by Bishop Raymond A. Lucker
Diocese of New Ulm

Christmas is all about mystery — the mystery of God’s love, the mystery of the Word Made Flesh, the mystery of life and sin and redemption.

I remember as a little child how the awe and mystery of Christmas touched me. We never decorated our Christmas tree until Christmas Eve. As little children we were put to bed early and were awakened around 10 o’clock in the evening to come downstairs to see what Santa had brought. We peered through the banister and saw the beautifully lit Christmas tree for the first time with Christmas gifts arranged underneath. It was a moment of wonder and joy.

We used to say that a mystery is a truth that we cannot fully understand. We would answer a question about a dogma of the Church we could not explain by saying, "Just accept it. It is a mystery." There is another way of looking at it. A mystery is a truth whose luminous beauty God has opened up for us. We can partially grasp it, but not entirely. We believe in the truths of our faith because God reveals them.

We fall back in wonder about the mystery of Jesus — God made flesh. We are confronted with the mystery of sickness and death and ask, "Why me?" We cannot fully grasp the mystery of the Holy Eucharist or the Trinity or creation. We bow down in awe and faith. For who can know the height and depth and breadth of God’s love?

As a young priest I taught classes in Christian Doctrine for catechists and adult education leaders. I would challenge them to stump me. I arrogantly thought that I could answer any question put to me in class. At least I thought I had the answer in one of my books.

Theologians try to explain the mysteries of faith that no words can contain. They try to help us understand the revelation of God and to apply the changeless truths of revelation to changing language and cultures. In many ways they have an impossible task, for who can understand the mystery of the presence of Jesus in the liturgy, in the sacred word of the scriptures? How can we see the presence of Jesus in one another, in the gathered liturgical assembly, in the priest at Mass, without faith?

One of the beauties of Catholicism is that while we have one faith we have many theologies. It is sad that some people want only their brand of theology to be accepted. They try to make their human understanding of the mysteries of our faith the same as revelation itself. Just recently the Archbishop of St. Paul, speaking about the writers and editors of a Catholic newspaper, said that they "engage in a reign of terror against anyone who disagrees with their understanding of Catholic doctrine."

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, "God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, imagebound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God — ‘the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable’ — with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God."

We gather in awe around the crib with the shepherds. We fall down in adoration with the wise men before our Lord and our God. We cannot fully understand, but we believe.

I wish all of you a Blessed and Happy Christmas.

December, 1998