2018-12-25

朋友们，我们今天庆祝耶稣基督、道成肉身的天主之子的生日。

 

今天弥撒中我们听到《圣经》中最精彩的部分，这部分的确是西方文学传统中的珍宝之一：《若望福音》的序言。这些优雅的文字在许多方面上表达了圣诞节的要义。

 

但今天我想集中讨论其中两句。第一句是：“世界原是藉他造成的；但世界却不认识他。”这句话精炼地表达了罪恶的所有悲剧性。圣言创造了人类，人类为着圣言而存在，因此人类与圣言悲欢与共。当我们与天主旨意脱节时，罪恶就是那缠绕着我们的失调。

 

然后我们听到无与伦比的喜讯：“但是，凡接受他的，他给他们，即给那些信他名字的人权能，好成为天主的子女。”在自然的基本原则上，低等生物除非得到高等生物的吸取牵引，否则是无法得以提升的。比如说，除非动物吃了植物，否则植物是无法成为有感知能力的生物的组成部分。同理，除非得到高等存在的同化，否则人类是无法提升自身的。教父们一致教导我们：天主道成肉身，为的是让人类可以像天主一样——即参与神性之中。简言之，我们之所以能够成为天主的儿女，是因为天主屈尊降贵地成为人子。

 

Friends, today we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God.

 

We hear at Mass one of the most magnificent passages in the Scriptures, indeed one of the gems of the Western literary tradition: the prologue to the Gospel of John. In many ways, the essential meaning of Christmas is contained in these elegantly crafted lines.

 

But today I would like to focus on two lines in particular. The first is this: "The world came to be through him, but the world did not know him." In that pithily crafted line, we sense the whole tragedy of sin. Human beings were made by and for the Logos and therefore they find their joy in a sort of sympathetic attunement to the Logos. Sin is the disharmony that comes when we fall out of alignment with God’s reasonable purpose.

 

Then comes the incomparably good news: "But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God." It is a basic principle of nature that nothing at a lower level of being can rise to a higher level unless it is drawn upward. For example, a plant can become ingredient in a sentient nature only if it is devoured by an animal. By this same principle, a human being can become something higher only when a superior reality assimilates him. The Church Fathers consistently taught that God became human so that humans might become God—which is to say, participants in the divine nature. In a word, we can become children of God precisely because God reached down to us and became a son of man.