Dear brothers and sisters, Fiat!
In our imagination, in our memories, our idea of Christmas is rather linked to the Gospel of Luke that we read in the night mass: the Child in the stable, the shepherds, the angels. This image of Christmas is carved into our memory along with the songs and decorations; it makes our hearts tender, perhaps more willing, but it leaves us with the feeling of an outward celebration, a bit nostalgic, to which much is owed by the choreography around it. On Christmas Day we read the beginning of the Gospel of John. Today it is once again presented for our reflection because it is far from the classic images of the choreography of this time to go "In the beginning".
It is the same expression with which the Bible begins. It is not only a matter of chronology: the act in which God begin all creation and therefore also time and history is the foundation of everything. "In the beginning," that is, before the creation of the world, before everything, from all time, the "Word" existed. 'Word' is an archaic word, it is no longer in use in common language and today it has lost its meaning. It translates the Greek term "Logos", which in Italian is also translated as "Word". According to John, the Word, existed before there was any beginning, before everything. John takes us to the threshold of history, to the depths of God.
When we hear the word "life" in a religious context, we often give it a spiritual meaning and think of the life of the soul, eternal life, high things. But here we are simply talking about everyday life, the life that makes us breathe, that puts us in relationship with others. Whatever our experience, whatever our way of life, everything comes from and is subject to the creative work of God because everything was made through Him and without Him nothing was made of what exists.
The surprising affirmation lies precisely in the full and total participation in daily life, in what seems trivial, simple, unimportant, as in a family in which we share important moments, demanding things, solemn events but above all waking up in the morning, meals, confidence, communion.
The Word wants to be our life, He wants to keep it under His gaze, under His ‘word’, to make it a light: the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
The Word "became flesh". In this "word" there is all the beauty of the Incarnation but also the strength of the Paschal Mystery because it says that right from the start the Word is not accepted; man has his own God in his head, the one he imagined amidst fumes of incense, flashes of gold and angelic choirs.
The Word became flesh is too crude an expression to enter the heart of man, yet Adam's cry resounds before Eve: " This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh " (Gen 2:23). How can a God dress in the same clothes as man, play like a child, laugh and cry, like a man?
The Word became flesh to give us, each one of us, no one excluded, the light of His life, the superabundance of grace and love of God. His "glory" that we have contemplated has the dimension of infinite love, the totality of the gift, the face of the cross full of grace and truth.
On December 22, 1903, on the relationship between the cross and the incarnation, Jesus explains to Luisa that in the Creation God gave His image to the soul; in the Incarnation He gave His Divinity, divinizing humanity. And since in the very act in which the Divinity incarnated Itself in humanity, in that very instant It incarnated Itself in the cross - in such a way that from the moment God was conceived, He was conceived united with the cross – it can be said that just as His cross was united with Him in the Incarnation which He did in the womb of His Mother, so does His cross form as many other incarnations of His in the wombs of souls. And just as the cross forms Jesus’ incarnation in souls, the cross is the incarnation of the soul in God. It is not union, but incarnation, because the cross penetrates so deep into her nature as to make her nature itself become suffering, and where there is suffering there is God, as God and suffering cannot be apart. And the cross, forming this sort of incarnation, renders this union more stable, and the separation of God from the soul almost as difficult as is separating suffering from one’s nature. On the other hand, through union, the separation can easily occur. It is understood, always, that this is not the Incarnation, but a simile of the Incarnation.