I.

We all have childhood memories of Christmas, even if they are not explicitly religious. Some fill us with nostalgia, some are bitter sweet, some filled with grief over relatives that are not with us anymore, but we were all touched deeply in some way or other during the celebration of those days. It is something that we associate with being home.

And all of us have at some point left home. Yet something of what we are looking for in life has been anticipated in this experience of home. In some way it is as the philosopher Ernst Bloch says: life is a quest for what shines into every childhood, but wherein nobody ever was – home.

II.

And that all that might not have been good or that scarred us will be redeemed eventually as well. Perhaps it did not take Sigmund Freud to know that we are carred by experiences in childhood as well. And so whatever was good in childhood is also connected with a future hope of redemption from that which was not good.

Jesus himself was born into a home. Born perhaps not at home, which would have been Nazareth; but born into a family, with Mary and Joseph. And the location was a home in so far as it speaks of his destiny, his future as well: it was in Bethlehem, he city of David, from whom the Messiah was expected.

To quote St. Thomas Aquinas:

“He wished to be born at Bethlehem away from home; because, as Gregory (the Great) says, through the human nature which He had taken, He was born, as it were, in a foreign place - foreign not to His power, but to His Nature. And, again, as the Venerable Bede says ((on Lk. 2:7)): "In order that He who found no room at the inn might prepare many mansions for us in His Father's house."

And so: beginning and future mission are connected in this birth, this first home that Jesus saw in his life as man.

III.

Childhood in itself connects both: the first experiences of our past, and the future. This is so because children are young, and in their youthfulness they point to a future yet to be fulfilled.

And that is in a way true for God himself. St. Augustine says somewhere that God is the oldest being, the Ancient of Days, if you want, because he always already was and is, even before the world was created, even before the beginning of time he already was.

Yet God is also the very youngest, because he is also still to come; for he is our future: wherever we will be in the future, God is still our goal for which we are striving. He himself is the unfulfilled promise of our childhood. And therefore it is also fitting that he becomes a child. He is not only our deepest memory but also our greatest hope. He is at once the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.

This does not mean that the end is nothing else but the beginning; we do not simply return to our origins, and then everything starts all over again. It is not an eternal return as we find it in most pagan religions. Then our past would not be redeemed, but we would be cursed to have to return to it in its unredeemed form. Friedrich Nietzsche made this eternal return into his religion, where all things constantly return; but he also saw that this was a frightful prospect, not a form of redemption. What we expect, by contrast, is not an “eternal return,” but rather a “return to eternity.” If there is a cycle, then it is a unique cycle, one that begins with creation and ends with the Last Judgment. But all of this, with its past and future, be it our personal history or that of the universe, is already present in that little child in the stable of Bethlehem, who is the turning point of this “return to eternity.”

Of the Father’s love begotten,
Ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega,
He the source, the ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see,
Evermore and evermore!

IV.

And so in him all things begin, and to him all things return. Yet he is also in the present. He is in our every moment of life. And so in all we do, he is born, if we allow him to be the beginning and end of all our endeavors. We can then incarnate him in our every action and undertaking.

This is of course true especially for the Divine Liturgy, which makes present God’s eternity and his incarnation. In the old Latin rite of the mass the priest would therefore say the following prayer at the beginning of mass:

ACTIONES nostras, quaesumus Domine, aspirando praeveni et adiuvando prosequere: ut cuncta nostra oratio et operatio a te semper incipiat, et per te coepta finiatur. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

DIRECT, we beg Thee, O Lord, our prayers and our actions by Thy holy inspirations and carry them on by Thy gracious assistance, so that every work of ours may always begin with Thee, and through Thee come to completion. Amen.

And so in all moments of life all 3 dimensions of time, past, present and future are there. We are always embraced by all of eternity, and it is our task to make the eternal meaning of life present in all our actions and endeavors.

But this, of course, we could not do, if God had not done it already. If he had not entered human life and its temporality, our own temporality would be unredeemed, and our attempts at living sub specie aeternitatis – under the viewpoint of eternity – would be futile.

V.

So what we celebrate in this night is the redemption of time itself. For it is for our redemption that God takes our nature. And it is our nature to live in time, while we are, at the same time, meant for eternity. If eternity does not take shape in our lives, then our lives remain meaningless.

If on the other hand, we can live our lives under the viewpoint of eternity, then we can even make sense of the suffering and the negative moments in our lives. After all, Jesus came for our redemption, and he knows that there have been unredeemed times in our life.

The child in the manger therefore does not leave out cross and suffering. I have a holy card of an old painting that shows the child in the manger, not looking at his mother, but at us, and in his hands he holds a tiny cross. And ancient traditions have connected the wood of the manger with the wood of the cross. After all, the stable of Bethlehem was not a 5 star hotel, and Jesus is almost as vulnerable and naked in the manger as he will be on the cross.

VI.

So, just as our childhood was not perfect, so from the beginning Jesus anticipates the cross.

In the Baroque church of Oberammergau there is an altarpiece that shows the Holy Trinity deliberating about the Incarnation. The Son gestures towards the Earth, obviously suggesting to the Father that he should become incarnate, that he should take our human nature. Above the two hovers the dove of the Holy Spirit. The Father embraces the Son with one arm, as if not wanting to let him go, but in the other hand he holds the scepter of the rule and providential governance of the world, and so he also is concerned for our salvation. Of course, we know that it is not as if the second person of the Trinity ever had left the Godhead. When he was in that manger in Bethlehem, he was still united to the whole Trinity; eternity does not know of interruptions, after all. And the depiction of this conversation does illustrate precisely that the Christmas is the work of the whole Trinity. They always remain together.

But on this altar, in the back of that conversation, angels also uphold the cross. The deliberation about the incarnation is already the deliberation about the passion and death of Jesus as well. It is already present to eternity.
In some other late medieval depictions one can see the little child Jesus coming from heaven, shouldering a cross, as he travels along the beam of the Holy Spirit into the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Naive as those depictions might seem, they illustrate the depth of Christmas: when eternity embraces our temporality in order to redeem it, it does not leave out our suffering and death.
In still other paintings the child Jesus looks like the body of Christ in a Pietà, the dead Jesus, lying on the lap of his mother. Perhaps this will also remind us that we are living in an age of infant mortality of a new kind, where infants die violently in their mother’s womb, which has statistically become the least safe place for a child to be. There are many related wounds that need healing, and in this night we are given the hope that this is a night that Jesus has entered as well. Not just on the cross but even in the womb there is suffering to be redeemed.

Again, this is true in a more general senses for all of us: suffering begins in childhood; our first experiences, even within the womb and in our first years are shaping us, and always also leave their wounds. There is no childhood that does not involve suffering and therefore the cross; there are good families, but there is no perfect family, no perfect parents.

On Christmas, we all get somewhat nostalgic, we unearth childhood memories of Christmas – but not infrequently also the pain, the great disappointed expectations and family fights and conflicts, or, in worse cases, the absence of all that would make Christmas beautiful. It is sometimes a clash of the worst and the best.

While we can assume with tradition that Mary gave birth to Jesus without pain, the woman depicted in the book of Revelation is giving birth in a terrible struggle, under pain and threatened by the beast; she is giving birth to the mystical body of her Son, to the Church, to us.
Unlike us, Jesus certainly had the perfect family, but still, the world that he entered was hostile: he was born in a barn, threatened by Herod, and had to go as a fugitive down to Egypt, while the Holy Innocents were murdered. The Holy Land then was not a more peaceful place than it is today. And yet this is where the Prince of Peace became a little and vulnerable child.

All of this we see when we see the child in the manger. In this child, God has embraced all of it, from beginning to end, from height to depth; and he has done so from and for all eternity.

In the words of St. Ambrose:

O equal to the Father, Thou!

gird on Thy fleshly mantle now;

the weakness of our mortal state

with deathless might invigorate.

Thy cradle here shall glitter bright,

and darkness breathe a newer light

where endless faith shall shine serene

and twilight never intervene.

All praise, eternal Son, to Thee,

whose advent sets Thy people free,

whom, with the Father, we adore,

and Holy Ghost, for evermore. Amen.