The first Christmas

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

Is it possible to travel in time? Professor Michio Kaku says it is possible but impractical. The energy requirements to bend time are onerous, the equivalent to a star or a black hole. If we could one day manage that amount of energy at will we could perhaps attempt time-travelling. We are all moving through time at a rate of about twenty-four hours per day but God does not travel with us in the same way because He exists outside time. Could God enter time? Could he manage the enormous amounts of energy necessary to leave the nunc-stans of the philosophers and enter our time and yet continue to be God and thus not a subject to circumstance? Ah! This is getting difficult.

I don’t think God would have any trouble gathering the necessary energy …

To whom then will you compare me,
or who is my peer? says the Holy One.
Lift up your eyes on high and see:
Who created all these?
He who brings out their host and numbers them,
calling them all by name;
because He is great in strength,
mighty in power,
not one of them is missing.
Isaiah 40:25-26

In fact, I am sure that He declared having done it at least once. God moved through time from point zero to a specific hour of His choice allowing certain things to happen to Him in the same manner that things happen to us.

“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.  Father, glorify Your Name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” John 12: 27-28

“For this I have come to this hour” is one of the most intriguing phrases in the Gospels. Why didn’t Jesus say “For this I was born” (John 18:37) or something of that sort? Why did he say “this hour” — and how could God the Father respond from the depths of eternity and talk to Jesus the man?  I find that passage of the Gospel of John most mysterious  because Jesus is in the present but God the Father expresses the past in saying “I have glorified [my name]” and the future with “I will glorify it again.”  The unfathomable mysteries of the hypostatic union make a brief appearance there. God was, is, and shall be all at once. Sorry, there is no way to express the concept precisely, perhaps it is possible to do it in Greek.

Jesus came to one hour and was born of a virginal maiden who had been conceived without sin only a few years earlier: a miracle inside a miracle, inside a miracle! Like those traditional Russian matryoshka dolls. The stars were already saying the Celestial Poem of the Messiah — wise men from the East saw the amazing show in the night skies over Babylon and came to see the newborn King of the Jews. Angels and simple shepherds were witnesses that something quite unusual was going on in David’s town of Beth-lehem, the “house of bread” now turned Beth-l’hayim,  the house of life and salvation. God entered time, six miles south of Jerusalem while almost every other person in the world continued travelling in time, twenty-four hours per day towards l’mitah, to death and their inevitable after-death encounter with Him in the realms beyond.

The ancient pagans believed that their gods liked to visit them disguised as mere mortals. Not one of their poets ever imagined the Incarnation, no one could possibly imagine something so simple and yet so sublime. “Laugh with me, I have come to this hour to kill death, to make all things new, to wipe all the tears from your eyes.”

The joke is missed by those who scorn the miracle of Christmas. To their sad intellects it may look like a pious fable but not to us. The God that made all those nuclear furnaces we call stars, the source and master of all that energy, entered time and became a little Jewish baby in the Middle East. A small baby in a manger, a tiny light destined to conquer the immensity of the night outside. The powers of darkness defeated by a young maiden and a baby. Who could have known?

A God in love with his creatures became one of them. He came to this time, our time, for the love of us.

Merry Christmas.

The Holy Family, oil painting, ca. 1787, by Francisco de Goya, Museo del Prado, Madrid