Christ’s birth in Bethlehem – soothing or disturbing?

Jan 03, 2025

Spiritual Reflection - Fr Ron Rolheiser
I’ve never been fully comfortable with some of my friends who send out Christmas cards with messages like: May the Peace of Christ Disturb You! Can’t we have one day a year to be happy and celebrate without having our already unhappy selves shaken with more guilt? Isn’t Christmas a time when we can enjoy being children again? Moreover, as Karl Rahner once said, isn’t Christmas a time when God gives us permission to be happy? So why not?

Well, it’s complex. Christmas is a time when God gives us permission to be happy, when the voice of God says: Comfort my people. Be comforted! Speak words of comfort!

But Christmas is also a time that highlights the sad truth that when God was born in our world two thousand years ago, there wasn’t room for that birth in all the normal homes and places of the day. There was no room for him at the inn. Peoples’ busy lives and practical concerns kept them from offering him a place to be born. That hasn’t changed. So, there are also good reasons to be disturbed.

But first, the comfort: A number of years ago, I participated in a large diocesan synod. At one point the animator in charge had us divide into small groups and each group was asked the question: What’s the single most-important message the church needs to say to the world right now?

The groups reported back and each group named some important spiritual or moral challenge: “We need to challenge our society toward more justice!” “We need to challenge the world to have real faith and not confuse God’s word with its own wishes.” “We need to challenge our world toward a more responsible sexual ethos.”  Wonderful, needed challenges, all of them. But no group came back and said: “We need to speak to the world of God’s consolation!” 

Granted, there is injustice, violence, racism, sexism, greed, selfishness, sexual irresponsibility, and self-serving faith around; but most adults in our world are also living in pain, anxiety, disappointment, loss, depression, and unresolved guilt. Everywhere you look, you see heavy hearts. Moreover, many people living with hurt and disappointment do not see God and the church as an answer to their pain but rather as somehow part of its cause.

So, in preaching God’s word, our churches need to assure the world of God’s love, God’s concern, and God’s forgiveness. Perhaps before doing anything else, God’s word is meant to comfort us; indeed, to be the ultimate source of all comfort. Only when the world knows God’s consolation will it be more open to accept the concomitant challenge.

And prominent in that challenge is to make room for Christ at the inn, namely, to open our hearts, our homes, and our world as places where Christ can come and live, no matter how inconvenient that may be. From the safe distance of two thousand years, we too easily make a scathing judgment on the people at the time of Jesus’ birth for not knowing what Mary and Joseph were carrying and for not making a place for Jesus to be born. How could they be so blind?

But that same judgment can still be made of us. We aren’t exactly making room in our own inns.

When a new person is born into this world, he or she takes a space where before there was no one. Sometimes that new person is warmly welcomed and a loving space is created and everyone around is happy for this new invasion.  But that isn’t always the case; sometimes, as was the case with Jesus, there is no space created for the new person and his or her presence is not welcomed.

We see this today (and this will constitute a judgment on our generation) in the reluctance, almost all over the world, to welcome new immigrants, to make room for them at the inn. If Christ is in the poor, in the stranger, and the Gospels assure us that he is, then Christ is surely in the immigrant. Today there are over fifty million refugees in the world, people whom no one will welcome. Why not?  

We are not bad people and are capable most times of being wonderfully generous. But letting this flood of immigrants enter our lives would disturb us. Our lives would have to change. We would lose some of our present comforts, some of our old familiarities, and some of our securities.

We are not bad people, neither were those innkeepers two thousand years ago who, not knowing what they were dealing with, in inculpable ignorance, turned Mary and Joseph away. I’ve always nursed a secret sympathy for them. Maybe because I am still, also in ignorance, doing exactly what they did. My comfort and security often have me say, No room at the inn.  

The skewed circumstances of Christ’s birth, if understood, cannot but disturb. May they also bring deep consolation.

(Oblate Fr Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher, and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He writes a weekly column that is carried in over 90 newspapers around the world. He can be contacted through his website www. ronrolheiser.com)