We tend to romanticize Christ’s birth. The sweetness of our carols, crèches, and Christmas cookies often leads us to think that the first Christmas was equally sweet.
We forget Joseph toiled to find a place for Mary to give birth. We don’t remember how Our Lady suffered the wintry cold. We feel comfortable when we recall the cave where Christ was born. But it doesn’t cross our mind that the straw the Infant slept on “probably stank as old straw stinks in stables” (Catherine Doherty). We forget, in a word, that Jesus Christ was born into poverty.
Our Lord Jesus is the Son of God. As God, he is eternally rich, enjoying a fullness beyond all telling. He suffers no need whatsoever. But the Son of God became a man. He became a needy baby, a poor man. “Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). Christ took on earthly poverty for our heavenly enrichment. But what sort of poverty was it?
Certainly, Christ was “poor in spirit,” the source and model of all the counter-intuitive spiritual attitudes set out in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5-7). But Jesus was also materially poor. He freely chose to go without needful things. The poor circumstances of his early life reveal this. His parents found no room in the inn. He slept in an animals’ feeding trough. Soon thereafter he was persecuted and forced into exile. His family lived modestly and worked hard for it. When his time came, he became a wandering preacher with nowhere to lay his head. Finally, he died a criminal’s death, alone and naked on the Cross.
Jesus chose to suffer what so many poor men and women endure unjustly and without choice. He did so to reveal God’s special love and nearness to the poorest of the poor. Christ’s very life shows him to be the Lord’s anointed sent to preach the Good News to the poor (Lk 4:18). He invites them to unite their poverty with his own. He gives them hope and patience, humility and love to carry otherwise unbearable burdens. That was the gift the poor God-child offered to the poor shepherds who visited him in Bethlehem. That same gift is on offer to all the poor through history, to those who are poor tonight.
So on this blessed Christmas Eve let’s sing carols, behold our crèches, and eat Christmas cookies with joy in our hearts. These remind us of God’s sweet love made manifest tonight. But let us not forget Christ’s poverty, and his (our) poor brothers and sisters he came to fill.
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Image: Tintoretto The Adoration of the Shepherds
