• Valson Thampu

‘The people dwelling in darkness,’ writes St Matthew quoting Isaiah, ‘have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned.’ Predictably, we have limited that light to the light of Christmas stars, which have, pardon me, little to do with the light of life. It is native to human nature to improvise substitutes. It has a long history that goes back, at least, to the Tower of Babel. A Tower of Unity was raised as a substitute for God-centric unity.

What does it mean to acknowledge Jesus as the light of life? Or, even more fundamentally, what does ‘life’ mean?

Ever since the dawn of human consciousness, our species has intuited love as the essence of life. So, the Bible reveals the God of life as the God of love. Life is light that emanates from the heart of love. Jesus is the incarnation at once of love and life. ‘Light’ symbolises the perfection of love-as-life.

Light symbolises truth, besides. Spiritually, the alternative to truth is not falsehood, but appearance. The world is a realm of appearances where truth exists in a beleaguered state. Hence the cynical verdict of the writer of Ecclesiastes: vanity of vanities, all is vanity. It is not that life as such is vanity, but that life lived on the plane of appearances is nothing but vanity.

But to live that way is to live life as death. As the Genesis account of the creation of human beings indicates, life wakes up when matter is animated by divine power. That power is love; for God is love. Insofar as human beings are created ‘in the image and likeness of God’, life in the human form cannot be lived in the zone of mere appearances. Truth and love are as basic to our humanity as oxygen is to our physical life. When the foundation of life shifts from truth, human life forfeits its wholeness. Truth is wholeness; whereas falsehood is the shadow-play of the partial. In point of fact, it is superfluous to say, ‘the whole truth’, because nothing less that the ‘whole’ amounts to truth.

Human nature, however, has a proclivity to the world of appearances and untruth, even as the aspiration for the divine, with all that it implies, remains immortal within us. The breath of God, our life-principle, symbolises wholeness. It makes us feel suffocated within the partial and the untrue. Correspondingly, we long to attain wholeness. God alone is Whole. Hence the longing of the psalmist: ‘As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.’ That makes human nature a mixed-up affair. We exist, pulled in opposite directions. The ‘lost son’ in the parable feels not only the pull towards the far country, but also the pull towards home. That pull is the most spiritual element in this mixed-up world where wheat and tares grow up together.

Worldly relationships, including those driven by sex, are not the only palliatives that the denizens of the world of appearances take to. Equally, there is the hiding place of wealth. Remember the ‘rich, young man’ who sought Jesus’s counsel? Also, Zacchaeus who wanted to see Jesus at a distance? Or, the ‘rich fool’ who perished under the burden of a plentiful harvest? Why does Jesus say, ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God’?

Then there is the refuge of formalistic religion. Nicodemus, the ruler of the Jews, wasn’t even free to visit Jesus during daytime! Yet he had a need to meet him. He, and many worse than him, were the reason that the people then were ‘like sheep without a shepherd’. Mere religiosity, it turns out, is no better as an alternative to abiding in the light of Life, than the other two ways examined above, though the prevailing assumption is to the contrary.

It is against such a background that we need to appreciate the light of life signalled by the Christmas Event. Historically, there are two categories of Christmases: Christmas before the Crucifixion of Jesus, and Christmas after. Every event recorded in the four gospels of individuals encountering Jesus in a life-transforming way is a manifestation of true Christmas. Spiritually, it is not in the manger of Bethlehem, but in the lives of human beings that Jesus must be born, and will continue to be born. This is the never-ending Christmas: ‘tidings of great joy for all humankind’.

So, the spotlight in Christmas needs to be placed, not on the cards, carols and cakes that we associate with our Christmas, which is its second category.  Ours is, if you like, the inn-sort-of-Christmas, which has ‘no room’ for the Babe.

In between the inn and the manger there stands, in this mysterious Narrative, the palace. It is understandable that to the wise men of the world the palace seemed the apt site for historic beginnings. But where can you and I go in the hour of our crying needs? To a place? Hardly! Our options are reduced to two: inn and cattle shed. Inn: if you have money in your pocket. What, if you don’t?

Well, that’s the universal joy rippling through the Event! The poor have, thanks to the Christmas Event, a cattle-shed to go to. Never mind who rules you or fools you. They, as Shakespeare says, ‘wax and wane with the moon’. This much blessed assurance you and I can count on: the manger of the Messiah will be there till the end of times. Thank God, it suffices!