At Christmas time we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ in a stable in Bethlehem. We are all familiar with the story - the little town of Bethlehem, the shepherds watching their flocks, the herald angels singing, the 3 Kings from Persian lands afar, and the birth of a small baby to young & humble, yet delighted, parents.

But, of course, this story is purely the outer wrapping of a deeper theological truth, which we celebrate at Christmastide - the fact that God entered his creation, not as some big “I am” kind of God, all glory and hallelujah, but in humility, and ordinariness, …in the person of a small child, just like one of us. In that little baby, in that manger, was our God, an imminent God, a present God, a God who was to experience human life.

Our God got out of his heaven and got involved with the things of every day. He knew what it was like to be small and vulnerable; he knew what it was like to be in a family; he knew what it was like to be misunderstood, to be rejected by others; he knew what it was like to have fun with his friends; he knew what it was like to lose loved ones, to be tortured and abused; he knew what it was like to have his life taken from him in pain and anguish.

The big danger at Christmas is sentimentality. Somewhere in the middle of the Christmas hype, the “much mistle-toeing” and “kids jingle-belling”, we need to find the baby Jesus where he is today.

Oscar Romero, head of the Roman Catholic Church in El Salvador, who was assassinated in 1980 for his opposition to the military government, wrote this: 'We must not seek the child Jesus in the pretty figures of our Christmas cribs. We must seek him among the undernourished children who have gone to bed at night with nothing to eat, among the poor newsboys who will sleep covered with newspapers in doorways'.

PIcture above: Belen in Iznajar