JESUS IS THE LIGHT OF OUR LIFE

We celebrate Christmas today. It is a vocation to celebrate love, Incarnation, Emmanuel, hypostatic unity and time to empty our self to give space to Jesus to get born in our hearts.

Love Story (Jn 3:16) 

“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (Jn 3:16) Karl Barth, one of the great Protestant theologians was asked to be a guest lecturer at the University of Chicago Divinity School. At the end of a captivating closing lecture, the president of the seminary announced that Dr. Barth was not well and was quite tired. “Therefore, I will ask just one question on behalf of all of us.” He turned to the renowned theologian and asked, “Of all the theological insights you have ever had, which do you consider to be the greatest of them all?“ It was the perfect question for a man who had written literally tens of thousands of pages of some of the most sophisticated theology ever put into print. Karl Barth closed his tired eyes, and he thought for a minute, and then he half smiled, opened his eyes, and said to those young seminarians, “The greatest theological insight that I have ever had is this: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Christmas is the celebration of this great Divine Love for us sinful humans.

 

Incarnation (Jn 1:14)

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14) This spectacular truth, at the center of what we celebrate at Christmas, we call “the incarnation,” which means the “in-fleshing” of the divine Son — God himself taking human flesh and blood and all our humanness. Christmas is when he adds humanity to his divinity, and does so that he might rescue us from our soul-destroying rebellion, and lavish us with the everlasting enjoyment for which we were made.

 

God with us (Is 7:14)

“Emmanuel” means, “God with us.” The word is found three times in the Old Testament of the Bible: Isaiah 7:14, 8:8, 8:10. It is found only once in the New Testament, in Matthew 1:23 toward the end of the birth narrative of Jesus. Here Matthew is citing Isaiah 7:14, and the word is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew word from the Old Testament. Matthew says that the birth of Jesus by the Virgin Mary is to “fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel’ (which means, God with us)” (1:22-23). Thus, Matthew tells his readers that Jesus’ birth fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah and goes on to explain what the word

 

Hypostatic unity (Jn 10:30)

“I and the Father are one” (Jn 10:30). ”It is a glorious revelation, and it’s also a great mystery. This is the greatest mystery in all of history, how God himself became fully human without ceasing to be fully divine — that God, in all his God-ness, united himself with all man-ness. Church history has coined it “the hypostatic union,” the joining of two distinct natures in one undivided person (“hypostatic” is just a fancy word for “personal”). Jesus is fully God and fully man in one spectacular person. And this union of God and man in Jesus is what makes possible our own union with the Godhead through him. 

 

Time to Empty Onself

He emptied Himself (Phil 2: 7). “But he emptied himself taking the form of a slave, being born in the human likeness” (Phil 2:7). The expression is not what he emptied himself of; it’s an idiomatic way of saying he became a nobody, he humbled himself completely, not only to become a human being, but to go all the way to the ignominy and shame and torture of the cross. . . . It’s talking about the astonishing, unequal, unimaginable, indescribable, self-humiliation in becoming human and then going so far not only to be a slave, but a slave who dies on the cross.

 

Christmas is the time to celebrate the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ who is the model of joy, hope, faith and peace. We just not only invite him but allow Him to born at the centre of our hearts. When Jesus gets born in our heart, He will light our life because Jesus is LIGHT.