A few years ago in China, I had an interesting conversation with a Taoist philosopher. Being a man of religion and a profound thinker he had studied Christianity and had great esteem for our faith. Once while talking about our different religions, he made this for me unexpected affirmation: "You Christians know too much about God? When I asked what he meant, he explained: "You know through revelation who God is, you can describe his nature, his attributes, his thoughts, his works, his plan for salvation from beginning to end. You know each of the three divine Persons and their relationship with each other. And as if this were not enough, the Son of God made himself visible and tangible becoming man. What is more, he founded the Church, instituted the sacraments, left his teaching and his examples. The Church knows very well what each member must believe, must do, to obtain salvation... You know so much that there is hardly anything to discover. I fear that so much knowledge will lessen the desire to stand before the mystery and diminish the Joy of tending towards the ineffable"

Evangelization is in fact about radiation and fascination. Ecclesia in Asia has a very eloquent symbol: A fire can only be lit by something that is itself on fire. The spread of the Good News is to be realized by people "who are themselves on fire with the love of Christ and burning with zeal to make him known more widely, love more deeply and followed more closely" (EA 23). Missionary strategies and activities are important but above all, men and women with burning hearts and joyful and grateful spirits, eager to make their treasure known and loved through their lives, their witnesses and their work.

Good News renews my life, make it more beautiful, fill it with joy? How do we share the goodness and joy of the Good News to our youth today, especially to those coming from the Chinese culture? I would like to invite you to "start afresh from Jesus Christ; who announces the Good News and who is the Good News. In the night in which Jesus was born the angel appeared to the shepherds out in the field with this message: "Be not afraid: I bring you good new of a great joy...' (Lk 2,8-14). Our evangelization should have this same characteristics, it is about sharing a great joy. Let us try to look at Jesus from this perspective and with the sensitivity of our Chinese mind and heart. Harmony attained by encounter: this belongs to the profound yearning of the Chinese soul. We shall contemplate Jesus from this special angle.

"If only you would open the heavens and come down!" (Is 63:19). This cry of the prophet Isaiah, which resounds specially in our liturgy of Advent, expresses humanity's deepest yearning. For mankind the distance between heaven and earth, between this our world and the mysterious and inaccessible world, home of the divinity, has always seemed impossible to span. Mankind has always longed to shorten this distance, so the sphere of the divine and the human may touch, not as an explosion, but as an embrace. We Chinese are particularly sensitive to this. We search for ways to 明天理，測天意，知天命.

According to the biblical narrative, mankind has tried to span this distance with his own initiatives and means. Adam and Eve gave way to the temptation to become "like God" (Gn 3:5) and their descendents "attempted to build a tower and a city whose summit reached the heavens" (Gn 11:3).They wanted to say to God: "Stay in peace where you are in the heavens. We can reach you if we want you? And naturally their undertaking of self-exaltation was unsuccessful with painful consequences. As time passed they gradually learned that it is not possible for man to "ascend" to heaven unless God first "descend" to the earth. So they began to humbly ask God in prayer to "look down?on them (cf Ps 14:2; 53:3:102:20; 113:6), and they see every divine intervention of help as God's "descending" toward his people (cf Ex 3:8; 19:11; Num 11:17; Ps 114:5). At the same time they assumed that there were certain places in which God likes to show himself, places chosen by him to be points of contact between heaven and earth; e.g. the Temple in Jerusalem. Therefore the greatest desire of every good Jew is to be in the temple. The Psalm says: "One thing I ask of the Lord, this I seek: to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life" (Ps 27, 4).

The situation changes with the Incarnation. Now the temple is no longer a place, it is a person, the Son of God made man, Jesus Christ, the one we profess in the creed: "For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven" He it is who brings heaven down to earth and lifts earth to heaven. Since the Incarnation our world is a different place, it has become the house, Jesus has a deep love for this world created through him in the beginning and which has become his home with the Incarnation. He looks on the world with delight and solidarity (耶穌的"物情"). He is attentive to nature: the lilies of the field, the vine and the tree, the splendor of a golden field and the fragility of a reed moved by the wind, the sunshine and rain which do good to all without partiality or reserve, the wind, the clouds, the light and shadows, water and fire.

He observes with wonder the growth of the mustard plant, which from a tiny seed becomes a tree large enough for the birds to nest in. He is a friend of animals and inspires John the Baptist to point to him as the Lamb of God. His parables and teachings are populated with animals form the largest such as the camel to the smallest such as the fly, the moth, the worm. Watching the free and happy flight of the sparrow the thinks of the Father's loving care, observing tenderly the hen who gathers her chicks, he recalls his mission to gather together the dispersed children of God. The den of the wolf and the nest of the nest of the bird inspire him to speak of his poverty. Sheep move his Good Shepherd's heart, the donkey becomes a sign of his messianic nature and the fish his purse from which to take the coin to pay the temple tax. The animal world offers material for some of his criticism, severe but mixed with irony and refined humor: filtering flies, swallowing camels, making a camel pass through a needle's eye.

Jesus' affection for everything that exists reveals all the beauty of the Incarnation. In Jesus God reveals his first love for his creation. In the story of the Genesis, at the end of each day God contemplates with admiration the work of his hands: "God saw it was good and beautiful'. This beauty, tarnished through sin, now retrieves its brightness with Jesus. In this way Jesus reveals to man the beauty of his dwelling place, of his home.

"When the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman..." (Gal 4:4). With the Incarnation God comes down into human history. Eternity enters into time and makes it "full". The concept of time is not univocal. Even though an hour always has sixty minutes and a minute has sixty seconds, in Africa, as on the other continents, the quality, density or "fullness" of time is not always the same.

We often think of time as "empty; a formless container which brings no significance with it. Although time can be measured with precision, calculated with clocks ever more sophisticated, in itself it has neither content nor consistence. It is the outer frame of unknown events and as such produce uncertainty and even fear. How can we fill, control, manage or save time? These are questions which manifest our powerlessness in the face of this reality so intimately linked with our existence.

In the viewpoint of God, time is never empty. Rather it is ambit in which God makes his presence felt and realizes his plan. Permeated with God, our chronological becomes full, dense, it becomes the history of salvation. Below the surface of a monotonous stream there flows the eternal which gives everything unity and substance.

In the Old Testament God filled time with his interventions for salvation, through Jesus He fills time with himself. Time becomes capable to host the eternal God, human history becomes the history of salvation, the history of God's love. Jesus himself begins his public life with these words: "The time has come" (Mk 1:14). With Jesus the fullest time of human history has arrived, the central point to which flows all that has been and from which flows all that is to be. That's why we put the birth of Christ at the centre of our History and divide it into two parts: BC and AD before Christ and the Christian era (anno domini).

Now 2007 years have passed since that night at Bethlehem, in which the angel announced: "Today a Savior has been born to you" (Lk 2:11), in which our time took a leap In quality. Externally we synchronize our calendar with this great event, taking the year of Jesus' birth as a reference point for our universal organization of time. But are we really aware of its profound significance? Do we really put Jesus at the centre of our time, our life, our history? Do our rhythms of life, our timetables, our personal and community programs and projects follow God's schedule? Do we run the risk of living a full timetable and an empty time?

On entering the world, Jesus renews the splendor of creation; entering time, he brings human history to its fullness; becoming part of humanity, the common nature of every human being is elevated to a lofty dignity. Becoming a man "the Son of god has united himself in some fashion with every human person" (Gaudium et spes 22) elevating the entire human race. The Son of God's becoming men took place in the greatest humility. He silently came "among us" without attracting attention. Let us hear how Luke describes the circumstances of his birth: "In those days Caesar Augustus published a decree ordering a census of the whole world... Everyone went to register in his own town" (Lk 2:1 ss).This is how Jesus was born during a journey, in the context of crowds on the move. With the people on earth start out on a journey towards their own towns, the Lord comes down from heaven and walks with them. While the king of this world is proud of his greatness and is pleased to see the great number of his subject, the real king of the universe becomes little and fragile, humble and obedient. While on earth the sons of men are counted, the Son of God, incognito and silent, comes in their midst, almost a number, a demographic unit of little importance.

Also the description given by Matthew, which begins with the genealogy of Jesus (Mt 1:1-17), gives us the same image of a God hidden among men, in a chain of names and faces. The Author of the Letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus' humility and his being radically involved in our human reality with this incisive affirmation: "He is not ashamed to be call us brothers' (Heb 2, 11).

All through his life, Jesus "worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind, acted by human choice, and loved with a human heart" (Gaudium ed spes 22).With the Incarnation our human being has been made the space of the manifestation of the divina. In Jesus we are truly made images of God.

Similarly regarding the cosmos and history, Jesus has an altitude of serene participation, open to everything which is authentically human (耶穌的"人情"). He himself "grows in wisdom and grace before God and man" (Lk 2,52) in the context of everyday family life in a simple environment, such as that of the little town of Nazareth. His person and his words express human warmth, full of common sense, wisdom, realism and love of life. He speaks frankly and in a practical way about the work of the farmer, the owner of the vineyard, the fisherman, the shepherd, the merchant and the builder of houses. He also notices the little domestic tasks assigned to women, for example, using yeast to make bread, lighting the lamp and putting it on the stand, preserving wind, mending old clothes. He even knows the pain of the woman in labor, and understands well her feeling. It is amazing that he should choose the image of the woman giving birth to speak of his death and resurrection (cf Jn 16:21-23).

He shares the joy of festivities, willingly accepts invitations to banquets, visits friends, attends weddings, holds babies in his arms and looks kindly on their games in the village squares. He observes with attention people praying in the Temple, and sees even the hidden, humble gesture of the widow who puts her last coins into the Temple offering box.

He shares the grief of those who mourn, understands the anguish of parents with sick children, is moved by the tears of a mother and by the death of a friend, feels compassion for the hungry crowds, is aware of the sense of impotence of the person who realizes that they are unable to add even one day to their life, knows the fear of the one who has the responsibility of protecting the house from unpredictable thieves.

Not unknown to him are the complex dynamics of human relationships in the family and in society. He himself had a wide circle of relationships: with his family and neighbors, with the disciples, with the crowds, with friends, admirers and enemies, with civil and religious authorities, with Jews and with Greeks, with the rich and the poor, the educated and the simple, etc. In his parables he speaks with perspicacity about the relationship between father and son, between brothers in the family, between master and servants, master and disciples, between the king and his subjects, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the oppressed, above all he insists on the love that must be shown to all, even enemies.

He appreciates human traditions, cultures and the wisdom developed by simple men and women in daily life. In his teaching Jesus makes a synthesis of human wisdom and divine wisdom. Words such as "There where your treasure is, is also your heart" (Mt 6:21), "Your left hand should not know what your right hand is doing" (Mt 6:3); "every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit"(Mt 7:17), etc, are divine words charged with humanity and at the same time human wisdom elevated into divine revelation.

With the coming of Christ man's existence took on an earnestness which classical antiquity never knew. The earnestness did not spring from human maturity; but from the call which each person received from God through Christ. Now let me place before you some Gospel images, some concrete examples of encounter between Jesus and different type of men and women. These stories reveal clearly what we are trying to say: encountering Christ is a source of joy.

We are all familiar with that low-profile Asian and the soft-spoken inquirer who comes to ask about the profounder significance of our faith Attracted by Jesus, Nicodemus, a Jewish leader, came to Jesus by night. Nicodemus was learned and successful, has a public position in society and many secret queries in his heart. It was not dogmatic argumentation that aroused his curiosity, but the person of Jesus. He was sincere in his searching. Jesus interacts with Nicodemus on the same profound level of his yearning. He challenges him with the issue of "being born again" and launches him to the freedom of the children of God under the guidance of the Spirit.

Totally different from Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman is superficial, shallow. She does not seek nor expect anything. It was Jesus who first addresses her. He leads her in a process starting from zero. With the symbol of water he frees the woman from her materialistic constraint and helps her discover her own dignity. He shows her that he is, in reality, greater then her forefathers, that his gift is greater than her traditional heritage. He speaks to her heart, entering into the depths of her life, opening her toward new horizons. He made her aware of God's love and his gifts to her: "If you only know the gift of God?. Even though she does not seek God, God awaits her, seeks her, loves her and draws her to himself

The encounter of Jesus with Nathanael is mediated by Philip, who after being called by Jesus to be his disciple, wanted to share this great Joy with his friend. Nathanael was cold, skeptic, even suspicious at the beginning: "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" It is amazing to read how Jesus reacts to this skepticism with one of his highest praise: "Here is a true Israelite, there is no duplicity in him? Jesus is positive in his way of looking at people and reality. A Chinese proverb says: "With heaven is in your heart, you see heaven everywhere" He sees in the heart of this young man the goodness, hidden under an external indifference. Jesus praise caused a complete change of attitude in Nathanael. "How do you know me?? he asked bewildered. "Before Philip called you I saw you under the fig tree" Jesus sees and draws out the best in every man and woman he encounters.

Zacchaeus was a tax collector, a type of banker who serves the Romans and considered by his fellow Jews as public sinner. He was short but clever. His curiosity to see Jesus challenged his intelligence. In order to see Jesus he came out from his house and climbed a tree, but now Jesus invites him to make the opposite journey: "Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay in your house'The small house with marks the small part of the world of this small man is now open to welcome God. Jesus once chased the sellers from the temple, scolding them for changing that holy place into a den of thieves. Now in the house of Zacchaeus, the opposite is happening. By becoming his guest, Jesus has transformed the house of a tax collector. a place of accumulated, dishonest wealth, into a place of communion with God. Not only his house, but Zacchaeus himself was transformed. He made a courageous decision: "Behold, half of my possessions. Lord, I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over? In the presence of Jesus, riches, which were everything to this tax collector, have become unimportant. Riches had closed him within himself, had isolated him from God and from his brothers, now they are an instrument of communion, of reconciliation.

"Have you eaten yet?" is a question heard many times a day in China. It is a familiar greeting between friends like "How do you do?" After his resurrection Jesus appears to his disciples at the shore of the lake, at their normal place of work. Jesus asked them: "Children, have you any fish to eat?" then he invites them to come to breakfast, which he himself has prepared for them. Affection and Tenderness characterize the attitude of Jesus. He cares for the happiness and well being of his disciples.

These are only some of the many Gospel stories on the encounter of Jesus with different type of men and women. The common point in all these encounters is Jesus reveals his interlocutors to themselves, he challenges them, he makes them aware of their identity, of their calling, of their ideals, their potentials, their resources, their source of joy, the deep yearning in their hearts, and above all, he helps them to discover the love of God and the real meaning of life.