But the blessed truth which the Holy Babe enshrines is that God is love and that therefore human beings can find their eternal happiness in him. For when God made human beings to enjoy the infinite bliss of sharing the life of their Maker, he did not evade the responsibility of his action.

And so, when human beings by their own rebellious sins separated themselves from God and cut themselves off from their destined bliss, God himself of his own freewill was made man to restore us to himself, to heal us of our sins, to renew us in his own likeness and thus to make that lost destiny realisable after all. It remained only for human beings to accept him or reject him, to remain the children of darkness or to become the children of light.

It is in the context of that choice that the Babe of Bethlehem was born. In his love he took human beings at their worst and shared their life at its worst.

“He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him”. There was no room for him in the inn at his Birth, and by the time he reached the end of his earthly life there was no room for him anywhere except on the Cross – and in the hearts of those who loved him.

For “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God…”.

So it is Bethlehem, set in the midst of a cruel and largely hostile world, which provides the key both to the nature of God and to the ultimate meaning of human life.

References

1. The works of Tacitus (trans. 1904) The Life of Agricola, chapter 30, London: George Bell and Sons.

2. The works of Flavius Josephus (trans. 1861) The Antiquities of the Jews, Book 17, Chap 10, para 10, Halifax: Milner and Sowerby.