Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow?

As we celebrate the birth of Jesus, we are reminded that God is with us on our individual life journeys and that we too are called to accompany others on theirs.

During the Advent season leading up to Christmas, we are invited to contemplate a young pregnant woman with her husband who left their home and faced a journey of difficulty and uncertainty.

The Holy Family was a family of MIGRANTS. Jesus was born in a stable outside Bethlehem, on the “wrong side of the tracks”, as they say nowadays. There was no welcome for his pregnant mother and her husband. The doors and hearts of the day were closed to them.

Jesus was born in the poorest and humblest of settings and not long after his birth, he became a REFUGEE. Fearing for their lives, his parents fled with him to Egypt.

One Solitary Life

Here is a man who was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village. He worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty. Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher.

He never owned a home. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never went to college. He never put His foot inside a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place He was born. He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but Himself…

While still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied Him. He was turned over to His enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed upon a cross between two thieves. While He was dying His executioners gambled for the only piece of property He had on earth – His coat. When He was dead, He was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.

Nineteen long centuries have come and gone, and today He is a centerpiece of the human race and leader of the column of progress.