The Christmas Day celebration in my sister Judy’s family includes a birthday cake. It’s brought out after dinner and the candles are lit.  The children hover over it waiting to blow out the candles and we sing Happy Birthday to Jesus.  It’s a great lesson for the kids and reminder for the adults about the meaning of Christmas.

Unfortunately, our religious art and Christmas cards can make us forget that God became an honest to goodness little baby. Yes, Jesus is truly, fully, and 100% God, but the great mystery we celebrate today is that He is also truly, fully, and 100% human.  He shared our human life with its joys and sorrows and even painful suffering and death.  He did so to prove His love, to show that He doesn’t love us from far away but as Emmanuel, “God-with-us.”

Fr. Al Lauer, a deceased priest of the Cincinnati Archdiocese, in one of his reflections in the Scripture reflection booklet “One Bread, One Body,” once wrote:

He emptied Himself (Phil. 2: 7) when He became a helpless Infant.  The all-powerful Creator of the world could not walk, talk, or roll over.  The second Person of the Blessed Trinity talked baby-talk, wet His diapers, and spit out His food. Almighty God weighed just a few pounds, shivered, cried, and nursed at His mother’s breast. … It seems almost blasphemous to suggest that God became a weak human being.  Yet He did, out of love for us…. The meaning of Christmas is shocking, but ultimately, it is love.

Until Jesus came, humanity was terribly afraid of God.  The Letter to the Hebrews, referring to Moses’s encounter with God on Mount Sinai, says:  “You have not approached that which could be touched and a blazing fire and gloomy darkness and storm and a trumpet blast and a voice speaking words such that those who heard begged that no message be further addressed to them, for they could not bear to hear the command: ‘If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.’ Indeed, so fearful was the spectacle that Moses said, ‘I am terrified and trembling’” (12: 18-21).

But God wants love and not fear.  Pope Benedict XVI, in his homily at Midnight Mass in 2008, put it this way: “God chose a new way. He became a child. He made Himself dependent and weak, in need of our love. Now—this God who has become a child says to us—you can no longer fear me, you can only love me.”

Let’s do that today and say: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESUS. I LOVE YOU!