From Bethlehem to Your Backyard: Living the Radical Humility of the Incarnation: A Franciscan Journey Through See–Judge–Act

Merry Christmas and Happy Christmas!

Before we dive in, and yeah, this is long, but thought-provoking, please think about the nativity scenes you’ll encounter this week before Christmas Day. It could be the one at your parish, or the ceramic set on your mantle that’s been in your family for years. What if I told you that these scenes—all of them—trace back to one cold December night in 1223, when a man named Francis of Assisi decided the world needed to see Jesus differently?

Today, we’ll discover how Francis’s transformative view of the Incarnation—God becoming human—invites us beyond celebration to everyday action. His approach has the power to reshape our response to poverty, inequality, and ecological crisis.

SEE — How Francis Looked at the Incarnation

The Story of Greccio (1223)

In December 1223, Francis, disappointed by changes in his order and suffering from illness, traveled to Greccio after Pope Honorius III approved the Franciscan rule, feeling his vision of simplicity had become complicated.

In Greccio, Francis asked Giovanni Velita to prepare a simple cave scene with a manger and live animals. His biographer wrote that Francis wanted people to see, with their own eyes, Christ’s poverty at birth.

On Christmas Eve 1223, something extraordinary happened. People flocked to witness the simple scene during Christmas Mass, as fires lit the darkness as crowds arrived carrying candles and torches. Francis, who was a deacon, proclaimed the Gospel and preached. An eyewitness, Giovanni Velita himself, reported seeing a real infant appear in the manger, and Francis embracing the child.

What Francis Was Seeing

Francis’s nativity scene was not just decorative—it was a deliberate theological message. For Francis:

• The manger, cross, and altar reveal one mystery: Jesus, born in a manger, foreshadows Christ as Eucharistic bread and a life given for love.
• For Francis, crib and cross share one humility: both display self-emptying divine love.
• Christ’s poverty was extreme: Born poor, lived poor, died poor. This wasn’t just about a lack of money—it was about God choosing vulnerability, dependence, and radical solidarity with the powerless.

Historical accounts tell us that Francis “carried Jesus in his heart, mouth, eyes, hands, and all his members.” His entire way of perceiving the world was filtered through this incarnate Christ.

Seeing Today

What does it mean to “see” with Francis’s eyes in 2026? It means:

1. Looking for Christ in unexpected places: Where is Jesus “in the manger” today?
2. In the poor and homeless on our streets
3. In migrants and refugees fleeing violence
4. In those excluded by race, class, or immigration status
5. In the wounded earth itself—our “common home.”

• Letting vulnerability become sacramental: Instead of turning away from suffering, we allow others’ vulnerability to become a sign of God’s closeness to us.
• Recognizing the scandal of our liturgy: Our beautiful nativity scenes and Eucharistic celebrations should awaken not sentimentality but awareness of real poverty, violence, and ecological harm in our neighborhoods and world.

A Powerful Example: Consider the nativity scenes displayed in some churches this season with signs reading “ICE was here”—with Joseph, Mary, and Jesus missing. This shocks us out of cozy Christmas nostalgia and into the reality that the Holy Family were refugees, and today’s refugees are Christ among us.

JUDGE — What the Incarnation Meant for Francis

God’s Deep Humility and Poverty

For Francis, the Incarnation revealed God’s own choice to embrace poverty and humility. This wasn’t about romanticizing material lack—it was about understanding that God voluntarily entered into:

• Powerlessness (a baby can’t defend itself)
• Dependence (needing parents, needing care)
• Vulnerability (to hunger, cold, danger)

If God embraced poverty and humility, what does this mean for our desire for power, status, and possessions? For Francis, poverty is first among virtues because God embraced it first.

Love and Suffering Are Inseparable

The manager’s humility leads to the Passion’s love: the crib and cross proclaim that God’s love embraces our suffering.

Later Franciscan theology, especially through St. Bonaventure (who lived shortly after Francis), developed what we call a “Christocentric perspective.” This means:

• In the incarnate Jesus, God fully reveals humanity to itself.
• Christ heals our divisions—within ourselves, between people, between humanity and creation.
• Every person possesses immeasurable dignity because the Word became human.

A Revolutionary Theological Insight: The Primacy of Christ

This brings us to one of the most beautiful—and challenging—ideas in Franciscan thought, developed by Blessed John Duns Scotus (1266-1308). (One of my favorite theologians)

Most theologians before Scotus said: “If humanity hadn’t sinned, there would be no Incarnation. Jesus came because of sin, to fix what we broke.” Think how often you hear that even today!

Scotus argued the opposite: the Son of God would have been made man even if humanity had not sinned. He wrote: “To think that God would have given up such a task had Adam not sinned would be quite unreasonable.”

Why does this matter? Because it means:

• The Incarnation is not Plan B: It’s not God’s backup plan after we messed up. It’s what God always wanted—to share divine life with us completely.
• It’s about love, not just repair: God doesn’t become human merely to fix sin, but because this is the ultimate expression of divine love.
• Christ has absolute primacy: All exists for Christ and in love, with the Incarnation as the goal.

As Scotus put it, it would be “utterly irrational” for the greatest work of God to be merely “occasioned” by sin.

Connecting to Vatican II and Beyond (Think Joseph Cardijn here)

This Franciscan vision found its way into modern Catholic teaching. The Second Vatican Council’s document Gaudium et Spes echoes Francis in teaching that “the incarnate Word illuminates the mystery of the human person.”

Thomas Merton, the great 20th-century spiritual writer, drew heavily on this Franciscan theology. He helped us see that:

• The Incarnation is cosmic—it affects all of creation.
• It points us toward nonviolence, poverty, and solidarity.
• Francis’s sense of “fraternity” extends to all religions and all of creation.

Through Merton, we encounter Francis’s incarnational vision “refracted through the questions and crises of the 20th and 21st centuries.”

Judging Our World

When we apply this Franciscan lens, we are called not just to observe but to respond—transforming our world through actions that affirm dignity.

The logic of the Incarnation challenges:

• Economic systems that produce extreme inequality
• Political rhetoric that creates “disposable people.”
• Environmental practices that treat creation as a commodity
• Border policies that separate families
• Any system that denies the immeasurable dignity of every person

If God chose insignificance and poverty, then our obsession with wealth, power, and status is radically called into question.

If every human being—and all creation—possesses dignity because Christ became incarnate, then policies and lifestyles must be assessed based on how they respect or harm this dignity.

ACT — How Francis Lived the Incarnation

Francis’s Radical Actions

Francis didn’t just contemplate the Incarnation—he embodied it:

1. He shed his clothing before the bishop to renounce his father’s wealth and status.
2. He begged for bread even from his own friars to maintain solidarity with the poor.
3. He chose to die naked on the ground, imitating the poor Christ to the very end.
4. He combined the Nativity with Eucharist at Greccio, showing that the Child of Bethlehem is the same Lord who offers himself as “bread come down from heaven.”

Over time, Francis became so united with the crucified and risen Christ that he received the stigmata—the wounds of Christ appearing on his own body. Bonaventure depicts him as “a living icon of the glorified, wounded Christ.”

Francis’s Community Embodied the Incarnation

Francis’s vision created a movement that:

• Begged rather than owned, sharing poverty with Christ
• Reconciled enemies and made peace
• Cared for lepers and other outcasts
• Praised creation as “brother” and “sister,” recognizing God’s presence in all things
• Formed tangible relationships that embodied God’s nearness

This wasn’t about individual piety. It was about creating communities that made God’s love visible and tangible.

Acting Today: Concrete Steps

So what does this mean for us? In 2026, living out the Incarnation calls us to concrete action—personally and in our communities.

Personal Level

• Embrace simplicity
• Examine your consumption habits.
• Ask: “Do I need this, or do I just want it?”
• Practice gratitude for what you have rather than craving what you lack.
• Share goods with the poor.
• Not just charitable giving, but genuine relationships
• Learn the names of homeless people in your area.
• Support organizations that treat people with dignity, not just efficiency
• Practice ecological conversion
• Treat creation as “brother” and “sister,” not as a resource to exploit
• Reduce waste and consumption.
• Make choices that respect our “common home.”

Community Level

Make space for those on the margins.

• Is your parish genuinely welcoming to the poor? To immigrants? To people of Color? To people not of your historical culture?
• Do your church buildings reflect Francis’s poverty or medieval wealth?
• Are your programs accessible to people with economic challenges?
• Link liturgy with justice
• Connect your Christmas nativity scenes with the immigration ministry.
• Let your Eucharistic worship flow into service.
• Make the connection explicit: “This Child in the manger is the immigrant child at the border.”

• Form Eucharistic communities
• Create small groups committed to prayer AND action.
• Share meals and resources, not just ideas.
• Practice mutual aid and genuine solidarity.

Systemic Level

• Advocate for policies that respect dignity.
• Support living wages and worker rights.
• Advocate for humane immigration policies.
• Push for environmental protection and climate action.
• Challenge structures of inequality
• Question economic systems that create billionaires while children go hungry
• Support organizations working for systemic change
• Use your voice and vote for the most vulnerable.

• Practice solidarity, not charity.
• Move from “helping them” to “standing with.”
• Listen to and amplify the voices of those directly affected.
• Share power, not just resources

The Integration: Simple, Eucharistic Living

Francis shows us that acting on the Incarnation isn’t about grand gestures. It’s about integrating our worship with our lives:

• Your Christmas crib should make you think about affordable housing.
• Your Eucharist should send you to serve the hungry.
• Your prayer should lead you to care for creation.
• Your community should be a sign of God’s inclusive love.

My Invitation To You

The Challenge Francis Offers Us

Francis of Assisi created the first nativity scene not to make Christmas cute, but to make the Incarnation real. He wanted us to feel the cold, smell the animals, see the poverty—and then recognize that same vulnerable Christ in our world today.

The See–Judge–Act method, rooted in Franciscan incarnational theology, offers us a path:

SEE: Look honestly at where Christ resides “in the manger” today—in the poor, the excluded, the wounded earth.

JUDGE: Compare these realities to the logic of the Incarnation. If God chose poverty and humility, our systems of wealth and power are radically questioned.

ACT: Live more simply, share more generously, and form communities that embody God’s nearness through tangible relationships.

The Hope Francis Offers Us

But here’s the profound hope in Francis’s vision: The Incarnation isn’t just about fixing what’s broken. Drawing on Scotus and the whole Franciscan tradition, we see that God always wanted this intimate union with us.

The Incarnation tells us:

• You are loved, not because you’re useful or fixed, but because love itself became flesh.
• Creation is good—not just “okay despite the fall,” but fundamentally blessed.
• There is enough—poverty in the Franciscan sense isn’t about scarcity but about trust.
• Vulnerability isn’t weakness—it’s the way God chose to come to us.

Your Next Step

This Christmas season and the New Year, I invite you to:

1. Visit a nativity scene with new eyes: Let it awaken not nostalgia but action. Ask yourself: “Where do I see Christ in poverty today?”
2. Choose one concrete action: Maybe it’s reducing consumption, forming a relationship with someone experiencing homelessness, or joining an environmental advocacy group.
3. Create a Eucharistic connection: Link your Sunday worship explicitly to Monday’s action. Let the Mass/Liturgy send you into mission.
4. Form or join a community: We can’t do this alone. Francis didn’t. Find others committed to this incarnational vision.

My Reflection

Eight hundred years after that cold December night in Greccio, Francis’s gift to us remains urgent. In a world of:

• Staggering inequality
• Climate crisis
• Refugee crises
• Rampant consumerism
• Ecological devastation

…we desperately need to remember that God chose to enter this world as a vulnerable infant, born to poor parents, laid in an animal’s feeding trough.

That Child is present today—in every child separated from parents at the border, in every person sleeping on our streets, in every species driven to extinction, in every person treated as disposable.

The question Francis poses to us across the centuries is simple but profound:

Will we see Christ there? Will we judge our systems by His values? And will we act to embody His presence in our world?

May the Christ Child, born in poverty in Bethlehem and re-presented in Greccio, be born anew in our hearts and our actions. Merry Christmas.