Chrismas is a love story

Chrismas is a love story Aloys Budi Purnomo ;  A Parish Priest and Chief of the Commission for Interfaith Affairs at the Archdiocese of Semarang

JAKARTA POST, 24 Desember 2012

Let’s imagine that Christmas is a love story. Who is falling in love to whom? First of all, He is God who is falling in love with us, mankind and creatures. So, Christmas is the story of God’s love for humanity and all creations through Jesus Christ. It’s very real, not a fairytale. Although there are so many questions about the authenticity and the accuracy about the nativity of Jesus Christ, as Pope Benedict XVI recently argued on his latest book, titled Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, the Christians never doubt the validity of Christmas. Every Christmas, Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, the central person and figure of the divine love story. In his book, the third in a series, the pope showed his academic background and writing abilities to offer us new insights on the infancy narratives. In Infancy Narratives, he offered a refreshing look at the subject while still defending to traditional Christian teachings on Jesus Christ as the proof of God’s love of humankind. What makes the book important? It was published a few weeks before Advent this year. It gives a good opportunity for all Christians to reflect on the profound mysteries of incarnation of Son of God as a love story in Christmas. As we know, Christmas has been distorted though in the eyes of the popular culture.  Every year and in every country, it falls to faithful Christians to resist the temptations of consumer culture and try to remove themselves to a quiet place from where they can contemplate the true essence of Christmas as the moment of Jesus’s birth and infancy.  From the Gospel we are able to understand the writers’ main aims when composing the infancy narratives.  It was to answer simple yet profound questions: Who is Jesus Christ and where does he come from? That is the main theme of the love story of Christmas. In meditating on these questions, we can hopefully get one step closer to understanding the mystery that is Jesus Christ and how it affects our lives so that we are able to feel the love of God in our real and actual lives.  In the perspective of the Christian faith, the first Christmas love story happened during a cruel and suffering moment. At the time, people cried out to heaven again and again for justice. They were crushed by misfortune.  Jesus Christ was born in such a situation. Even, after his birth, Herod murdered innocent infants, forcing Jesus to flee to Egypt. It was cruelty and suffering moment. Then we ask, what kind of love story would God tell us? God is good, and so he wants to save us from evil. But how can it be done? Let me share something from Mgr. Charles J. Chaput, the archbishop of Philadelphia to ilustrate it. Thirteen years ago, as archbishop of Denver, Chaput helped bury some of the victims of the Columbine High School massacre. He said at that time nothing was more helpless or heart-breaking than to sit with parents who kissed their children goodbye in the morning and would never see them alive again in this world. The pain of loss was excruciating.  Words of comfort sounded empty. The victims in the Sandy Hook massacre were even younger and more numerous than those at Columbine, and if such intense sorrow could be measured, the suffering of the the family members left behind might easily be worse.   With such young lives cut so short, every parental memory of an absent child will be precious — compounded by a hunger for more time and more memories that would never happen.  This was why we need to keep the grieving families so urgently in our hearts and prayers. As people asked, we propose the same question as well, “How could a loving God allow such wickedness?”  Every life lost in Connecticut — and also in every country — is unique, precious and irreplaceable. We can also shout out similar questions now. Why does God allow war to break out? Why does God allow hunger to occur?  Why does God allow the kind of poverty that strips away the dignity of millions of people in countries around the world?  In the light of Christmas as the love story of God, we have the answer. Through Jesus Christ, God gives us the dignity of freedom to choose between right or wrong, a path of life or a path of death. On Christmas, we’re urged to lift up our hearts and prepare to rejoice.  There’s nothing remotely naïve in this call to joy. We know the harshness of the world far too well for empty pieties. Today, the evil in the world is bitter and brutal. We can see it in terrorism, radicalism and violence. But we know that it’s not new.  Nor, in the light of human history, is it a surprise.  The only surprise is the persistence of God’s love, fidelity and mercy. The surprise is that, despite our sins, we still long to be the people that God intended us to be.  Christmas is the birthday of Jesus Christ. He is our Emmanuel, a name that means “God with us” with all his love, whom God sent into a dark world to bring us light and hope according to his true story love. So, the love story has been with every generation since Bethlehem more than 2,000 years ago. And it remains, even now and here in our lives today. Have a Merry Christmas. ●