The Great Church Year -The Best of Karl Rahner’s Homilies, Sermons, and Meditations, by Karl Rahner, Copyright 1993. All rights reserved. Used with permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York.
16 • Christmas: “Ever Since I Became Your Brother...”*
*The Eternal Year, 19—26
The celebration of Christmas is such a pious custom! The Christmas tree, the pretty presents, the excitement of the children and a little Christmas music are always beautiful and touching. A religious mood intensifying the atmosphere makes it especially lovely and touching. To be sure, we are all secretly a little self-indulgent — who will blame us? — and so we readily let ourselves fall into a mood that is peaceful and comforting, just as we pat a crying child on the head and say, “It isn’t so bad, everything will surely turn out all right.”
ls this all there is to Christmas? Is this the main point? Or are the beauty and coziness, the stillness and intimacy of Christmas only the fine, gentle echo of an event that is today’s real celebration, an event that takes place somewhere else altogether, much higher in heaven, much deeper in the abysses, and much more inwardly in the soul? Are the joy and peace of Christmas only the expression of a mood, in which one dreamily takes refuge? Or are they the outward expression marking the sacred celebration of an actual event? Even if we should not want it to be true, even if we grasp no more from it than a little childlike romanticism and homey comfort, Christmas is by all means truth and reality. In the face of it we bravely open our hearts so that it may also happen to us and through us.
Christmas is more than a bit of cheerful mood. The child — he is the one who counts today. The important figure in this holy night is the child, the one child, the Son of God, and his birth. Everything else about this feast is based on and quickened by this, or else it dies and turns to illusion. Christmas means that he has come. He has made the night bright. He has turned the night of our darkness, our incomprehensible night, into Christmas. The terrible night of our anxiety and helplessness is now a holy night. This is what Christmas tells us. Through this feast, the moment when this event took place once and for all should also become a reality in our hearts and should remain there to form our entire outlook on life, our Christian outlook.
If we mortals are completely immersed in the average experiences of our blind, routine, monotonous daily life, then we will have to come to the frightening and discouraging view that — in small things and great — nothing of importance really happens in the world. To be sure, we might think that there is an eternal rise and fall of world events, of the destiny of nations, even of personal experiences, sometimes good and joyful, usually bad and gloomy. Ultimately, however, all this circles in upon itself, aimlessly and without direction. It wastes away blindly and without meaning. People hide the senseless purposelessness of events only by anxiously taking care not to think beyond the next day. Seen only from our point of view, we are an enigma, an eternally frightening and mortal enigma.
If we should examine the birth of the child of today’s feast merely from our point of view, then we could say of him and of us, too, only what is written in the dismal, bitter text of Job 14:1—2: “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He comes forth like a flower, and withers; he flees like a shadow, and continues not.” From our point of view, we could be no more than a tiny point of light in the unlimited dark, a point of light that can only make the darkness even more frightening. We would be no more than a sum that didn’t come out right. We seem cast off into time, which makes everything disappear, forced into existence without being asked, laden with wearisome toil and disappointment. Through our own fault we burden ourselves with pain and punishment. We begin to suffer death in the moment when we are born. We are insecure and driven to be childish about all that is illusory, all that is called the sunny side of life — which in reality should be only the refining means of ensuring that the martyrdom and torture of life do not end too quickly.
But if in faith we say, “It is Christmas” — in faith that is determined, sober, and above all else courageous — then we mean that an event came bursting into the world and into our life, an event that has changed all that we call the world and our life. This event alone has provided a goal and a purpose for everything. It has not only put an end to the saying of Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun, but also to the eternal return of modern philosophers; it is an event through which our night — the fearful, cold, bleak night where body and soul await death from exposure — has become Christmas, the holy night. For the Lord is there, the Lord of creatures and of my life. He no longer merely looks down from the endless “all in one and once for all” of his eternity upon my constantly changing life that glides by far below him. The eternal has become time, the Son has become man, the eternal purpose of the world, the all-embracing meaningfulness of all reality has become flesh.
Through this fact, that God has become man, time and human life are changed. Not to the extent that he has ceased to be himself, the etemal Word of God himself, with all his splendor and unimaginable bliss. But he has really become human. And now this world and its very destiny concern him. Now it is not only his work, but a part of his very self. Now he no longer watches its course as a spectator; he himself is now within it. What is expected of us is now expected of him; our lot now falls upon him, our earthly joy as well as the wretchedness that is proper to us. Now we no longer need to seek him in the endlessness of heaven, where our spirit and our heart get lost. Now he himself is on our very earth, where he is no better off than we and where he receives no special privilege, but our every fate: hunger, weariness, enmity, mortal terror and a wretched death. That the infinity of God should take upon itself human narrowness, that bliss should accept the mortal sorrow of the earth, that life should take on death — this is the most unlikely truth. But only this — the obscure light of faith — makes our nights bright, only this makes them holy.
God has come. He is there in the world. And therefore everything is different from what we imagine it to be. Time is transformed from its eternal onward flow into an event that with silent, clear resoluteness leads to a definitely determined goal wherein we and the world shall stand before the unveiled face of God. When we say, “It is Christmas,” we mean that God has spoken into the world his last, his deepest, his most beautiful word in the incarnate Word, a word that can no longer be revoked because it is God’s definitive deed, because it is God himself in the world. And this word means: I love you, you, the world and human beings. This is a wholly unexpected word, a quite unlikely word. For how can this word be spoken when both the human person and the world are recognized as dreadful, empty abysses? But God knows them better than we. And yet he has spoken this word by being himself born as a creature. The very existence of this incarnate Word of love demands that it shall provide, eye to eye and heart to heart, an almost unbelievable fellowship, an astonishing communion between the eternal God and us. Indeed, it says that this communion is already there. This is the word that God has spoken in the birth of his Son.
And now there is stillness in the world only for a little while. The busyness that is proudly called universal history, or one’s own life, is only the stratagem of an eternal love that wills to enable the individual to give a free answer to its final word. And in this prolonged short moment of God’s silence that is called history after the birth of Christ, the person is supposed to have a chance to speak. In the trembling of his heart that quivers because of God’s love, he should teIl God, who as man stands beside him in silent expectation, “I” — no, rather he should say nothing to him, but silently give himself to the love of God that is there because the Son is born.
Christmas means that God has come to us, come to us in such a way that from now on, even in his own awesome, glorious splendor, he can only be “at home” with the world and with us. Through the birth of this child everything is already transformed. With the inexorability of love, everything is already pushing out from that inmost center of reality which is the incarnate Word. It is pushing out toward the countenance of God, and now we need not fear that before God’s countenance the world will have to be burned to nothing by his consuming fire of holiness and righteousness.
All time is already embraced by the eternity that has itself become time. All tears are dried up at their source, because God himself has wept with them, and has already wiped them from his eyes. All hope is already real possession, because God is already possessed by the world. The night of the world has become bright. God does not allow our stubborn defiance and weakness to be greater than our hearts, and so will not have it be as small as a tiny child who is born and who lies in a crib. Our heart does not want to admit that midnight is already past and that a day without evening already penetrates the night. All bitterness is only the reminder that it is not yet clearly known that the one world-Christmas has dawned; and alI the happiness of this earth is only the mysterious confirmation, which most people do not understand, that Christmas is already present.
The feast of Christmas is therefore not poetry and childish romanticism, but the avowal and the faith, which alone justifies a human being, that God has risen up and has already spoken his final word in the drama of history, no matter how much clamor the world keeps up. The celebration of Christmas can only be the echo of that word in the depth of our being by which we speak a believing amen to God’s word that has come from his vast eternity into the narrowness of this world, and yet has not ceased to be the word of God’s truth and the word of his own blissful love. When not only the glimmer of candles, the joy of children, and the fragrance of the Christmas tree but the heart itself answers God’s childlike word of love with a gracious yes, then Christmas really takes place, not only in mood, but in the most unalloyed reality. For this word of the heart is then truly produced by God’s holy grace; God’s word is then born in our heart, too. God himself then moves into our heart, just as he moved into the world in Bethlehem, just as truly and really, and yet even more intimately. When the heart itself answers, we really open its gates high and wide, and God comes and takes possession of our hearts, just as in the first Christmas he came and took possession of the world.
And now he says to us what he has already said to the world as a whole through his grace-filled birth: “I am there. I am with you. I am your life. I am your time. I am the gloom of your daily routine. Why will you not bear it? I weep your tears — pour yours out to me, my child. I am your joy. Do not be afraid to be happy, for ever since I wept, joy is the standard of Iiving that is really more suitable than the anxiety and grief of those who think they have no hope. I am the blind alleys of all your paths, for when you no longer know how to go any further, then you have reached me, foolish child, though you are not aware of it. I am in your anxiety for I have shared it by suffering it. And in doing so, I wasn’t even heroic according to the wisdom of the world. I am in the prison of your finiteness, for my love has made me your prisoner. When the totals of your plans and of your life’s experiences do not balance out evenly, I am the unsolved remainder. And I know that this remainder, which makes you so frantic, is in reality my love, that you do not yet understand. I am present in your needs. I have suffered them and they are now transformed, but not obliterated from my heart. I am in your lowest fall, for today I began to descend into hell. I am in your death, for today I began to die with you, because I was born, and I have not let myself be spared any real part of this death.
“Do not be sorry, as Job was, for those who are born; for all who accept my salvation are born in this holy night because my Christmas embraces all your days and all your nights. I myself— my whole being and my whole personality — are truly engaged in the terrifying adventure that begins with your birth. I tell you, mine was no easier and no less dangerous than yours. I assure you, though, it had a happy ending. Ever since I became your brother, you are as near to me as I am to myself. If, therefore, I, as a creature, want to prove in me and in you, my brothers and sisters, that I, as creator, have not made a hopeless experiment with the human race, who then shall tear my hand away from you? I accepted you when I took my human life to myself. As one of your kind, as a fresh start, I conquered in my failure.
“If you judge the future only according to yourselves, you cannot be pessimistic enough. But do not forget that your real future is my present, the present that began today and shall never again become transitoriness. And so you are certainly planning in a realistic way if you rely on my optimism, which is not utopia but the reality of God. This reality — incomprehensible wonder of my almighty love — I have sheltered, safely and completely, in the cold stable of your world. I am there. I no longer go away from this world, even if you do not see me now. When you, poor mortals, celebrate Christmas, then say to everything that is there and to everything that you are, one thing only — say to me: ‘You are here. You have come. You have come into everything. Even into my soul. Even behind the stubbornness of my wickedness, which doesn’t want to let itself be pardoned.’ Say only one thing, and then it is Christmas for you, too; say only: ‘You are here.’ No, don’t say anything. I am there. And ever since then my love is unconquerable. I am there. It is Christmas. Light the candles. They have more right to exist than all the darkness. It is Christmas, Christmas that lasts forever.”
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18 -- “Christmas: Grace in the Human Abyss”
We read in scripture that those who love their neighbor have fulfilled the law. This is the ultimate truth because God himself has become that neighbor, and so in every neighbor it is always he, one who is nearest and most distant, who is accepted and loved.
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20 – “Christmas: The Great Joy”
Let us be kind! We have no right to demand a better world if we do not begin the improvement ourselves in our own heart. Let us be kind today! After all, we do not have to be malicious and bitter and defend ourselves greedily and anxiously against others.
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