![]() God is no father who devours his children, but the Father who, in Jesus, makes us his children and feeds us with his tender love. He comes there, to a feeding trough, in order to become our food. There, in that manger, Christ is born, and there we discover his closeness to us. He comes there because there we see the problem of our humanity: the indifference produced by the greedy rush to possess and consume. In the manger of rejection and discomfort, God makes himself present. And we ourselves are invited to view life, politics and history through the eyes of children. In him, the Child of Bethlehem, every child is present. Yet those are the very places to which Jesus comes, a child in the manger of rejection and refusal. I think above all of the children devoured by war, poverty and injustice. This Christmas too, as in the case of Jesus, a world ravenous for money, hungry for power and pleasure does not make room for the little ones, for so many unborn, poor and forgotten children. How many wars have we seen! And in how many places, even today, are human dignity and freedom treated with contempt! As always, the principal victims of this human greed are the weak and the vulnerable. While animals feed in their stalls, men and women in our world, in their hunger for wealth and power, consume even their neighbours, their brothers and sisters. In this way, it can symbolize one aspect of our humanity: our greed for consumption. The manger serves as a feeding trough, to enable food to be consumed more quickly. What then does the manger tell us? It tells us three things, at least: closeness, poverty and concreteness.Ĭloseness. It is the way God is born in history, so that history itself can be reborn. Yet why is the manger so important? Because it is the sign, and not by chance, of Christ’s coming into this world. In order to rediscover the meaning of Christmas, we need to look to the manger. 12) and finally, the shepherds, who find “the child lying in the manger” (v. First, Mary places Jesus “in a manger” ( Lk 2:7) then the angels tell the shepherds about “a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” (v. ![]() It is a small and apparently insignificant detail that it nonetheless mentions three times, always in relation to the central figures in the narrative. Yet the Gospel has little to do with that worldly scenario it quickly shifts our gaze to something else, which it considers more important. In that sense, the atmosphere was very much like our modern celebration of Christmas. It starts with a situation not unlike our own: everyone is bustling about, getting ready for an important event, the great census, which called for much preparation. So how do we rediscover the meaning of Christmas? First of all, where do we go to find it? The Gospel of Jesus’ birth appears to have been written precisely for this purpose: to take us by the hand and lead us where God would have us go. We know many things about Christmas, but we forget its real meaning. The miraculous restoration of a rooster to life is a common motif in European ballads it frequently appears in a tale in which an innocent person condemned to death is miraculously saved from death, and in which someone expresses disbelief in that miracle as it was unlikely as the rooster's resurrection.What does this night still have to say to our lives? Two thousand years after the birth of Jesus, after so many Christmases spent amid decorations and gifts, after so much consumerism that has packaged the mystery we celebrate, there is a danger. This story, with the Wise Men as the heroes, appears in Child ballad 55, " The Carnal and the Crane". Immediately it does, and Herod had Stephen stoned to death. Herod says it is as true as that the cock cooked for his supper would crow again. Herod asks him what he lacks, and he affirms that no one lacks anything in his hall, but the child born in Bethlehem is better than that. ![]() He saw the Star of Bethlehem and went to Herod to leave his service. ![]() ![]() Stephen's Day being the day after Christmas. It depicts the martyrdom of Saint Stephen as occurring, with wild anachronism, under Herod the Great, and claims that that was the reason for St. Stephen and Herod" is Child ballad 22 and a Christmas carol. Traditional song A Faroese stamp commemorating the Faroese ballad "Rudisar vísa", on the same story ![]()
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