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Quotations Theological Reflections

The Unlikeliness of Truth

From Karl Rahner.� I got it from a compilation book, The Great Church Year.� But it can be found also in The Eternal Year, 19-26.

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If we should examine the birth of the child of today’s feast merely from our point of view, then we could say of him and of us, too, only what is written in the dismal, bitter text of Job 14:1-2: �Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He comes forth like a flower and withers; he flees like a shadow, and continues not.� From our point of view, we could be no more than a tiny point of light in the unlimited dark, a point of light that can only make the darkness even more frightening. We would be no more than a sum that didn’t come out right. We seem cast off into time, which makes everything disappear, forced into existence without being asked, laden with wearisome toil and disappointment. Through our own fault we burden ourselves with pain and punishment. We begin to suffer death in the moment when we are born. We are insecure and driven to be childish about all that is illusory, all that is called the sunny side of life � which in reality should be only the refining means of ensuring that the martyrdom and torture of life do not end too quickly.

But if in faith we say, �It is Christmas� � in faith that is determined, sober, and above all else courageous � then we mean that an event came bursting into the world and into our life, an event that has changed all that we call the world and our life. This event alone has provided a goal and a purpose for everything. It has not only put an end to the saying of Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun, but also to the eternal return of modern philosophers; it is an even through which our night � the fearful, cold, bleak night where body and soul await death from exposure � has become Christmas, the holy night. For the Lord is there, the Lord of creatures and of my life. He no longer merely looks down from the endless �all in one and once for all� of his eternity upon my constantly changing life that glides by far below him. The eternal has become time, the Son has become man, the eternal purpose of the world, the all-embracing meaningfulness of all reality has become flesh.

Through this fact, that God has become man, time and human life are changed. Not to the extent that he has ceased to be himself, the eternal Word of God himself, with all his splendor and unimaginable bliss. But he has really become human. And now this world and its very destiny concern him. Now it is not only his work, but a part of his very self. Now he no longer watches its course a spectator; he himself is now within it. What is expected of us is now expected of him; our lot now falls upon him, our earthly joy as well as the wretchedness that is proper to us. Now we no longer need to seek him in the endlessness of heaven, where our spirit and our heart get lost. Now he himself on our very earth, where he is no better off than we and where he receives no special privilege, but our every fate: hunger, weariness, enmity, mortal terror and a wretched death. That the infinity of God should take upon itself human narrowness, that bliss should accept the mortal sorrow of the earth, that life should take on death � this is the most unlikely truth. But only this � the obscure light of faith � makes our nights bright, only this makes them holy.

God has come. He is there in the world. And therefore everything is different from what we imagine it to be. Time is transformed from its eternal onward flow into an event that with silent, clear resoluteness leads to a definitely determined goal wherein we and the world shall stand before the unveiled face of God. When we say, �It is Christmas,� we mean that God has spoken into the world his last, his deepest, his most beautiful word in the incarnate Word, a word that can no longer be revoked because it is God’s definite deed, because it is God himself in the world. And this word means: I love you, you, the world and human beings. This is a wholly unexpected word, a quite unlikely word. For how can this word be spoken when both the human person and the world are recognized as dreadful, empty abysses? But God knows them better than we. And yet he has spoken this word by being himself born as a creature. The very existence of this incarnate Word of love demands that it shall provide, eye to eye and heart to heart, an almost unbelievable fellowship, an astonishing communion between the eternal God and us. Indeed, it says that this communion is already there. This is the word that God has spoken in the birth of his Son.

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