GREAT EXPECTATIONS FOR THE CELEBRATION AND COMMEMORATION  OF THE BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST                               ON CHRISTMAS DAY…SPIRITUAL THOUGHTS..1

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, did not come into this world to live, He came into it to die. Death was the goal of His life, the gold that He was seeking. You and I come into the world to live. Death is an interruption. He, Himself told the Greeks that the seed must fall to the ground and die before it springs forth to ‘New Life’.

Unless there is a Good Friday in our lives, there will never be an Easter Sunday. The Cross is the condition of the empty tomb, and the crown of thorns is the preface to the halo of light, to the Crown of Glory.

Christianity begins not with sunshine but with defeat. Sunshine religions that begin with psychic elation end often in disillusionment and despair. So essential is the ‘dying to self’  as a prelude to the ‘true life of self’, that there were three monumental attempts to force Christ to abandon His Cross.

The devil offered Him three shorts cuts to winning the world at the beginning of His Public Life,  knowing that if Christ left out the Cross from His life, we, would have nothing left, and certainly not Christianity, for the Cross is related to our sins. Christ was our “stand in” on the stage of life.

We can never divorce Christ from the Cross. The crossless Christ leaves men burdened with their guilt which festers in a thousand ‘psychoses and neuroses’. The crossless cross cannot save for it ends in Dachau, the Gulag Archilepago and the squeezing of the lives of the millions like grapes to make the collective wine of the State.

The Cross met its defeat when the earth received its most serious wound … the empty tomb. To create the world cost God nothing; to save it from sin it cost Him His Life-Blood.  Every tribulation, pain and cross IS the shadow of His Hand outstretched caressingly. Even on His manger, at birth, there was the shadow of the Cross.

Adapted from ‘The Life of Christ’ by Fulton Sheen