Reflecting on what we truly celebrate at Christmas

This will be the final issue of "The Catholic Week prior to Christmas."  I want to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas.  I pray that you will be filled with the light of the Gospel and that the Lord will fill you with His Grace.  It is so easy to get caught up in the trappings of Christmas and we can lose our focus on the true gift that is being offered.
I would like to briefly reflect on the reality of Christmas.
The second person of the Blessed Trinity took on a complete human nature so that He could save us.  He was born specifically so that He could save us.  You see, humanity had completely rejected God, and God respected that freedom.  We needed to be reconciled to God, but we had nothing worthy of God, nothing sufficient to offer.  God was the only one who could heal the rift that we had created.  But God is justice and therefore is just.  God did not owe the debt, so God offering to pay the debt would not satisfy justice.  The Word of God, who was a divine person and had a divine nature, assumed a human nature to Himself.  Thus, when Jesus died on the cross the debt owed was in fact being paid by a human.  Yet, the sacrifice was sufficient because the Divine Word was the one offering.
For this to happen, the Divine Word had to be conceived and be born as a human.  Jesus was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary and we celebrate the day of His birth on Dec 25.  
I stutter to think of the humility required for the Son of God to take onto Himself the nature of one of His creatures.  And not just a creature, but one born into a poor family in an oppressed culture.  Jesus offers Himself to us.  
This is what we celebrate at Christmas.  This is truly the greatest gift, and the gift of Jesus to us is renewed every time we receive the Jesus in the Eucharist. 
 — Pat Arensberg is the Director of the Office for Evangelization and Family Life. Email him at [email protected] 
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