Feast of the
Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary
(Micah 5:1-4a; Matthew 1:1-16.18-23)
Did you ever have to pinch yourself to make sure you were
not dreaming? Sometimes things happen
that are so incredible that we think we are imagining them. Perhaps we see a person that we presumed to
be dead. “Can it be so?” we ask
ourselves. The other day an Iraqi Shiite
soldier survived the massacre of fellow Shiite prisoners by ISIS militia. He had a terrible ordeal but still may have had
to pinch himself to know that he was alive.
We celebrate the birth of the Virgin Mary for a similar reason.
It is almost incredible that God would become human. Why would the Almighty reduce himself to the
fragility of humankind? Perhaps it can
be compared to one of us becoming an ant!
Who would want to be the smallest of animals that carries cargo all day
long? No one would, yet God became human. Today in recognizing the birth of Mary, we acknowledge
that her son, divine by conception of the Holy Spirit, was through her a human
being.
We must ask ourselves, why did God become human if it was
such a come down? The answer, of course,
is that He loves us. God saw in human
beings a faint likeness to Himself that He wanted us to share in His eternal
life. But that required that we
become as caring as He. For this reason Christ died on
the cross. By his life and death we are rid of our selfishness and filled with his love.
