O Holy night! The stars are brightly shiningSo goes the first verse of my favorite Christmas carol. A carol differs from a hymn in that a carol is a festive song, generally religious but not necessarily so. By contrast, a hymn is a solemn song of worship.
It is the night of our dear Savior's birth
Long lay the world in sin and error pining
'Til He appears and the soul felt its worth
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn
Fall on your knees
What is lovely about the best Christmas carols, like O Holy Night, is they are memorable and theologically dense. In other words, they convey the revelation of God in Jesus Christ simply by being beautiful. Their message goes from our heads to our hearts through our voices. This is why it said that the one who sings prays twice.
Far from being the end, tonight marks the beginning of the Christian festival of Christmas. Traditionally, Christmas lasts twelve days- the twelfth night being Epiphany on 6 January. For Roman Catholics in the United States, Christmas goes until the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which we usually celebrate, as we will this year, on 8 January.
There is a lot of concern about keeping Christ in Christmas. As Christians, the best way to keep Christ in Christmas is by observing Advent. Celebrating the Annunciation on 25 March should help us keep in mind of the fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph observed a nine-month Advent as they prepared for Jesus’ birth.
It is also telling that, despite his parents’ preparations, the Lord was born during their sojourn to Bethlehem and not at home in their native Nazareth. This lends some credibility to the saying, “We plan, God laughs.” But the preparation required for Christmas is not all the busyness we tend to engage in this time of year. It is not all the shopping, decorating, socializing, cooking, fretting, and fussing. It is preparing your heart so that Christ can be born in you. This requires prayer and meditation, which leads to contemplation.
Like Mary and Joseph, we need to prepare our hearts and our souls to receive Christ. We do so not knowing exactly when or how he will come to us. We wait in hope, trusting that he will come. Christ almost never arrives in an expected way and often not in the ways we want him to show up.
Jesus did not come to deprive you of your freedom or to take away your humanity by his overpowering divinity. Rather than get you out of jams, the Lord accompanies you through them, even those of your own making. Therefore, when you’re struggling, going through a difficult time, or facing daunting circumstances, it is important not to jump to the conclusion that God has abandoned you. It is precisely through those kinds of circumstances that you can come to realize Jesus Christ is Emmanuel, God with us.
The disconnection between the manner of Christ’s appearance and our expectations is a sure sign of what O Holy Night indicates with the lyrics: “Long lay the world in sin and error pining.”
Like his birth in an out-of-the-way place in a nowhere town in a marginal part of the Roman Empire, Christ’s coming now as then is quiet and simple. Think about the “sign” the angel told the shepherds to look for: “you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”1 This is the sign that “Christ the Lord” is born? Yes! And therein lies its message and power.
As Pope Benedict XVI noted in a Christmas homily years ago- the Lord of the Universe
does not come with power and outward splendor. He comes as a baby – defenseless and in need of our help. He does not want to overwhelm us with his strength. He takes away our fear of his greatness. He asks for our love: so he makes himself a child… God made himself small so we could understand him2As inauspicious as it is, Jesus’s advent, his arrival, his coming dispels the darkness, as our reading from Isaiah indicates. We know has arrived when, to quote the carol again, the soul feels its worth. The Lord’s quiet presence brings peace in the midst of chaos, inspires hope when you are tempted to despair, and enables you to see through and beyond “this present darkness.”3
From the earliest Church, the manger has served as a symbol for the altar, on which we consecrate the bread that, by the Spirit’s transforming power, the same power that made the universe- the power of divine love, “becomes Christ himself: the true food for our hearts.”4
To relegate Christ’s coming or arrival to a highly sanitized scene set a long time ago in a land far away is to do nothing more than engage in sentimentalism. As nice as it is at times, sentiment has no transformative power. A remedy for this is found in the teaching of that great Doctor of the Church, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who noted that the Lord arrives three times.
Advent prepares us not just or even primarily for our celebration of the Lord’s first coming but is preparation for his second coming at the end of time. Christ’s third coming happens or potentially happens (if we open ourselves to receive him), between the first two.
Occurring as it does between the other two, Christ’s third coming is like a path we walk as pilgrims from his first arrival to his second coming. As our reading from the Letter to Titus indicates, our pilgrim path is the way of faith, hope, and love, making it the path of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. This is how we “live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age, as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of our great God and savior Jesus Christ.”5
My dear friends in this Holy Mass, from which the term Christ-Mass comes to us, you can experience for yourself God becoming small. So small that he can fit in the palm of your hand. As you open yourself to welcome Christ you can’t help but experience for yourself the thrill of joy that accompanies the in-breaking of that new and glorious morning: the light of Christ.
At the end of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens gives us, in his description of the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge, a wonderful example of the transformation wrought by receiving Christ. In the wake of his supernatural encounters with the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, Ebenezer Scrooge, Dickens wrote:
became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him6And so, as Dickens ended his A Christmas Carol, “God bless Us, Everyone!”7 Merry Christmas.
1 Luke 2:11-12.↩
2 Pope Benedict XVI. Homily for the Solemnity of the Nativity of Our Lord: Midnight Mass: 25 December 2006.↩
3 Ephesians 6:12..↩
4 Pope Benedict XVI. Homily for Midnight Mass: 25 December 2006.↩
5 Titus 2:12b-13.↩
6 Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol. “The End of It.”.↩
7 Ibid.↩
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