Dr Nishant A.Irudayadason
Professor of Philosophy and Ethics, Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune.

Catholic exegetes agree on the importance of the theological significance more than the historicity of the infancy narratives in the Gospels according to Matthew and Luke. If understood properly, the theological meaning, according to the Swiss theologian Hans Küng, contains the core of liberation theology. One could quibble at length about the history of the virgin birth of Jesus. That would be missing the point. What is important here is the message. What this idea of virginity tells us – which is “essentially in the soul”, according to Thomas Aquinas – is that humanity cannot give itself a saviour: it can only welcome him in faith. For the beginning of a truly new world, humanity needs the action of God.
The “Almighty” God is a God of surprises. He manifests his strength through weakness by making himself a fragile child born in a manger because there is no room for him elsewhere. Küng holds that there is a political dimension to Christmas. The saviour of the suffering, born in a stable, unequivocally manifests that he is siding with the nameless and powerless (the insignificant shepherds of the countryside) against those who hold power. In the Gospel texts, it is the atmosphere of smallness and poverty that reigns. When God enters the fabric of our history, he does not reveal himself as a strong man, but as the most vulnerable being.
This association between God and vulnerability is surprising. The figure of an almighty and imperious God–which many of us carry in our unconscious—places us at the antipodes of any notion of weakness or vulnerability. The two most widespread images of the Christian faith are vulnerability images: the Child in his manger and the Man on the cross. Christmas is first and foremost the luminous face of vulnerability. we see a small child without defence, with an imperative need to be surrounded and protected. Divine love is not a kind of haughty condescension, like a nobleman who leaves his castle once a year to distribute gifts to his unfortunate subjects, but an authentic solidarity through which the master fully assumes the condition of the slaves.
Already, at the time of the Annunciation, the Magnificat of Mary sets the tone. The God who comes and whom he exalts is not Santa Claus of the employers’ council: He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble state; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty”. One must be deaf, or in bad faith, not to hear the political message of this hymn. This is, of course, the “great politics”—the common good of all as opposed to the narrow party politics—evoked by Pope Francis in the book The Path to Change: Politics and Society. In the same book, when the French sociologist Dominique Wolton asks him to identify the greatest threat to peace in the world, Francis replies without hesitation that it is money. On Christmas Eve, God chose His side; it is not that of the rich and powerful.
The late theologian Gregory Baum also insisted on the theological-political dimension of Christmas. At Christmas, through the Child Jesus, God intervenes in history from below. He reveals himself as the powerless, who can only act validly through the hearts and minds of people who struggle, in the power of the Spirit, to create a more just and peaceful world. In other words, God, absolutely needs humans to act, but humans, in order to ward off deleterious pride, must understand that they need God and others to set themselves free. Christmas sings this covenant of the poor in search of dignity, justice and truth. A Christmas of reinstated and satisfied consciences is, in this sense, an oxymoron.