AAt Christmas Christians celebrate this mystery that has already occurred – the coming of God in the flesh of Christ – as promise and guarantee of what they still await: that God be in all humanity and that humanity be made God. But if this is the foundation of the feast, then the joy that fills it cannot be subjected to any “exclusiveness”: it is joy “for all the people”, for all of humanity as receiver of God’s love. Christians cannot take possession of Christmas by taking it away from others, they cannot imprison the hope that is the longing of everyone’s heart. If in Jesus the Creator has become creature, the Eternal has become mortal, the All-Powerful has become powerless, it is so that man could become the Son himself of God. We are confronted with that “admirabile commercium”, with that “wonderful exchange”, by which the fathers of the first centuries sought to explain to their contemporaries the event that had not so much changed the course of history as it had rather restored to history its sense. This is the shining hope that Christians ought still today announce to the men and women among whom they live, so thirsting for meaning, so desirous of hope, so possessed by an expectation greater than their own heart. For Christians it is a matter of going, of staying in the midst of others with the same joy with which God came among us in the Son, the Emmanuel, the God-with-us, who cannot and should not ever become the God-against-the-others. Then Christmas – not only the Christian one, but also that “of all”. even that contagious climate of goodness that overcomes the hypocrisy of a foolish do-goodiness – will not end burned up in consuming many goods in a few hours, will not go out with the last light, will not know the depreciation of the end of season sale, but will expand, multiplying itself in daily living: it will be the pledge of a more human life, containing authentic relations and respect for the other, a life rich in meaning, capable of expressing in acts and words beauty and light, echoes of that light which shone in the deep night of Bethlehem and which ought to shine also today in every place enveloped by the darkness of pain and of non-sense. Christians know by faith that God wanted to commit himself radically to humanity in becoming man, they know that he entered history to direct it definitively towards the exit of salvation, they know that he assumed the weakness of men exposed to the offenses of evil just in order to overcome evil and death. And they are called to witness this “knowledge” of theirs in a daily taking up of poverty, of abasement to meet the other, in the consciousness that what unites men is greater than what makes them different against each other.

Yes, if at Christmas Christians are in joy, this is not a privilege reserved to them, a gift the sharing of which would frustrate it: on the contrary, it is not permitted to them to take exclusive possession of it because they cannot withdraw Christ from the humanity to which he was sent by the Father. Christmas is an invitation to hope, and this hope is offered to all.

Enzo Bianchi
{link_prodotto:id=320}