Clearly, God could have saved us in any manner he chose. Also, God could have made us differently; he could have made creatures with no freewill, no ability to choose and therefore no ability to love. But God didn’t do that. Instead, God made creatures of very good stuff – and only because they are of very good stuff, such as intellect and will — were they able to turn against him. C.S. Lewis makes this point. Cows can’t be very good or very bad, because cows are stupid. But because humans are clever – and angels all the cleverer – when a human or angel decides to turn, it’s only because they are so good that they’re actions can be so wicked. But God, as Lewis points out, thought all this warring was worth the risk, because it is hard to see how else God could have a loving-saving relationship to us.
There is tremendous beauty and love in the nativity scene. The paintings of Mary looking adoringly at her Savior Child always remind me of the look my wife first gave to Roan when he was born. I’d never witnessed such an obvious physical manifestation of love. You could just “see” it. And later, when Christ gave his mom to the Church in John 19 (“Woman, behold your son; behold your mother”; etc) the order of sequence is beautifully (but subtly) revealing. A mother first gazes upon her child with incomparable love and then the child eventually realizes the love of his (or her) mother and wants to return it. This, in part, is why Catholics take devotion to the Blessed Mother so seriously – because Christ wanted us to. He gave us a spiritual mom. His mom. And so to honor and love Mary is to deepen our reverence and love for Christ; it is, however slowly, to awaken from our spiritual birth, and come to realize, after much blinking and confusion, our heavenly mother who’s been praying for us all along. Love of Christ and Marian devotion are not competitive, but complementary. To love God and to know God, just is, in part, to love and know God’s mom.
The other thing to notice about the nativity is God’s omnipotence. Obviously, most theologians remark upon the utter and surprising humility of God coming into the world in such poor and dejected circumstances – of entering human history through the womb of a pious teenager and resting peacefully in a feeding trough. This was certainly not the messiah the Jewish people were expecting, but Christ is the messiah, nonetheless. I say God’s omnipotence is reflected in the nativity because only God who knows all things from eternity and will them into existence could have pulled such a marvelous and beautiful stunt. This speaks to the very nature of God, where His omnipotence just is His love and just is His wisdom, etc. God somehow resolves all possible paradoxes and often unexpectedly, just as He resolved the paradox of being both infinitely just and infinitely merciful with respect to human sin, not by nailing any of us to a piece of wood, but Himself.
Merry Christmas, everyone.