To the Band of Brothers: December 20, 2023

I know you guys are focused on exams. As well you should be. But last night, the Spirit spoke to me and I thought I would share it. I was thinking about Christmas. It dawned on me that the significance of the birth of Christ is so massive that if I were writing the script, it would look nothing like how it played out. In fact, if I were a movie producer and God came to me with that script, I would have yawned and buried it in a drawer. I mean, throw in some explosions, alien invasions, and a couple of big-name stars and maybe I would consider it. But Bethlehem, a carpenter, shepherds, and a teenage virgin from Nazareth… boring.

Yet this is the genius of God. First, His ability to make extraordinary things out of ordinary things. Second, His uncanny ability to stealthily invade our lives, unnoticed by the masses. Before you know it, He’s there. And third, and one of my favorites, His love of flipping the dynamic, of turning things on their head. At least turning it on our heads.

Here’s the thing. We often get the spiritual life and our call to be disciples of Jesus backwards. We think we need to do good things to gain heaven. The opposite is true. We do good things because a piece of heaven is already in us. It was placed there in us by God the moment we were conceived, the moment He willed us into existence.

We don’t love God to garner a response from Him, to have Him take notice of us and love us. No. We love God because He loved us first. We love God as a response to His love for us. It is God who always takes the initiative. He has loved us since we existed only as an idea in His mind to the moment we were finally knitted in our mother’s womb, to this very moment and forever.

Think of it this way. The man who gives his wife flowers doesn’t do so to gain his wife’s love, but to respond in some degree to the love she already has for him. The son who points to his father sitting in the stands as he rounds third base after hitting a home run doesn’t do so to gain his father’s love, but does so to respond in some degree to the love his father has expressed already in countless hours dedicated to teaching him the game and driving him to practice.

The same is true with God. Our prayers, our going to Mass, our serving the poor, our doing the good and avoiding evil is always and foremost a response to the love God has for us. It is a love expressed always with the air we breathe, the sun that rises and sets, the relationships that nurture us, the graces that sustain us.

Ultimately, this is the significance of Christmas. It is a celebration not simply of the historical birth of Jesus some 2,000 years ago, but a celebration of the love so powerful God has for us that He gave His only Son so we may have eternal life (John 3:16). God becomes flesh so that mankind may realize more than ever that God loves him. It is the ultimate, most perfect expression of God’s love.

At the end of the day, it is important for us to understand we don’t have to do anything to gain God’s love. We don’t have to earn it, we don’t have to work for it, we don’t even have to ask for it. It is a gift freely given. That’s why it is called grace (“gratia” or free). The good we do is always a response. It is an acknowledgment and an expression of gratitude.