(Lk 2:16-21)

In the cages of our devotion, perhaps there is still no place for Jesus who offers himself. He continues to be born a child like the others, distant and poor, rejected.

Only those on the margins of society seem capable of waiting, openness to the mystery, and searching: keeping watch at night (v.8), passing by and seeing (v.15), coming in haste (v.16), praising (v.20).

The Mother is already making her way from the religiosity of the fathers to the Faith in the Father: Contemplative who listens, meets her deepest states and tries not to miss anything.

Those who are nobodies but feel anxious searching and prayerful hearts can sing a new song.

In this way, he will be able to decipher the signs of the divine Presence inscribed in events, and welcome Christ into his inner dwelling (v.7) [cf. commentary on the Prologue of John].

In the simplicity of the Son - in the Freedom of children - the Eternal God points out to the wretched and abandoned multitudes a new Way, capable of valuing the limits and even the eccentricities of each one.

Throughout the first century, both in Palestine and Asia Minor [Johannine and Lucan churches] the different schools of theology and servants of God - of traditional Judaism, of Jesus, of the Baptist - confronted each other in alternative ways.

Where there were communities of Jews, there was no lack of controversy between Christians and various (more or less radical) observers of the religion of the fathers - as well as people who had been baptised by John, or at least in contact with his pupils. The Master and the first apostles had also been.

Rather than confusion, there was real competition between the group of Christ's disciples and those of the Baptizer.

This, even though both proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom of God, and proposed social justice and the forgiveness of sins in practical life - instead of through rituals and sacrificial gestures at the Temple in Jerusalem.

Yet, thanks to the Son, the apostles grasped the depth of the Father's heart, which never resembles a justicialist, but works exclusively for the good and the promotion of life.

Hence in the Faith they themselves achieved inexplicable recoveries - precisely by gratuitously integrating the weak sides of people - without works of mortification of the insecure woman and man, nor claiming impossible preventive perfections.

Even today, precisely from the dark sides of our personality, the Father creates in the Spirit of the Beatitudes 'his' Newness, which turns the tables.

A completely unexpected change, impossible to imagine and propose; at least on the basis of prejudices or established ideas - all of which compete with self-esteem and joie de vivre.

The God of unconditional and guilt-dispelling love was precisely the exclusive prerogative of the new people of Faith in Christ, who had overcome the accusatory, moralistic and fussy cloaks of established custom.

Even then, diversity brought into play the question of the purifications required by the 'creeds' accepted by the cultural paradigm, and by identity rituals.

Jesus seemed completely alien to the mentality of the cultic ablutions of tradition.

It was the habit of life with Him that regenerated souls in the round, even from the eccentricities of each one.

Precious uniquenesses, interpreted as a sign of vocational exceptionality.

He taught the wretched and those condemned by religion how to get back on their feet by appealing to the different faces lurking in each one's soul: taking them on and investing them rather than denying them.

Personalities all... not pre-emptively sterilised; souls also with extravagant expressions, or with unconscious, shaky, unexpressed sides - in which Jesus taught to discover the traits of the personal missionary call.

And precisely 'from' here - it seems incredible - we too are sent to the Annunciation.

All this remains fundamental every day.

In fact, the [pious or avant-garde] proposals may present themselves in dignified forms - but they remain only outposts of the new quality leap.

The latter, capable of astonishment and all humanising: without the tare of feeling marked for life by external opinions.

Obviously, these forms of familial looseness and immediacy towards the Eternal God aroused the envy of the veterans still caged in the old fears of retribution, in the heap of works of law, of personal efficiencies unaware of open Grace, of personal Gift.

In no fulfilment, but in Christ alone, his friends and brothers recognised the Voice of the loving God.

He does not distinguish a priori 'superiorities': between the pure and the impure, the able and the unable, friends and foes; the chosen, the predestined, and the not.

In short, in our real life we do not wait for a phenomenon Messiah who continually upsets and oppresses us, filling us with fears and deviations to be corrected [which sap all energy]. 

Let us only look for a Friend who allows us to express ourselves in an unprecedented way and have a long - even undeserved - hope.

Let us be like the shepherds: no one has ever understood what convinced them, except the amazement of unpredictable gratuitousness (vv.15-18.20).

Paradoxically ready to found a new people - without too many regulations and clichés - starting from how and where each one found himself.

By now, we too no longer need the imprimatur of ideological sectarianism, without openness to the surprise of the surprising Incarnation, which makes the 'inadequate' gasp with joy...

Our most childish oddities [cf. commentary on the Prologue of John] can bring the human condition closer to the divine one.

So they have the approval of the Lord of all cosmos.