Despite the mercantile recuperation of Christmas, its evocative power, this two-thousand-year-old story of birth, is far from exhausted. In particular in our time when it is incumbent on us to renew our relationship to the world and to the living in a radical and urgent way, at least if the future still has meaning for us. Its youth resides in the surprising promise that it constantly renews: childhood is the future of the world.
This promise unfolds its mobilizing power, especially when death reigns supreme and the future seems compromised. In these dark times, the cry of the prophet Isaiah, “a child is born to us” (Is 9,6), associated with Christmas, serves as fire in the dark and cold night of desolation. It has the signal virtue of resounding in the hearts of those who are crushed by the wheel of history, like a call to lean on the love of life stronger than death, to stand up, and to assert to the dark face of the world their irrepressible dignity as well as the beauty of life when it is stripped of its blush of opulence and selfishness.
Whatever the merchants of nonsense say about it, anxious to keep joy far from the wounds of life and gratitude far from the gift of self – profit obliges – Christmas has its roots in the very violence of the world and in the suffering that it generates. It is therefore not surprising that Christmas is followed, in the liturgical calendar as in the story of the birth of Jesus, by the massacre of the Innocents. The manger is so close to the cross. The love of death. Painful reminder of the “natural” law of a world subject to the power of money and the reign of the strong who impose their agenda and their way of life, even if the world were to perish, like COP15 on biodiversity , held recently in Montreal, proves it.
Thus, the joyful story of a humble birth, that of a fragile little being, in the image of God, has as its background that of the Herods of this world who do not intend to laugh when it comes to secure their empire. In their eyes, birth is in itself bad news, for it heralds the miracle of life bringing unexpected and new beginnings which they abhor since they appreciate only the order and peace of cemeteries, thanks to which they repel the creative forces of the present. So how much more if this birth is the unexpected one of God in the midst of the desperate. A real bomb that undermines the bases of their power which always present themselves as immutable – “divine”. “Good news to the poor” is necessarily in the Gospel bad news for those who grow rich from their poverty.
Now, these people can swagger, boast about their flagrant victories, shout loud and clear that the world is under their rule, time at their service, life a commodity like any other and their triumphal march without fault or obstacle. … The silent voice of Christmas, like a light breeze, blows across the whole earth: it’s all nonsense. Not that they do not have control over the world, how could one deny it, the money, the weapons, the fear, the indecency of the luxury which they display, the greed which they show, and the influence they exert on people proves it to satiety. But he is only a colossus with feet of clay. Because the thing that will never belong to them is the future. It constantly comes like an earthquake with childhood, which brings with it a breath of invigorating insurrection.
No matter how much we devastate the Earth and the living, snatch life with a vengeance from the children of the Rachels of this world, who refuse to be comforted (Mt 2,18), the desire for life will be stronger. Because, we know, deep within us, where the living meets its source: chains are made to be broken, justice and kindness to shine like the sun in all its brilliance. Christmas echoes this intimate, impregnable faith in the soul, like a fire that never goes out. He does it in his own way, insofar as it joins this “something” that believers call Someone, inside oneself, greater than oneself, who reveals us to ourselves, and the meaning of life and human struggle.
However, it is difficult in a secularized society like ours, which has faith, belief, God and religion, a vision so reductive that it confines them to trickery and obscurantism, certainly very real, to gauge their subversive and liberating charge. But it is nevertheless the sign of Christmas: song of the humble and the humbled which merges with the very song of God, humble and humiliated, and reminds the self-proclaimed masters of time and their idols who crush and humiliate, that their reign does not only for a while. Song that affirms the dawn against the persistence of the night, and keeps alive the flickering flame and the human march in alert of hope, in struggle and resistance. The task is great. But how beautiful the song is. It’s Christmas.