display

"Glory to God on high" is how the angels intone the message of the birth of Jesus.

According to the account of Luke's Gospel, they float in the sky above (cf. Lk 2:14).

But Christmas in 2020 paints a different picture.

We feel as seldom thrown to the ground at this festival.

The corona pandemic and other crises in the world and in the church have brought us to the very bottom.

The threat to our health, the new worries about financial and existential security, the catastrophe over the climate and the loss of honesty - all of this makes us so helpless and powerless.

What was otherwise indispensable at Christmas - full church services, moving songs and touching music, fellowship with family and friends - all of that suddenly seems to have been taken from us.

One would like to ask: won't the festival take place this year?

At the bottom it's so sober and cold, so lonely and lost.

Given the reality that surrounds us, has the message of Christmas become obsolete?

If you look at pictures of the events of the Holy Night, you can often see that the newborn Christ Child is lying on the floor, kneeling surrounded by Mary and Joseph.

At the very bottom they receive him who comes from on high.

display

In these critical times one can often hear that the Church and the world need a change of perspective.

Not only the cases of abuse and the corona pandemic challenge us to learn to see from below and to adopt the victims' point of view.

Repentance in faith and changes in life begin with looking again and taking another, previously hidden point of view.

The “point of view” at Christmas is something different than looking down from above.

It is an encounter at eye level at the bottom, and then, in this solidarity, the common look upwards.

A festival to be found

The festival is different this year.

The familiar is broken through in order to see what we have in common more clearly.

Gifts appear less as material gifts and as enjoyment of abundance.

Discovering new possibilities in the absence of a lack of opportunities and anticipating profits in apparent losses can lead to the surprise that the giver wishes the giver to receive.

That we let ourselves be reached at the bottom by the message of the birth of Christ, that we are found by God, who wants to straighten our gaze together, is the new thing about Christmas, which some may have thought old-fashioned until now.

What Pablo Picasso once said about his style of painting could be a good description of this upward movement that Christmas 2020 wants to open:

“I don't search - I find.

Searching is starting from old stocks and wanting to find what is already known.

Finding is something completely new.

All roads are open and what is found is unknown.

It is a risk, a sacred adventure.

The uncertainty of such risks can only be accepted by those who know they are safe in the unseen, who let themselves be pulled by the goal and not determine the goal themselves. "

display

Christmas at the bottom is a festival to be found.

God, who became man in Jesus Christ, shows us how it works:

"To know that you are secure in the unconcealed, to let yourself be drawn from the goal and not to determine the goal yourself"

.

This belief needs church services - especially at Christmas - because the community at the bottom must not be limited to people staying among themselves.

Letting yourself be pulled away from your goal begins with lying on the ground like the Child of Bethlehem and looking up at the sky.

Learning all over again at the bottom, looking up, can turn Christmas into a new start in a crisis.

To see further than the horizon of everyday life allows, the adventure of life extends beyond death.

Christians call this perspective

“heaven”

, and we have to confess self-critically that in the Corona crisis we often lacked the courage to use this word again and speak of the fact that there is more than you can see.

At the very bottom is not the exit, but the apex

Where we look up in faith, there is no consolation in the hereafter;

but in this world the memory that we always have to put our life in front of the mirror of eternity.

Whoever ignores this point of view shortens the horizon of hope.

The sky becomes cloudy when the light from above is no longer allowed to penetrate.

display

Whoever knows at the bottom that the common gaze lifts up will not set any freely chosen limit to life on earth.

For Christians, the bottom is not the exit, but the apex.

Christmas has Easter in view.

That festival first confronted us with Corona this year so that it doesn't let us surrender now.

Because the silence of the Holy Night brings to light what is still outstanding:

everything!

In this sense the chanting of the angels goes on and beyond Christmas:

"Glorified is God on high and on earth is peace with the men of his grace!"

(Lk 2:14)

Christians live towards a goal and they believe in the beginning given by the birth of Christ in the stable of Bethlehem.

To let oneself be pulled from the goal remains the adventure of a departure that will lead people over and over again in the course of their lives.

Not looking for what is one's own first, but first finding the completely different, God, who has assumed a human face in Jesus Christ, leads to the peace of Christmas.

This security of faith in the unsecured of the world gives the message of this festival a new meaning in the current crises.

The change of perspective so often demanded these days remains a risk, a sacred adventure in the mature insight that one cannot and does not want to determine the goal oneself.

But where the temptation exists, heaven becomes a projection;

where Christmas is allowed to speak again, it becomes a true perspective.

Christians and their church are not “systemically important” in the sense that the business has to run.

Rather, they are “relevant to existence” because Christmas refers to Easter and a sky is stretched out over us that is too often clouded by the clouds of everyday life.

Christmas 2020 can become that ray of sunshine that breaks through this ceiling.

It is important to regain this outlook.

To sense him again in the heart and to make him present before the eyes of our spirit by looking up from below anew, seeing the angels and hearing them sing the praises of God, creates a broad horizon of hope.

This year her message sounds even more urgent and at the same time more liberating:

"God is glorified on high and on earth is peace with the people of his grace!"

(Lk 2:14).

Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, 61, is a delegate for catechesis in the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization in Rome and Bishop Emeritus of Limburg.

This text is from WELT AM SONNTAG.

We are happy to deliver them to your home on a regular basis.

Source: Welt am Sonntag