December 25, The Nativity of the Lord
The Word of God re-creates the man
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it ….. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him. But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, …. And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth …. From his fullness we have all received, grace in place of grace, because while the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. The only Son, God, who is at the Father’s side, has revealed him. Jn 1,1-18
When we read the prologue of the gospel of John, we cannot give up to realize that it describes what it happens in the families – this happened also in our family – when there is the habit to meditate the Word of God. When we started, several years ago, we were “good Christians“, those who attend the mass by the Sunday, receive the sacraments and educate the sons to act in the same way. God, however, was for us a being quite unknown and indecipherable, as the Lord Jesus Christ was, because we were perceiving them far away in the heavenly sphere: “He was, by the beginning, aside God”. Even if we believed that “everything was done by him and without him nothing which exists has been done”, for us the Lord was far away, still “ close to God”. As long as we started to listen and to meditate the Holy Scriptures, and specifically the gospels, Jesus Christ, and via him the Father, have been revealed to us day by day and now we can say that we realize that they are close, but mostly we reached the understanding to be really sons of God: “He came among you…..to the ones who accepted him ……he has given the power to become sons of God”. It happened because – as the today gospel announces – we have welcome him in the walls of our house and his Word resounded among us, as Paul continuously invites to do: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, as in all wisdom you teach and admonish one another, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God” (Col 3,16). God has always spoken in the history, but before to start to meditate his Word, the man preferred to listen to him by reading the great book of the nature: the starry sky, the sunrises, the sunsets, the sequence of the seasons with the trees which strip and dress up themselves again, the mounts, the sea with its thousand changes or the lakes with their calm beauty. Since the moment when we started to listen the truths of the Kingdom of the heaven which are hidden into the parables and we have participated, day after day, to the miracles which the Lord achieved in our life as he achieved them in the roads of the Palestine, we realized that he is really the son of God born to the world to reveal to us the truths which have been hidden since always: “The true light, the one which illuminate every man, was coming into the world”. But, mostly, we are sure that really Jesus Christ came among us to liberate the man from the slavery of the sin and to save the man, paying on the cross a price which, as Paul says, only Jesus was able to pay. As, on the beginning of the times, the Word of God created the world and the man, by listening today the revealed word the original man is re-created in ourselves, made at his image: “God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him“ (Gn 1,27). And, together with the man, also the world is re-created.