The Meaning of Christ’s Birth
The story of every human life begins with birth and ends with death. In the Person of Christ, however, it was his death that was first and his life that was last. The Scripture describes him as the Lamb slain as it were, from the beginning of the world. He was slain in intention by the first sin and rebellion against God. It was not so much that his birth cast a shadow on his life and thus led to his death; it was rather that the cross was first, and cast its shadow back to his birth. His has been the only life in the world that was ever lived backward. As the flower in the crannied wall tells the poet of nature, and as the atom is the miniature of the solar system, so too, his birth tells the mystery of the gibbet. He went from the known to the known, from the reason of his coming manifested by his name “Jesus” or “Savior” to the fulfillment of his coming, namely, his death on the cross.
John gives us his eternal prehistory; Matthew, his temporal prehistory, by way of his genealogy. It is significant how much his temporal ancestry was connected with sinners and foreigners! These blots on the escutcheon of his human lineage suggest a pity for the sinful and for the strangers to the covenant. Both these aspects of his compassion would later on be hurled against him as accusations: “he is a friend of sinners”; “he is a Samaritan.” But the shadow of a stained past foretells his future love for the stained. Born of a woman, he was a man and could be one with all humanity; born of a Virgin, who was overshadowed by the Spirit and “full of grace,” he would also be outside that current of sin which infected all men.
Venerable Fulton J. Sheen
Archbishop Sheen († 1979)
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