Bishop Galante’s Christmas message
Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up a righteous shoot to David; As king he shall reign and govern wisely, He shall do what is just and right in the land. (Jer 23:5)
God has kept His promise! In response to human sin, God did not retreat from us. Rather, He reached out to reconcile humanity to Himself by entering into our fallen nature, thereby redeeming it, transforming the world, and giving us a share in His own divine life. With the Incarnation, God’s own Son entered human history to live among us as our Brother and our Redeemer.
Saint Paul in Philippians reminds us: “Though He was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. Rather He emptied Himself and took the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men.” (Phil. 2:6-7). In God’s plan for our redemption, the sinless Jesus — which in Hebrew means “God saves” — did not avoid our sin, but emptied Himself in order to take on our sinfulness and to carry it with Him to the cross in a perfect sacrifice of love. God willed the suffering and death of His own Son so that our sins could be forgiven and so that we might have by adoption what Jesus has by nature, divine life.
At Christmas, then, we celebrate not simply the birth of our Messiah. We celebrate our liberation from sin. We rejoice in our reconciliation with God. We are renewed with the hope of eternal life. We are reminded of God’s fidelity and His infinite love for us. Jesus, who exchanges our sins for God’s forgiveness, is the ultimate revelation of that divine love.
Can we imagine a greater gift? While human words and understanding fail to grasp fully the mystery of the Incarnation, our faith assures us that the second person of the Trinity became flesh, remaining God while becoming man, one divine person with a divine nature and a human nature. Yet, Jesus’ humanity was never diminished or overshadowed by His divinity. He experienced the love of a son for his mother, the joys and disappointments of life, intense sorrow, even anger. He felt hunger, the fatigue of long days and frustration at disciples who were slow to understand Him and who betrayed Him. He prayed fervently, yet still experienced times when He felt abandoned by His Father.
In this sense, Jesus knows us well. He knows and has Himself felt the challenges and hardships we face in life, as well as its joys. Jesus’ solidarity with us in our humanity should always be a source of great consolation to us in life as we celebrate His birth and look forward with longing and hope to His second coming at the end of time.
Jesus knows and loves us, but how well do we know and love Jesus? We surely know “about” Jesus. We’ve known from childhood the contours of His life and ministry. But to really know and love any person, we need to know Him personally. We must develop a relationship with Him by meditating on His Word in Scripture and through the grace of the sacraments, most especially through the Eucharist. As we come to know Him more deeply, then we can begin to love Him as He loves us.
Of course, to love Jesus, we must first love ourselves, not in a self-involved kind of way, but in recognition of the fact that we’re God’s creation and, to quote another, He doesn’t make junk! Likewise, we must love our neighbor as we love ourselves, which is sometimes a tall order, especially when that neighbor is hard to love. Indeed, we are called to love even our enemies — not in a sentimental, Hallmark card kind of way, but in a way that recognizes and respects every person’s human dignity, dignity that derives from our creation by God. As Saint Leo the Great once wrote, “Christian, remember your dignity….”
Our love is directed, in a sense, vertically to God and horizontally, if you will, to our neighbor. One is not complete without the other. It is no coincidence that these two dimensions of our love intersect in a cross, the Cross of Jesus, for it is in the heart of Jesus
that love for God and love for His people intersects. In Jesus, the divine and human dimensions of love are one.
If we love like Jesus then we can begin to live like Jesus. Just as Jesus emptied Himself to take on our sins, we must empty our lives of sin and all those things that keep us from making room for Jesus. Only by handing over our sin and inviting Jesus into our lives can our hearts beat with Jesus’ own heart as we live our faith and transform the world with Christ’s love and peace.
May this Christmas deepen our gratitude to God for the gift of His Son and may we come to know Jesus more intimately, love Jesus more ardently, and live Jesus more totally each day of this coming New Year!
Fraternally,
Most Reverend Joseph A. Galante, D.D., J.C.D