It's a Small Word, After All . . . by George Gagliardi

A baby was born, long ago on a Christmas morn in a manger, etc. And the aching soul, having borne one too many burdens, may well be tempted to say, “That’s nice” or perhaps even more harshly, “So what?” 

What indeed? What does a birth of a Jewish kid some 2000 or more years ago have to say to me now?

It’s a good question and it deserves a good answer. However, I don’t have one – at least not exactly. I don’t have one custom made for you as you try and make sense of that which makes no sense. I don’t have one that makes the pain go away or fills the empty heart. But what I do have is this … hope.

It’s a small word, easily lost among the clichés of the world and not hard to submerge beneath a sea of cynicism and anger. But let’s think about this word for a moment.

What if hope were not just a word but a person? A person who knew firsthand about  heartache and loneliness and  being abandoned. A person whose birth was cause for violence and greed and hatred for some and, at the same time, an occasion to bring out the whole angelic choir – trumpets included, I’ll betcha – for others.

It was the kind of birth that was so remarkably unremarkable in its locale as to be ludicrous. If this is God’s idea of how to introduce eternal hope to the world, well… man, what could you have been thinking! This baby boy is it? This is the hope we’ve been waiting for? And I suspect He was smiling as He was saying, “Yes, just wait and see.”

I guess that’s the hardest part of hope sometime, the waiting. But turns out God was right. Jesus did more than “make good”; he “made good” by making miracles and making the lives of  people better, people who most folk had given up on. Well, I’d say when hope looks like that, then it’s worth putting your faith in or at least investigating.

Well, that’s what people of faith, me included, believe about Jesus. He was/is the embodiment of hope, that God is not “asleep at the switch,” even when it seems He is.

I wish, for all of you who find sadness an unwelcome companion this Christmas, the hope that He brings, that He ushered into this crazy, mixed-up, unfair, unjust world that first Christmas years ago when he was born. It’s a hope as vital and alive as the heart that receives the gift of love and gives the gift of love. And with all my heart, I wish that kind of hope for you this Christmas and the whole year through.

^{Merry Christmas (Anyway),}

^{George Gagliardi, December, 2012}