God was born as a baby!

This afternoon, while preparing myself for the vigil of Christmas, two words rose from within me:

The first isn’t obviously linked to Christmas. One day when Jesus was speaking in the courtyard of the Temple of Jerusalem. Soldiers were sent to arrest him. The people around him were quite crowded together and the soldiers had to make a path among them. But as they made their path, they heard, they listened and when they went back to give an account of their mission to the doctors of law they were asked: “You didn’t bring him?”. The men replied: “Never has a man spoken like this man.”

Never has a man spoken like this man.I have a lot of admiration for The One who knew, who knows how to speak of God to us, to the point that John, when he wrote his Gospel said, “It is He, the Word.” God speaks. To speak you need an impetus inside of you. God speaks...and how does he speak? Like a human being apparently. But how is he still speaking? He speaks and expresses himself all the time with all of his life. In fact, we know nothing about God, if not what He, Jesus, has shown us by his actions, by his words. He showed us. But he is not only an expression of God when he is an adult. And the Church’s incredible intelligence says to us: “For this man to die on the Cross, first he had to be born.” God speaks with all his behaviour.

When he was just a little embryo, when he was a foetus, when he was born, when he was a little boy, a young teenager, a man then a worker... One day he started to speak with our words. But was he a mute before? No, everything about him speaks. If we have no words, no knowledge on the subject of God, we have Him. Everything we know about God is through Him, from his conception until after his death, his resurrection and the gift of his soul to his disciples so that they could finally know him from within. He speaks with all of his life.

During this vigil of Christmas, there is something that both draws us in yet is surprising. God: a little baby! I still hear the priest of Nazareth say: “I am neither Jew nor Arab, I was born a baby.” People who have all sorts of ideas about God, who have been moulded with certain ideas, have difficulty imagining the divine subject with this gaze of a baby. God: a baby. He speaks with all of his life, with everything that he is.

Each person understands as they can. Each sees as they can see. I know a lot of this, knowledge does not necessarily support me. What supports me is an intensity of soul which becomes a light from the soul. And this intensity of soul that God communicates with us manifests in a little baby who’s mother swaddles him and places him in a manger.

God: a baby! Later Jesus would say, and that’s the key, “Whoever sees me sees the Father.” God is a baby. God the Father is not older than the Son. God was born a baby. A baby who will express his soul, this joy caused by the tenderness that is shown to him. He will learn happy feelings which make him smile and also pain when he has a tummy ache. God: a baby! God who learns from us, God who receives from us the same humanity to say who He is. This little baby says everything about God. We would like to have slightly more thought out notions, to possess some sort of knowledge. God is a baby. Let’s take a look at the Child.

The second thing inside me is that I would never have been able to be with the shepherds who ran. It is hard enough for me to run now. I already find walking a challenge, so running? “Let us run then to Bethlehem and see this word realised...” I cannot run outwardly, but within I run, “...and they found Mary and Joseph with the Newborn laid in the manger.” And of Mary, we say that she listened. She turned everything around inside her that we say about her son: “Who is it? What will he be like?” Because a child is born as a stranger to his parents at first, so you have to welcome this stranger who is a child, this baby. A stranger, someone who is not like me.

God is a stranger and we have to welcome this unusual stranger who is hard to welcome because he throws all our notions of God out of the window. The baby lets it happen. Mary dresses him and places him in the manger.

This afternoon I was asking myself, What do I like most in the world? What makes me live? It’s admiration. If I could not admire, I would die. This admiration before God, which is said with a vulnerability and powerlessness, yet these are already grand words... God who speaks without saying anything. God who is there, who suffers, who is only waiting for a gaze. He is only waiting for an interest and it is He who places the impetus and contemplative thoughts within us. It’s Him.

Can I get to know God by myself? No. But there is this little one, a baby who is the Word of God. He is what God can say of Him. Now he is offered up to our gaze. Now he is offered to this opening of the heart. There is nothing to do, unless, perhaps, what the soldiers experienced by listening to him. These men of power and of law were grapsed. There were enraptured to the point that they could no longer seize him. With an illuminated face, they came back to say to their master, “There has never been a man who spoke like this.” Never before did God speak or  express himself by the powerlessness of a baby: “This is me.”

You have to let the gaze finish its path. That is all and that’s all I’m asking of you this evening. I ask for this gaze that Mary and Joseph possessed. St Luke says, “Mary listened to everything that was said about her child and she turned into her heart everything that was said to him.” This job, this is where I allow the other to live within me, I turn, I show my presence. She turned the words as if to carve out their meaning.

This is the mystery of God. You simply have to let this baby do its thing without trying to take it. “Never has a man spoken like this man.”

Roger Robert, 24th December 2017

French to English translation by Debbie Garrick and Cécile Simon