to express in my comment is the infinite specificity of God’s being. If identity and definition, distinction in existing entities has any reality it finds that in the existence of God, who reveals himself in Christ, in human form what and who God is.
Far from the mistaken Jesuit theologians at Boston College that misled a dear relative, my niece’s daughter, to assume that God is everywhere, a truth, although not in the mistaken sense as an amorphous presence. As we know that God keeps all things in existence he is not identified in all things as one in being with them. When we love someone dearly that love if holy, pure, and good is the work of grace, and in a real sense his presence through grace. Ubi caritas Deus est.
We distinguish that love, that which is inspired by God’s gift of grace from his real presence as we find in the Holy Eucharist. The gift differs from the human act of the will that belongs to us, a willful act by which we gain merit. As is true with each of us God desires to be loved as a being distinct from all else that exists.
Just noticed this later comment. Yes, we are and over the years have always been on the same page. Thankful, here, for the electronic social group enabled by CWR. And, about the pantheistic Boston College Jesuit (or course, Jesuit!), how to say that God is both IN all things AND yet absolutely above all things…Synodality?
Yes, Father, spousal love is a participation in the Divine nature (2 Pt 1:4), through grace, in this life. It is not the telos, which is to participate fully in the Trinitarian exchange of life and love in glory.
Fr. should we 1. account for Christ in the sacrament of marriage and 2. also distinguish this marriage from non-sacramental marriage?
Further, do we say that Christ’s love for the spouse is idolatrous?
Certainly as to 1 Elias Christ binds that marriage in the exchange of vows the form of the sacrament. The matter, the husband and wife united in Christ presage a great mystery, the human conjugal union as analogous to the eternal union of the redeemed in their most intimate, spiritual relationship with God. That is the end that marriage points to.
A non sacramental natural law marriage as existed early on in the Church has the potential to reflect God’s goodness in the union between a man and woman. For the non baptized there was the potential for holiness in response to grace. When the Church instituted the sacrament for the baptized it added the presence of and grace of Christ to that union.
Your second question is perspectively irrelevant. God’s love for us is neither worship nor adoration. It is only humans that worship or adore. For example, the Son in his human nature adored the Father. The Father loved the Son [as God would love himself in the mystery of the Trinity] as his beloved, but did not worship his human nature.
Sacramental marriage – does the one spouse participate in Christ’s love for the other and minister it? As do the spouses together in the union of Christ’s love for them? Would any such thing be “idolatrous”?
I am holding that the answer is yes on 2 counts and no on the last. Between them God is not just all over the place. I am thinking that there is something of the same problem at work as when it is asserted that “Catholics worship Mary. statues and the Pope”.
This unique access in the sacrament of marriage is a treasure of faith and reason for them and the storehouse of sanctity of the bond.
The “God is everywhere” thing, “God is all over the place”, is indeed a widespread temptation and growing error and many a Catholic has collapsed into it, consequently embracing of divorce and justifying it. I would not suppose it is confined to Jesuits or any grouping; however, laxity is the doorway coming in and going out!
Writer is open to correction. Or advisement. And welsomes admonition. Thank you.
Elias, love for the other imbued with sacramental grace, sincere and deep is not idolatry. Idolatry is defined here as worship, that love that belongs to God alone in which we recognize infinite good deserving of all our love and gratitude. One to whom we acknowledge as unquestionable good to whom we owe obedience and servitude.
No human person deserves our total giving to that extent of fealty. Whereas love for a spouse may reach a measure of similarity the line of departure would be surrendering the will. Only our creator and savior has that right to mastery of will and life, of our very thoughts, of all our desires. In effect of our whole heart, mind, soul, and with all our strength.
Elias. And to answer your first question directly, what you suggest on espousal love, a sacramentally married man and woman, as with the devoted priest, imbued with Our Lord’s grace, thoroughly enlightened by scripture and the teachings of the Church, emulate as close as is possible the love that holy matrimony anticipates to be experienced in the beatific vision.
Fr. I don’t mean to string you out! but we can’t overlook or misplace the redemptive side in the bond, in front of the manger! As to which, I was thinking more to travails and dislocations endured by of St. Rita. The burdens of the husband’s defections with his service of imperfections and infidelity, fell on her with the suffering that went with it. She was not “made free to serve God in other ways because one must love God above all and nothing can detain this”; rather, her call was to witness the bond. It would have offended God -and the bond,- for her to have been giving talks on fidelity and draw the attention on herself just as much as giving talks on being “released from bondage” and finding righteous happiness; or for her to have joined a travelling band of preachers in a spirit of poverty; or for her to have been made the special witness of a living saintly hermit -or for that matter, Pope.
Rita kept all these things in being.
She also had to carry the disregard and contempt of relatives in high disdain and society that demoted her even further than for having become the man’s wife in the first place, now for her supposed elect position -attitudes that are ever more prevalent and demanding today. The attitude today is “Such a thing could never be elect!” Had both spouses deserted the bond, they then both would have been offending God in the highest degree; and this is what characteristic of present circumstances now attaining everywhere. Meanwhile society embraces error as preordained necessity and intervention from God, as solemn witness.