Falling downwards

By Br Mark O'Connor FMS, 24 December 2022
The Newborn Child by Georges de la Tour. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

 

“He came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.”

Jesus ‘came down’. Those simple words of the Nicene Creed, say so much to us, as we enter once again into the mystery of Christmas.

Jesus left His glory behind, the glory that He had with His Father. He ‘emptied himself’—we call this the kenosis or ‘emptying of himself’—to assume the form of a servant, taking on our human condition.

Let’s remember that our God never forces Himself on us. Jesus of Nazareth, the Word made flesh, never makes us listen. He leaves us free. He comes to us, as one of us. He ‘came down from heaven’.

Jesus came down from heaven to become one of us. Like any immigrant, He brought with Him the culture, language and lifestyle of His home in heaven. And what is at the core of the language and culture of the ‘immigrant’ Son of God, who comes from the very heart of the mystery of the Trinity?

Quite simply, that God is a lover who gives Himself to us totally with boundless self-sacrifice. That to be divine, is to become a servant of others.

As the great Anglican New Testament scholar and bishop, N.T. Wright, has noted: God became flesh not to stop being divine. It was a decision about what it means to be divine!

This decision has enormous implications for our discipleship. As Pope Francis has eloquently shown, in his pastoral ministry, washing the feet of those who are in need is an imperative and a test of our being authentic and true to our faith. It is our way of imitating the Son of God, who ‘came down from heaven’.

For Jesus to come as one of the working poor, living in an occupied territory, surrounded by scandal and accusation, living in relative obscurity in the middle of nowhere.

The child in the manger is, therefore, calling us to a spirituality of emptiness and service. Jesus emptied Himself to serve humanity and, as Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, we, therefore, have to empty ourselves of all rivalry and conceit and all thinking of ourselves as better than others.

Such a spirituality of emptiness prompts us to think this Christmas, of what is inside us that we need to empty out. Is it being judgemental? Is it a tendency to sidestep the call of the Gospel to share generously with others? Could it be an arrogance which looks down and refuses to accept others in all their difference? Might it be a subtle racism?

Whatever it is for each of us personally, this spirituality of emptiness demands our inner conversion.

For living the Gospel today is not about being promoted, taking the ‘higher’ place and ‘succeeding’. When any disciple becomes ‘pedestalised’ – when others exalt or adulate them beyond who they really are – the Holy Spirit has a way of teaching us in the Church, usually through humiliation and pain, that we are all merely servants, not masters.

Not to name names, but even the history of our wounded but graced Catholic Church, over the last 2000-plus years, has many very salutary examples of this!

Let’s never forget that real development and growth, the mystical tradition of our history tells us, comes from ‘falling downwards’; from failing and yes, from painful reversals.

And Christian ‘perfection’ is echoed best in the person who can forgive and include imperfection, not the one who thinks he or she is totally above all the necessary messiness of being a ‘graced sinner’.

Being close to God is not about going up the ‘escalator’ of life. Rather, it is all about following a God who is always ‘descending’ and constantly bending down to serve.

That is how we live our way into the mystery of God.

In the words of Karl Rahner SJ, “We no longer have to seek the beloved God beyond the stars in that inaccessible light where He dwells and where no one can see Him. Because it is Christmas, because the Word was made flesh, God is near, and the faintest word in the quiet chamber of our heart, the word of love, reaches his ear and his heart.”

Br Mark O’Connor FMS is Vicar for Communications in the Diocese of Parramatta.

This article was originally published in the 2022 Advent | Summer 2022 edition of the Catholic Outlook Magazine. You can pick up your copy of the magazine in parishes and offices across the Diocese of Parramatta now or you can read the digital version here.

 

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