Beyond the Creche

We wait for the baby – for the infant.   Do we wait for a sweet face and imagine the tender scene at the manager with Mary and Joseph, the angels, and all the animals?  Do we think a bit deeper and remember why he came?  And, how do we wait?

Father Richard Rohr in his 1989 Catholic Update contribution “Christmas Watch: What are we waiting for?” gives us an answer to the latter question.  He said: “We have to wait for the coming of Jesus in the manner of poor people, of people in touch with their inner emptiness and hunger.  To use the words of the Magnificat [See Monsignor’s Tuesday homily], God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty’ (Luke 1:53).” 

“That’s why Jesus said he came to preach the Gospel to the poor, because poor people – like the shepherds at Bethlehem, like the poor among us today – are in a unique position to hear the Good News, because they know they need it…It was Jesus’ Christmas gift to us to show us the way to God.  He taught us to pray out of our life experience, our own oppression, our own poverty…Only out of that place of emptiness and powerlessness within our own souls are we in a position to experience the Word of God, to hear without distorting it, to receive it and let it challenge us.”

Father Rohr offers us a fresh perspective that shifts us away from the baby to us.  He asks us to say “Come, Lord Jesus,” but not to the baby.  He suggests we look well beyond the creche and as adults to find Jesus not in the manger but in strangers – our brothers and sisters at the edge of society who are marginalized and who we know as the homeless, the hungry, and the oppressed.   They, according to Rohr, are the ones made lepers who need healing and compassion.

It’s the day before Christmas, and Santa’s sleigh is on the way.  We should be on the way as well – on the way to Jesus who’s not really in a manger under a star.  He’s hidden in the strangers around and among us.       

Deacon David Pierce