By Father Michael Sweeney, O.P.
Special to The Voice

We have entered again into the season of Advent when, as the People of God, we prepare to celebrate the mystery of the Incarnation, wonderfully summarized in the Second Preface of the Mass of Christmas: “Christ is your Son before all ages, yet now he is born in time. He has come to lift up all things to himself, to restore unity to creation, and to lead mankind from exile into your heavenly Kingdom.”

CNS photo/gregory a. shemitz

This is the season in which we are called to renew our hope that Christ is truly present to us, and that he will, indeed, “lift up all things to himself” and “restore unity to creation.” Yet, as we prepare to celebrate Christmas in the year 2008, there is much that would seem to contradict such a hope: we find our world in financial turmoil, marked by every kind of violence and division.

We know by faith that the birth of Christ fulfilled the hope of Israel and of all humanity. Yet there is something that is deeply disturbing about the fact of his birth: Christopher Dawson, the great historian, reminds us that this most significant event in the history of mankind, the event which would, in the end, change decisively and forever all of human history “. . . was not only unimportant but actually invisible” to all but a handful of Jesus’ contemporaries.

How is it that God would tolerate that the one event upon which the salvation of our race depends — the birth of his own Son — should have been, not only unimportant, but invisible to secular society? How can it be that the truth of the Incarnation should remain invisible to so many of our contemporaries?

Can we invest our hope in something that appears to be so unacknowledged, so powerless in the face of the great evils that confront the human race? Are we able to receive the Incarnation as actual and real, and not merely as an ideal, a sort of “dream” for the sake of humanity?

Our race does not need a dream or an ideal. What humankind needs, and needs desperately, is the manifestation of the power of God: a power that “restores to value, promotes and draws good from all the forms of evil existing in the world and in mankind” (John Paul II, Dives in Misericordia, 6).

In Christ, the divine power has been made manifest, and the name for this power is mercy. Mercy is the power of love to overcome sin, to restore relationship, and to draw good “from all the forms of evil existing in the world and in mankind.” (ibid.). It is the mercy of God that is manifested in the birth of Christ, even as the mercy of God is made visible to us in the Eucharist.

At every Mass something extraordinary occurs, something so very unexpected that we might easily overlook it — the Son of God commits himself into our care. The One in whom all things came to be, the One in whom we live and move and have our being, the One who is to come to judge the living and the dead, places himself in our hands.

The power that overcomes evil, the power that draws good from all of the forms of evil existing in the world, is the power that restores our dignity, the power that is manifested when the Son of God entrusts himself to us. In that moment the least among us, the one whose life appears a complete failure, the one whom all the world may hold in contempt, is invested with the incomparable dignity of being entrusted by the Father with the care of his Son.

No human power can effect, in a single moment, such an ennobling of the human person. The Eucharist is an act of omnipotence, the act of God alone.

Why was the birth of Christ “not only unimportant but actually invisible” to secular humanity? Why was the Son of God laid in a manger —a feed trough for cattle or sheep? Why was the good news of his birth reserved to shepherds —the lowliest and least esteemed of all the people of the ancient world?

Only for the reason that something entirely new was at work, a manifestation of divine power, a power that alone can free the minds and hearts of humanity.

The power of God is not the power of a human state, a power to coerce by force of arms or by economic might. The power of God is a supernatural reality: the power to restore dignity to man and to woman, to remove once and for all the obstacles to the relationships between nations and between persons, the power to overcome fear and even death itself.

In the wonder of the Incarnation, God entrusted his Son to us as an infant —and, in that moment, bestowed upon us an entirely new dignity. The challenge, then, of our Advent season remains the challenge of St. Peter Chrysologus, “Why . . . are you so worthless in your own eyes and yet so precious to God? Why render yourself such dishonor when you are honored by Him?”

Let us perceive in the Eucharist the source and revelation of our own dignity, and let us once again find in this gesture of Our Lord — which is the gesture of Christmas — the evidence for our hope.

(Dominican Father Michael Sweeney is the president of the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.)

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