By Archbishop Mark Coleridge
Christmas is a time for people to come together – families, friends, communities – and there’s a good reason for this.
In this time of pandemic when isolation and separation have struck us all it’s especially important to come together to celebrate what makes us one rather than endure what keeps us apart.
But there’s a deeper reason why Christmas is about people coming together and why the feast really matters.
In the birth of Jesus, God becomes one of us; and once that happens the ultimate separation is overcome – the sundering of heaven and earth, God and humanity.
The two become one flesh. God makes a home among us so that we can make our home in God. God sits down at table with us so that we can sit down at table with him.
And once he takes flesh in Jesus, God remains in flesh for ever. Christmas isn’t “once upon a time”– it is forever.
It means that God is found always and only in the flesh.
Early in the last century the French Catholic writer Charles Peguy wrote of a widespread denial of the Incarnation, which he called “a mystical disaster”.
He meant that many people, even the devout, think they have to escape the flesh in order to experience God.
They think they have to escape their humanity in order to find their way to the divinity when in fact the exact opposite is true.
They have to enter more deeply into their humanity in order to discover the divinity.
They have to embrace the flesh in order to experience God, or at least to experience the real God rather than some anti-human, life-denying pagan deity.
An implication of this is that those who believe in the Incarnation have to enter deeply into culture and history rather than walk away from them as if culture and history were only to be rejected and condemned.
The real God has entered deeply into culture and history, gone to their very bedrock in the Incarnation; and it is there that God is to be found.
This is what the Second Vatican Council meant in speaking of “the signs of the times”.
These are the often surprising signs of God immersed in culture and history, signs of heaven on earth that need to be discerned and interpreted.
One of the most powerful of these signs is when, in a world of separation and polarisation, human beings reach out beyond the divides to come together in the way envisioned by Pope Francis in his Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti.
Once the ultimate separation of heaven and earth, God and humanity is overcome there is no separation that cannot be overcome, no chasm that cannot be bridged.
That’s the good news of Christmas. In families and politics, between friends and nations, among religions and cultures there is no estrangement or enmity that cannot be transcended.
Christmas says that reconciliation and communion are possible, that there can be peace on earth and between human beings.
We are in fact sisters and brothers, all of us, and we were created not for estrangement and enmity but for the joy of God’s peace.
That’s the truth announced by Christmas, and it’s what Christmas makes possible.
That’s why Christmas is not just an optional extra but a necessity.
The festival began long ago as a celebration of the triumph of light over darkness in the northern world, the feast of the sol invictus, the unconquered sun.
But in the meantime Christmas has become much more, even in our part of the world where the seasons are vice versa.
Christmas has become a celebration of the triumph of togetherness over separation, of communion over division, of peace over enmity.
This triumph moves at every level.
It touches individual hearts, families, religious communities, societies, nations.
Christmas speaks an ageless truth not just to the Church or to Christians but to everyone and to the whole world; and in a time like this that truth is as necessary as it has ever been.
Archbishop Mark Coleridge is the Archbishop of Brisbane.
