The Audacity of a Presence.
Julián Carrón - Notes from the homily by Julián Carrón on December 25th, 2025. Christmas of the Lord, Year A.
God created man to share in His happiness, but man preferred to achieve it on his own—and failed. At that point, God could have given up in the face of such obstinacy. Instead, He took the initiative—again and again, from Abraham onwards—to create a people through whom everyone could see the advantage of following Him. Yet, the people remained stubborn in their refusal, ignoring even His messengers, the prophets.
What else could God do? What method could He use that would respect the freedom He Himself had given to man? Abandon him to his whims? Or take an even bolder initiative?
God knew that because we are accustomed to doing as we please, no punishment or prohibition could ever convince us. To truly provoke our freedom, He could only put forward an unpredictable initiative.
“No one has ever seen God,” we heard in the Gospel.
“How can a man have a clear consciousness and an affective energy toward destiny when destiny is confused, mysterious, obscure [because it is ‘never seen’]?” Giussani asks.
“As long as the object [what we seek] is obscure, one can imagine whatever one wants” and can do “whatever one likes.” It is like when we have not yet met the person we love: we are searching, and we feel free to do whatever we want. “It is only when destiny [the face] becomes clear,” is revealed—just as when the face of the beloved appears—that man can have clarity and “adequate affective energy” to adhere.
This is the novelty that “Jesus brought us.” In fact, “that the Mystery became clear and became an affectively attractive presence […] was a grace. Jesus brought it; in fact, grace is Jesus. Grace is not a ‘thing’; grace is a presence [a flesh, a face]” (L. Giussani, L’autocoscienza del cosmo, p. 247).
Until God reveals Himself, like the beloved, man remains lost. And to respond to this loss, God takes an absolutely unimaginable initiative: He sends His Son. If we pause for a moment to consider that God sends His Son to men—men so stubborn as to reject every attempt He has made—we can only remain speechless.
“The only Son, who is God and is in the bosom of the Father, is the one who has revealed [the Mystery].”
This is the great news of the feast we celebrate today: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us; and we have contemplated his glory, the glory as of the only Son coming from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
It is like the glory we see shining when we encounter the face of a loved one. How can we recognize the glory that shines in the Son? How do we recognize it in a loved one? It is simple: by the fullness with which we are filled. We heard it in the Gospel: “From his fullness we have all received: grace upon grace.”
We needed to be presented with an attraction in which we could see the fullness that life can achieve! A lesson, a speech, or a set of rules—which had already proven ineffective—was not enough. We needed a man, flesh and blood, a face that would attest to the fullness we all long for without success, a face that would be the answer to our inability to achieve the fullness we cannot help but desire.
Those who encountered Him could not help but exult: “We have never seen anything like this!” Only God’s genius could have conceived of an idea bold enough to send His Son, making the fullness we blindly seek accessible to us humans.
It is difficult for us to imagine a gesture as audacious as God’s. But what the Son brought was something too different from our standard way of thinking; a Presence was needed that would challenge our patterns and images, opening us up to something unique and different. As St. Irenaeus says:
“The Word of God took up his dwelling among men and became the Son of Man, to accustom man to perceive God and to accustom God to dwell in man according to the will of the Father. For this reason, God gave us as a ‘sign’ of our salvation the one who, born of the Virgin, is Emmanuel” (Irenaeus, AH, III, 20, 2-3).
This coexistence in time was necessary to attract us without forcing us. How much time did the disciples, who lived with Him, need to be charmed and persuaded! But is all this just a memory of the past, or is it something that continues to happen today?
Where does it happen today?
“You know it well: you can’t do something, you’re tired and you can’t take it anymore. And suddenly you meet someone’s gaze in the crowd—a human gaze—and it’s as if you’ve come close to a hidden divinity. And everything suddenly becomes easier” (A. Tarkovsky).
It is a matter of allowing ourselves to be surprised today, like the shepherds or the men of that time. “Earthly men need a presence in the flesh,” says Hannah Arendt. “From time to time, someone appears among us who exemplifies human nature and personally embodies something that we would otherwise only know as a concept or an ideal.” Without this, the ideal would not have the ability to grasp us.
Christmas can only happen as an Event if we find ourselves in the presence of emotionally attractive people who are already “taken” by that Event. They are the echo of that original Event that continues to happen today. To our surprise, they tell us—as one person wrote to me recently:
“I will never cease to give thanks and celebrate that God, by entering history and making Himself known to me with sacred respect for my freedom, makes everything new, makes life life, makes me me!”
This is the news of Christmas.
(First reading: Is 52:7-10; Psalm 97 (98); Second reading: Heb 1:1-6; Gospel: Jn 1:1-18)
