Editor’s note: This reflection was originally published on Fr. Mark-David’s Facebook page.

John the Baptist is a Christmas reality check.
The biblical version of Santa checking to see
“who’s been naughty who’s been nice.”
John, baptizing all those who as Mark’s gospel reports,
“acknowledge their sins.”

John the Baptist is a biblical Marley’s Ghost,
Pointing out to our inner Scrooge,
the chain we are forging
Link by link, yard by yard,
full, heavy and ponderous
As we, like Marley, have forgotten:
“Mankind is my business.
The common welfare was my business;
charity, mercy forbearance were, all, my business.
The dealings of my trade
but a drop of water
in the comprehensive ocean of my business…
Not to know that no space of regret
Can make amends for one’s life’s opportunities misused.”

Perhaps Marley and John the Baptist have a point
Perhaps I need to stop and acknowledge my sins.
Own up to the ways in which I have neglected and ignored
What should be my business:
charity, mercy, forbearance, the common welfare.
The truth of Christmas,
the truth of Christ born as we are born, is this:
“Every single one of us-are creatures deserving of love.
God himself fell in love with us
and became human in order to be close to us.
Therefore, every human being is of infinite value
Whether native or foreigner,
Healthy or ill, old or disabled, rich or poor.
For God and in God’s sight
every human being is worthy of love and life.”

My catalogue of sins against Christmas begins with
The conscious and unconscious ways in which I judge
Myself, and certainly others,
As unworthy of love, undeserving of mercy, not worth attention.

Just because I think about me all the time
Does not mean I think of me
with the love God thinks of me.
Maybe if I learned to see me with that love, God’s love,
I would see you, as God sees you:
Worthy of love, deserving of mercy, worth my attention.

The sinfulness I must acknowledge
is I get lost in my own distress and misery;
So lost, I seek to find my way home
with selfishness, vanity, arrogance, violence.
Those are the sins I must acknowledge,
Acknowledge not just that I do them, but
Acknowledge that they are not the way home.
They do not protect me. They do not set me free.
They are chains, I forge link by link, yard by yard
Chains that imprison me, keeping me from God
Keeping me from you, keeping me from love.

My way home, my way to safety, my way to happiness
Is found in seeing God’s love for me,
Seeing God’s love for you.
My way home begins with joining my little love
to God’s love: God’s love for me, God’s love for you.

Covid-19 has determined this Christmas will be different.
In the USA, 14 million with illness, 274,000 deaths,
In the world, 67 million infected, 1.5 million dead,
these have already made this Christmas different.
But what is not different this Christmas
Is who you are to God, who every human being is to God,
A human being with whom God is in love.
What is not different this Christmas
Is God’s hope that you believe
Believe in the Holy Spirit of love within you
And from that amazing storehouse of mercy
find courage, hope and a Merry Christmas.
Amen.

Paulist Fr. Mark David Janus is president of Paulist Press.