There is a story told about a child who woke up from a dream in the middle of the night frightened. She was on her own so she cried out for protection. Her mother who was in the bedroom next door heard her cry and immediately came to comfort her. The mother tried to reassure her daughter that she was safe and that there was no reason for her to be frightened. ‘Don’t you know that God is looking after you,’ she said. ‘Yes mammy I know God is looking after me,’ the child replied, ‘but tonight I need a God with skin on!’
Jesus was God with skin on. People met God in the humanity of Jesus. This is what we are celebrating at Christmas; we call it the Incarnation. In Jesus, God became one of us; he became one with us. On that first Christmas night “The Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). Jesus of Nazareth was the very human face of God, the person in whom God was met and known in the most concrete of ways.
Because Jesus was God with skin on, we are also God with skin on. If God dwelt in the humanity of Jesus then God dwells in our humanity too. What we are celebrating at Christmas is not just the extraordinary fact that God put on flesh in Jesus, but the even more extraordinary fact that we put flesh on God for each other. This truth is poetically expressed in this little verse: “I sought my soul I could not see; I sought my God and He eluded me; I sought my neighbour and I found all three.” In the concrete reality of our neighbour we meet God. In the earthiness of our neighbour we meet God. In the humanness of our neighbour we meet God. This is the implication of what happened on that first Christmas all those years ago.
The birth of Jesus raised the dignity of our humanity to a whole new realm. Whether we are aware of it or not, God is living and loving in each of us and this makes us sacred vessels and channels of the divine presence. To accept this is to accept that our humanity is the primary means through which God is involved in our world. To quote the words attributed to St Teresa of Avila:
“Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion is to look out to the earth. Yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good and yours are the hands by which He is to bless us now.”