Psallam​​ TIBI​

QUID EST VERITAS?

"ego in hoc natus sum et ad hoc veni in mundum

ut testimonium perhibeam veritati omnis qui est ex veritate audit meam vocem

dicit ei Pilatus quid est veritas"

 

"WHAT IS TRUTH?" asked Pontius Pilate in response to the most important commentary on the Nativity of Jesus Christ – Christ’s own. For Saint John does not give us the conventional account of the Nativity with the shepherds and the angels and the Christ Child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. In fact, the word ‘born’ in relation to Jesus is used only once in his whole gospel. And that it is used here, not on the night of His birth, but on that day that He would suffer death, gives us, in Christ’s own words, the true meaning of Christmas.

 

For the Incarnation points, ultimately, not to the coming of Christ but to His ‘missa’, or His ‘going’; His going forth to the Cross; His dismissal from the sight of men to the sacrifice that is the consummation of His coming; the sacrifice that is our Mass – Christ’s Mass, which is not simply the reason for the season, but the reason for life itself, for it is the very source of our life in Him. For just as Christ was born this day that He might suffer and die to give us life, so too have we been born, not to live for ourselves but for Him, which is ultimately our missa or dismissal from Christmas to the way of the Cross.

 

“To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth hears my voice.” (Jn. 18:37) What, then, is the truth which we have heard in His voice? To what end have we been born and chosen and called by the voice that speaks only the truth? To what truth do we bear witness in our celebration of this Solemn Feast?

 

We are not the people of Christmas until we are the people of the Cross. For Christ, born this day, is the Way, the Truth, and the Life: the truth is God’s love, the way is its giving, and the life is its reward, and in Christmas we have all of these. For in the Incarnation we have the Emmanuel, the fullness of God-with-us, and God is love. And in His Cross we have the way, for it is only in taking up our crosses and following Him that we have life: our participation in the life of God, in the love that is God, for all eternity.

 

So it is that in Christmas we see the light of Truth; the light of Christ whose coming banishes the darkness of sin and reveals the love that was ours from the beginning. The truth that is the perfect giving of love so perfectly received. For this day we have indeed received the love of God in glorious perfection: a love that is meek in its giving, so much so that it should humble us to receive it. For as on this day, Christ “emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men [and] … humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the Cross” (Phil. 2:7-8), how much more shall we seek to live the humility of His birth in the stable, and the full emptying of His love in the Cross? For this is the Truth of salvation, this is the Truth we have sought, and this is the Truth to which our lives must be living and dying witness: that “God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting” (Jn. 3:16).

 

May, then, the light of His Truth that dawned this day, reign in your minds and hearts and shine forth in your lives as you are sent forth this Christmas Day, and always.