Bethlehem and the Cosmos

“A Christology deaf to the cries of the world is unable to utter any divine Word.” Panikkar

The first days in Bethlehem and the 30 some years that followed in the life of Jesus, are about one person, who lived two thousand years ago on one tiny planet rotating around one star out of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, itself, one out of a trillion galaxies. The immensity of all this might seem to make Jesus’ life (and ours) utterly insignificant. That would be the case if our religious reach is too small and our understanding of creation doesn’t go beyond the Genesis story. But, if we believe that that the Spirit of God was present from the very beginning – 14 billion years ago, maybe longer, the immensity only fills us with awe, wonder and peace.

Raimon Panikkar, priest, theologian & philosopher, once said that we cannot understand the significance of Jesus Christ apart from cosmology.  The Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, coined the word Christogenesis to describe the dynamic presence of God (Spirit) in evolution; the creative entanglement of divine and created life in the movement toward wholeness and fulfillment.

A look into cosmology can be for another time.  The simple essence of the story of the Christ child, born to two homeless young Jewish parents in a primitive earthly setting in Bethlehem of Judea, shines light throughout the universe. God is not a doctrine but Love penetrating the universe since the beginning. Ilia Delio wrote: “We have made Jesus the object of the New Testament but the whole of the Gospel life is an evolution of a new mind and heart, a new spiritual vitality and action in the world. What took place in Jesus is to take place in our lives as well, if God is to emerge as the unitive center of love in evolution.”

 Merry Christmas