In the beginning was the word, and the word became man

BIMBO CABIDOG

If you don’t understand, it must be a mystery. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, wrote John the Evangelist. What language was the word? The people couldn’t get it. This was because they thought by what the tongue speaks. And such thought could not comprehend mystery.

The word came to the world and lived among humans. It was the light, and the light was the life of men. Through it, everything was made that was made. Without it, nothing came to be. Speech didn’t decipher it. Man was mystified, even when the verbo had already become flesh and blood.

The birth was not determined with the accuracy of science. There was no calendar those days. But over the past two thousand years, billions of mortals knew for sure: the God-man was born. And that birth, they would celebrate in the 25th of the last month of the year. Many, of course, did not agree. They argued it was a different month and date.

If you believe in Jesus Christ you must believe in Christmas? Hmm, not so. But a large portion of humanity has staked their lives and reputation for the belief. Trillions of dollars are spent every year throughout the globe in affirmation of the fact that He was born to a human mother on December 25. Billions of people attest as if they were there.

Only a handful of mortals though, awake in the cold of the evening, were supposed to have witnessed it. Religion has a fragile case of the human-incarnate God. Even the writers of the four bestsellers were not telling from first-hand account. And who could be sure the child was He?

The point is that no one needed to be sure. No one needed concrete evidence. It is enough to be told. You either believe or do not. But it is a belief that is perfect. It is a trust that abides even through uncertainty in the shadow of death. What is this that man suddenly has?

Being born is at the outset seemed illogical for a God. The alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, does not go through that. For a human to give birth to God is absurd. But absurd is not impossible. God is not limited by reasoning. He has everything in his hold. He has everything in his fold.

All about the birth was out of the usual and normal. If man was to conceive it, he would have chosen a different course. He would have chosen an entry that heralded greatness, as society always does. For a king to be born in ordinary circumstances was not ordinary. But He was not just king.

He was the word that began all, when there was not even a mere concept of heraldry or royalty yet. He was the depth from which surged the fountain of life. He was the mystery reality, the soul and living essence of the truth. And because He was so, the faithful needed no proof to believe. 

For ages, humanity was lost. For a very long time, it crawled on earth weighed down by a heavy burden. Existence was a huge physical load that it carried to the end that was the grave. It was destined to be swallowed by the curse of mortality from generation to generation.

All the pride and glory of conquests dust claimed whenever the hour came, for the fate of mankind was to succumb to physical corruption. The body could only be redeemed by being wrapped in the light and lifted. It needed rebirth through the word. It needed the birth of the God-man.

A couple of millenniums since, more than half of humanity still doesn’t agree that has already happened. But billions know Jesus Christ, and pray to Him. They celebrate the supposed day of His birth, and glorify the child in swaddling clothes on the manger where a bright lone star shone.

Whether you agree or disagree that Christ is God, it is not his being born man alone that counts. It is the story of the redemption of mankind from the mortal fate. And it is the faith in the story that will redeem man by making him God. The birth of the God-man made man God.

You couldn’t prove it simply by scientific research where you can only find litters of fossil finds from an evolutionary past pointing to Homo sapiens. Christmas is not the link that establishes the leap to a different species. It is the connection of faith to a higher destiny.