The Necessity of a Real Christ

It is often said at Christmastime that Jesus is born into every heart. But these “births” must not make us forget the primordial, massive fact that Jesus was born of Mary among a people that at the time were dominated by the greatest empire of the age.If we forget that, the birth of Jesus becomes an abstraction, a symbol, a cipher. Apart from its historical coordinates the event loses its meaning. To the eyes of Christians the incarnation is the irruption of God into human history: an incarnation of littleness and service in the midst of the power and arrogance of the mighty of this world; an irruption that smells of the stable.

~ G. Gutiérrez (The God of Life, 1989)