What Christmas Teaches Us When the World Falls Apart
This year exposed the depth of our darkness. Christmas reveals where light dares to enter.
Merry Christmas! As a gift of gratitude to you and those you love, today’s Christmas Day reflection will be available to all readers.
If you have been edified by our Advent reflection series and all our work here at Letters from Leo, I’m humbly asking for your support.
If you’d like to invest in our mission during this sacred season, here are three ways you can help:
Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.
Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.
Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.
Whether you give $0, $1, or $1,000, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” — (John 1:5)
Brothers and sisters —
Perhaps such a greeting sounds strange, but in truth, this is the most important lesson of Christmas.
With Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem, God became our sibling, and we all became brothers and sisters. The heart of the Christmas story is that God’s love for us and all of creation is boundless.
Sadly, many people don’t experience this love.
For all its joy, the holidays can often be a time of sorrow for many. Many people this Christmas feel the pain of social exclusion, economic hardships, and familial dysfunction.
Perhaps some of us have experienced the death of a loved one in the past year, a job loss, or even a divorce.
And as the year winds down, even the biggest optimist can’t deny that 2025 has been a tough year for our nation and the world.
The tragedy of the past year has played out on our television screens, on our phones, and in our newspapers.
Everyday the headlines seem to get worse. Against this grim backdrop, our nation comes upon Christmas.
The true spirit of this season is often trapped behind our society’s gilded age of consumerism and superficiality.
But if we open our eyes and our hearts to rediscover the radical story of Christmas, the holiday can be a source of hope and liberation for our nation during this time of great trial.
Though we tend to romanticize the Christmas story, it’s important to remember that Mary and Joseph bore a lot of hardships leading up to Jesus’s birth. Time and again, they faced discomfort and rejection. As Luke puts it so vividly, there was no room in the inn.
Our nation is suffering its own winter of hardships, but in Jesus, God proves that love itself can be born amidst brokenness, abandonment, and obscurity.
In the time of Jesus’ birth, the expectation of a messiah was strong among the Jewish people.
They were looking for a hero who would at last set their people free from every form of moral, political and economic slavery they faced under the tyranny of Rome.
The prophet Isaiah told them this liberator would “beat spears and swords into plowshares and pruning hooks” and end the scandal of war.
As one modern hymn puts it, the dream of Isaiah was that "peace will pervade more than forest and field: God will transfigure the violence concealed deep in the heart and in systems of gain.”
Yet God didn’t send a military leader or a politician to save his people, but a child born to an unwed mother, who even fled violence as a refugee.
This child did indeed bring liberation, but not just for the people of that time and place.
He was to be a savior for all of humanity and for every age, destroying death forever and restoring life through the means of a shameful death upon the cross.
No one would have expected the messiah to be born in poverty, obscurity and exclusion, far from the cultural and political centers of the world — but such is God’s logic.
But Jesus doesn’t just come for the excluded. He comes, too, for the parts of our own lives that are suffering. In Jesus, the Pope Francis said, God “assumed our frailty, our suffering, our anxieties, our desires and our limitations. … He accepts our poverty, God who is in love with our smallness.”
Francis argues that the Christmas story “asks us to risk a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction. True faith in the incarnate Son of God is inseparable from self-giving, from membership in the community, from service, from reconciliation with others.”
At Christmas, Jesus came all the way down into the grittiness of human dysfunction — its violence, its disloyalty and its sinfulness — to bring everyone up. The very essence of the holiday calls us out of our comfort and into discomfort.
The basic message of Christmas is simple: no matter who we are or what we’ve done, God never tires of loving us.
In the United States, Christmas comes during the darkest days of the year. But that is when the Star of Bethlehem shines brightest. In this holy birth, we discern a path out of darkness into God’s wonderful light.
For those who experience joy this Christmas, please savor it and share it with others.
As your brother and friend, I ask you to please find those in your family or your community who need a lift this Christmas and show them how much they are loved.
A simple act of love can change someone’s life for good and help them experience the redeeming love that marks this season.
And if you feel sorrow, don’t be ashamed of it. You are not forgotten, and you are not alone.
Because with Jesus’s birth, we are siblings — brothers and sisters — once more.
I wish you and those you love a Merry Christmas. I’ll see you on the road.
Christopher, this is beautiful! Merry Christmas! We have many emotions this Christmas 🎄 I hope everyone finds a little moment of hope & peace!🙏
Let’s look to Luke, a message of Grace, and power through humility.
Luke opens with one of Christianity’s most evocative and theologically rich passages: an account of Jesus’ birth that stitches annunciation, praise, humility, and prophetic witness into a single, compelling overture. Far from a mere prologue, Luke’s nativity narrative announces the theological themes that will shape the whole Gospel—God’s preferential concern for the lowly, the reversal of human expectations, continuity with Israel, and the universal scope of salvation.
Luke frames his Gospel with orderly historiographical language, yet he shapes the infancy material with literary and theological artistry. The paired annunciations to Zechariah and to Mary contrast silence, doubt, and faith; the Magnificat and Zechariah’s Benedictus serve as poetic commentaries that celebrate God’s overturning of social hierarchies; the journey to Bethlehem and the manger birth place the Messiah’s entry in circumstances of poverty; and the temple scenes—Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis and Anna’s praise—locate the child within Israel’s covenantal story while pointing beyond it. Each detail is calibrated to announce who Jesus is and what his coming means.
Central to Luke’s theology is the motif of reversal. Mary’s Magnificat proclaims that God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” This theme recurs throughout Luke–Acts: the last are first, the humble inherit blessing, and God’s mercy upends entrenched hierarchies. By announcing Jesus first to shepherds—socially marginal figures—and by situating the birth in a manger, Luke signals that God’s kingdom breaks in where human society least expects it. The Gospel consistently locates revelation among the poor, the outsider, and the overlooked.
Linked to reversal is a pronounced concern for the poor. Luke’s infancy narrative frames Jesus as a figure whose orientation is toward those on the margins. The family’s economic vulnerability—evident in the temple’s sacrificial rites and the child’s humble birthplace—prefigures the Gospel’s later emphasis on economic justice, compassion, and the ethics of redistribution. Luke’s Jesus arrives not as imperial majesty but as God’s presence with those in need.
Yet Luke marries novelty with continuity. The temple scenes, prophetic utterances, and Bethlehem setting root Jesus in Israel’s story: he is the culmination of covenantal hope. Simeon’s words—calling the child “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel”—articulate Luke’s dual claim that God’s salvation fulfills Israel’s promise and opens outward to the nations. Prophetic forms—angelic annunciation, song, and temple prophecy—link the birth to Israel’s longstanding patterns of promise, judgment, and renewal.
Luke also grants distinctive voice and theological agency to women, most notably Mary. The Magnificat channels Old Testament echoes (Hannah, the Psalms) while giving the mother a prophetic platform. Mary’s receptivity and song model a discipleship formed by humility, trust, and prophetic imagination. Alongside male prophetic voices—Zechariah and Simeon—Mary’s prominence suggests Luke’s inclusive pattern of revelation.
The shepherds’ witness further displaces conventional expectations of authority. Historically marginalized in some Jewish circles, shepherds are the Gospel’s first human recipients of the divine announcement. Their urgent journey to the manger, their public proclamation, and their return “glorifying and praising God” exemplify Luke’s pattern: revelation comes to the lowly and issues in testimony that upends social hierarchies of credibility and power.
Luke’s nativity account has long shaped Christian worship and pastoral imagination. The Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis are central to liturgical prayer; the shepherds and Mary furnish enduring models of vocation and faithful reception. Liturgically and pastorally, Luke’s scenes orient communities toward mercy, humility, and prophetic hope.
Modern scholarship debates historical questions—the census, chronology, and harmonization with other infancy accounts—but these critical inquiries do not exhaust the narrative’s theological force. Whether read as rooted in early Christian memory or as a carefully crafted theological composition, Luke’s nativity functions as an inaugural proclamation: it reveals who Jesus is, whom he comes to serve, and how God’s saving work will subvert human expectations.
In sum, Luke’s nativity narrative is both intimate and cosmic. It announces God’s preferential care for the lowly, inaugurates a reversal of worldly hierarchies, and links Jesus to Israel’s fulfilled hope while projecting that hope to the nations. Through the songs and witnesses of Mary, Zechariah, Simeon, Anna, and the shepherds, Luke crafts a vision of salvation that is at once personal and universal—rooted in a concrete family and poised to transform the world.