History is just beginning to unpack the deeper levels of the Christmas narrative. The birth of Jesus is about God’s ongoing creative activity; God is not done creating the human race. In this context, the birth of Jesus can be seen as an evolutionary leap in humankind’s development. Jesus is our elder evolutionary brother who reveals to us where we are headed if we choose to cooperate with the arc of God’s creative activity. In today’s Gospel from John 1:1-18 we read, “But to those who did accept him, he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born not by natural generation, nor by human choice, nor by a man’s decision, but of God.”
The ultimate goal of the human journey is to be Christlike, to become “children of God.” To be a child of God is to remake ourselves in the divine image. We do this not by stoic willpower, but by believing in “Jesus’ name,” which does not necessarily mean that we must formally become Christians. The concept of “Jesus’ name” represents the stream of Christ Consciousness, that is, the very lifeblood of God. Sri Yukteswar baptized Yogananda into what he called the “holy stream,” another name for Christ Consciousness. Every act of devotion to Christ and the gurus, every sincere prayer, every meditation, and every act of loving service immerses us deeper and deeper into the stream of Christ Consciousness. In this way, we evolve to become the marriage of heaven and earth.
Remaking ourselves in the divine image must sound like an impossible task, but the sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities. Remember what Jesus said, “What is impossible for man is possible for God.” Our limitations actually bring us to the threshold of God’s all-powerful love. The path is simple: day by day, we learn to rotate around God’s inexhaustible light rather than the axis of our own egos. For every step forward we take in the evolution of our own consciousness, humanity evolves with us, because light begets light. Our spiritual evolution is not just for us, but for the world. Prayerfully consider these words from Sri Aurobindo, a cousin of Yogananda: “In the one task for which our lives were born, to raise the world to God in deathless light, to bring God down to the world on earth we came, to change the earthly life to life divine, since God has made earth, earth must make God in herself.”
I was born
To raise the world to God
In deathless light
And to bring God
Into my life
And into the whole world.
