December 18, 2025 // Columns

The Love of Christ, the Joy of Christmas

Father Mark Hellinger

We finally come to the great celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. This day, and this season, reminds us of an essential truth – a truth that, like Jesus in the manger, appears small, even insignificant, but one, when it is allowed to grow in our hearts to full stature, has the power to change everything. It is a truth that can be summarized in this way: Christmas teaches us that we were loved by God before we were lovable. Indeed, this is the truth of God’s word itself, given to us by St. John in his first letter. God loved us first.

The struggle to understand what this means draws each of us to the manger. If we search the depth of our hearts, I think we find that our failures in love – our rejection of God, our hurting others, our isolation and loneliness in the darkness of this world – are rooted in our lack of acceptance of the love that God has for us. So, we come to manger because there is a restlessness in our hearts – a part of us that cannot understand what it means to be so profoundly loved. Yet, something in our hearts cannot stay away. Something draws us to this celebration – no matter how close or far we feel from God.

In the manager we find the living God – and we find the powerful evidence of the fact that we have been loved before we were loveable. What have you done in your life to earn a Savior such as this? The answer is nothing. And yet, there He is – love in the flesh, the living God come to save you.

That is the power of the name Emmanuel – God is with us. Pope Benedict XVI gave a powerful reflection on the power of this proclamation when he said: “What does it mean when we call this God a living God? It means that this God is not a conclusion we have reached by thinking, which we now offer to others in the certainty of our own perception and understanding. When we talk of the living God, it means this: This God shows Himself to us. He looks out from eternity into time and puts Himself into a relationship with us. We cannot define Him in whatever way we like. He has defined Himself and now stands before us as Our Lord, over us and in our midst. This self-revelation of God, by virtue of which He is not our conception but our Lord, rightly stands, therefore, at the center of our Creed.”

Christmas is about that essential truth that we are first loved by a God who is not an idea, or a concept, or a placebo, or distant clockmaker, but a person – one with whom we can relate and over whom we have no control. In His love for each one of us, He took on our flesh to save us. He revealed Himself to us. He died to save us. He rose to offer us life.

So often, when I am with others in the confessional, it is noticeable how Satan deceives us into thinking we have to earn God’s love. And it is noticeable how often the experience of doubt or rejection of God really has less to do actual atheism and more to do with being overwhelmed by our sin. So, I say to each and every person: Jesus comes to us as a Child to crush that lie. He comes to us as the proof that we are first loved before we could ever have earned it. He comes to us to love us into being worthy of love.

And when we realize the truth of God’s love at Christmas, that is what sustains us in a life given to Him for the rest of the year. We are reminded of the primacy of God’s love for us at every Mass, and despite straying far from God because of our sins, we aren’t even successfully fooling ourselves.

To accept this love and to learn to abide in it – that is, to live and delight in it, to be made free by it, and to live a life that sees God as a savior and not a taskmaster – is a challenge of humility more than it is of anything else. And we are reminded of this essential reality every time we say the Creed. But in particular, we are reminded of it at Christmas (and the Annunciation) as we genuflect at the mystery of Love’s coming in the flesh.

Every time we say the Creed, we are supposed to bow at the words, “and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man.” Why? Because it is the reminder that Love humbled itself and came down – Love came down to us who could not reach up to it. And so, every time we do it, and especially as we genuflect at those powerful words, we are reminded of humility: the humility of God and the humility we are called to have before His overwhelming love.

Drawing on the design of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem – a church that is only accessible today by bending down to pass through the doorway, which is maybe 4-feet high – Pope Benedict commented: “Anyone wishing to enter the place of Jesus’ birth has to bend down. It seems to me that a deeper truth is revealed here, which should touch our hearts on this holy night: If we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our ‘enlightened’ reason. We must set aside our false certainties, our intellectual pride, which prevents us from recognizing God’s closeness. We must follow the interior path of St. Francis – the path leading to that ultimate outward and inward simplicity that enables the heart to see. We must bend down, spiritually … in order to pass through the portal of faith and encounter the God who is so different from our prejudices and opinions – the God who conceals Himself in the humility of a newborn baby. In this spirit, let us celebrate the liturgy of the holy night, let us strip away our fixation on what is material, on what can be measured and grasped. Let us allow ourselves to be made simple by the God who reveals Himself to the simple of heart.”

At Christmas, we are reminded even by the simple action of genuflecting at the mystery of God made man that we are first loved. That we do not and cannot earn God’s love. And that every time we bow down at these words throughout the whole year, at every Sunday Mass we attend, that we can live the joy of Christmas. The joy of being with the God who has revealed Himself to us, has come in the flesh, has freed us from our sin, and offers us abundant life. The joy of giving ourselves to the God who has done these things and does not allow our sinfulness to keep us far away from Him.