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.
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