Of humble origins

Fr. Livio Tonello, director

Sometimes in famous writers’s biographies we read that they were born of humble origins. We can certainly use this expression for Jesus: we cannot imagine somebody more humble than him: and we use this expression for a king, the king of the world! Are we astonished? God acts beginning from the bottom, from the last ones.

Those who are able to read into little signs the future potential will take advantage of it. As in the short story of a man who came across three stonecutters and asked them what they were doing. The first replied, “I am making a living”. The second kept on hammering while he said, “I am doing the best job of stone cutting in the entire county”.

The third looked up with a visionary gleam in his eye and said, “I am building a cathedral”. We can catch a glimpse of a bright future into the humble birth in Bethlehem. We can discover it through faith looking beyond appearances and being astonished. It is a great lesson for us. As we are surrounded (and maybe fascinated) by the world of entertainment we risk loosing our sense of being human.

We despise the marginalised and all what is not attractive. To live Christmas means to go out into the streets of every existential periphery! Because the wonderful history of redemption started like this: at the beginning in Nazareth, a little village in Galilee, then in a grotto in Bethlehem and at the end outside the walls of Jerusalem, between the two thieves.

Christmas asks us to accept this wonderful “history”: the king of the word became human like us in every way so that everyone can accept his own littleness becoming small to embrace him. We have learned a lesson from the pandemic: it has “cut the grass” taking the lives of the rich and of the poor, of the young and of the elderly... but it has given us the opportunity to start taking care of everyone again, especially of the fragile. On the night of Bethlehem there were no priests of the temple neither the masters of the Scriptures.

Many pagans paid homage to the Son of God but the wise men refused him. Is it still a divine provocation to shake our conscience? It is so easy to be conformist, to think about other people’s conversion... I am here, we are here to celebrate the profound meaning of Christmas beyond the culture of consumerism. Jesus, the “birthday child” must be surrounded by people like the shepherds to whom the angels appeared bringing the good new. Only the marginalised said “I was there” on that night that changed history.

Over the centuries Christians constructed great cathedrals sanding rough stones. Are they just the wonderful heritage of the Middle Ages or do they remind us that God can be there only if we make him at home in our hearts?