Long ago, a wise and good king ruled in Persia. He loved his people and wanted to know how they lived. He wanted to know about their hardships. So he dressed himself in the clothes of a peasant and went to the homes of the poor. No one whom he visited suspected that he was their king. One of them was a very poor man who lived in a cellar. The king ate his coarse food with him and cheered him up. Then he left. Later he visited the poor man again and disclosed his identity. The king thought the man would ask for some gift or favour, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “You left your palace and your glory to visit me in this dark, dreary place. You ate the course food I ate. You brought gladness to my heart! To others you may have given rich gifts. But to me you have given yourself!”

At Christmas we celebrate the king of kings leaving his divine glory and coming to our deary world to share with us our poverty, misery and pain. It is not a question of Jesus giving us any particular gifts or blessings, it is a question of him giving us himself. This is the big difference between Jesus and Santa Claus. Santa Claus rides in an open sleigh giving gifts to children who have been good, so long as their houses have got chimneys. Santa leaves the gifts on the Christmas tree and disappears. Christ, on the other hand, does not leave a gift and disappear. He comes to live with us. He comes to share our human condition. His very presence is the gift. And, as the poor man in our story knows, being with the king is far more satisfying than receiving a gift from him.

When we talk about how the eternal Son of God left his heavenly glory, took on flesh and became a human being like us in all things except sin, we use the word “incarnation.” This is the mystery we celebrate at Christmas. It is the mystery of how the eternal Word of God took flesh in the little child of Bethlehem. The passage from Hebrews which we have for today’s second reading was probably chosen because of its reference to the incarnation. It talks about “when Christ came into the world” and how “God had prepared a body for him” (Hebrews 10: 5).

We are told that “when Christ came into the world, he said, ... ‘I have come to do your will, O God’” (Hebrews 10:5). In place of the sacrificial rituals at the centre of Jewish temple worship Jesus chose submission to God’s will as the better way to serve God. The author of Hebrews gives us the impression that living a life of personal submission to God’s will and fulfilling the ritual requirements of temple worship are alternative ways of serving God. Reading Hebrews one gets the impression that it is either the one or the other, and that the two cannot go together. But the Old Testament prophets spoke of both personal morality and public worship. They emphasized that sacrifices must be accompanied with obedience to God’s commandments of justice and love or else they would be no good. The sum of their teaching is that obedience and sacrifice are good, but that “Obedience is better than sacrifice, and submission than the fat of rams” (1 Samuel 15:22). The author of Hebrews took it that obedience is good and sacrifice is bad. Why this dichotomy between personal obedience and temple worship?

Hebrews was probably written quite late in New Testament times, long after the death of Paul. As the title shows, it was written for the benefit of Jewish Christians. Jewish Christians used to worship both in the temple with other Jewish believers and in private homes among themselves as believers in Christ. When in the year 70 ad the Roman army under Titus sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple, the Jewish community was thrown into a crisis of faith. How could they satisfy their religious duties to God without a temple where they could offer sacrifices? The author of Hebrew offered a Christian response: Jesus has offered in his body the one and perfect sacrifice that satisfies God’s requirement. There is, therefore, no further need for sacrifices. Rather the “sacrifice” that God’s people should offer henceforth is the spiritual sacrifice of total submission to God in obedience to God’s commandments.

Today we find ourselves in the same position as the poor man being visited by his king. Like the poor man our hearts should be full of joy, not in the extra gift the king will give us but in the fact that the king has come to be with us, to become one of us. We can, therefore, gladly sing today already the Christmas song, “From heaven above to earth I come.”

Welcome to earth, Thou noble Guest, / Through Whom e’en wicked men are blest!
Thou com’st to share our misery, / What can we render, Lord, to Thee!