GOD WITH A HUMAN FACE

AGod with a human face@ - Christmas Midnight

Let me tell you about my young Chinese friend, Doris. She is fourteen years old now, in her first year of high school.  I first saw her in a St Louis hospital, one hour after her birth. While the nurse tended to her mother, Doris was lying, naked and unashamed, under a heat lamp, flexing all ten of her little fingers as she began to explore the unaccustomed freedom of the world she had just entered. At age four she sent me a Christmas card on which she had written: ADear Grandpa Jay, I miss you.@ In the fourteen years of her still short life Doris has brought me more joy that I can ever say.   

Knowing how Doris has touched my heart helps us understand why, when God decided to come to us in human form, he started as each of us starts: as a baby. Pope Benedict XVI says that the little one in the manger at Bethlehem is AGod with a human face@: helpless and vulnerable, as all babies are; yet instantly appealing. Looking at this child, and looking at the man on the cross, we begin to see God.

The longing to see God is as old as humanity. It was that desire which caused Moses to ask God:  ALet me see your glory.@ To which the Lord replied: AI will make all my beauty pass before you ... But my face you cannot see, for no man sees me and still lives. Here is a place near me where you shall station yourself on the rock. When my glory passes I will set you in the hollow of the rock and will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand, so that you may see my back; but my face you cannot see@ (Exod. 33:18-23).

What was true for Moses is true also for us. If God were to come to us in his unimaginable power and glory, he would overwhelm us. So he makes himself small. AThis will be a sign for you,@ the angels tell the shepherds. AYou will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.@ 

AGod=s sign is the baby,@ Pope Benedict says. AGod=s sign is that he makes himself small for us. This is how he reigns. He does not come with power and outward splendor. He comes as a baby B defenseless and in need of our help. He does not want to overwhelm us with his strength. He takes away our fear of his greatness. He asks for our love: so he makes himself a child. He wants nothing other from us than our love, through which we spontaneously learn to enter into his feelings, his thoughts and his will B we learn to live with him and to practice with him that humility of renunciation that belongs to the very essence of love. God made himself small so that we could understand him, welcome him, and love him.@

What was true at the first Christmas at Bethlehem remains true for all time.  God continues to make himself small today: he comes to us in the humble appearance of the consecrated host of the Eucharist. In what looks to the outward eye like a small piece of unleavened bread, Jesus gives us himself. We cannot see him with our physical eyes, only with the inner eyes of faith. The longing to see God face to face remains. It was this longing which produced the verses with which I should like to close.  They were written in England a century and a half ago. 

                                 Jesus, these eyes have never seen

That radiant form of thine;

The veil of sense hangs dark between

Thy blesséd face and mine.

I see thee not, I hear thee not,

Yet art thou oft with me;

And earth hath ne=er so dear a spot

As where I meet with thee. 

Yet, though I have not seen, and still

Must rest in faith alone,

I love thee, dearest Lord, and will,

Unseen, but not unknown.

When death these mortal eyes shall seal,

And still this throbbing heart,

The rending veil shall thee reveal

All glorious as thou art.