“O holy night! The stars are brightly shining, It is the night of our dear Savior's birth.” So begins my favorite Christmas Carol. But brighter than the brightest star is the Son of God, Jesus Christ.
For us and our salvation God's Son was incarnate of the Blessed Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit. Just as Jesus is “consubstantial” with the Father, which makes him “God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God,” being born of the woman Miriam of Nazareth, he is also consubstantial with us, making him truly human, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.
The circumstances of the Father’s Only Begotten Son becoming human are certainly not what we, in our disfigured human imaginations, would deem the proper way for the Deity to enter his creation. I hope over the last month, during the season of Advent, you took the opportunity to reflect deeply on the Joyful Mysteries of the Blessed Virgin’s Most Holy Rosary.
It is the third of the Joyful Mysteries that we contemplate Jesus’s birth, his nativity. The fruit of this mystery is poverty. Our use of old-fashioned words like, “manger” and “swaddling clothes,” can obscure what the evangelist wants to convey in the Gospel we just heard: the Creator of the Universe chose to enter his creation in a cave that housed animals with all that entails in terms of filth and waste, was wrapped in unclean rags, and placed in a feeding trough.
If you have not yet taken the opportunity to reflect on the mysteries of our Lord’s conception and birth, I urge you to do so over these days of Christmas. For Roman Catholics in the United States, Christmas lasts until the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which falls this year on Sunday, 12 January. Christmas is a season, not a day. This gives you plenty of time, especially now that Christmas is practically over for many people, who observe it as one largely anti-climactic day.
Tonight, like the shepherds, we keep watch. Rather than watching over our flocks, we are watching for the Good Shepherd. Sometimes this can feel like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin or like Vladimir and Estragon, who are still Waiting for Godot. But like the shepherds, we have to know where to look to find him.
Just as the Lord of the Universe was born as a marginal person, among a marginal people, in a remote part of the Roman Empire, in an out-of-the-way place in southern Judah, today he is still found on the margins. Jesus is found in the homeless, hungry, lonely, sick, and imprisoned. When you consider the circumstances of his birth, how can you not be reminded of refugee and immigrant families fleeing violence, instability, and debilitating poverty? In short, each of us is an innkeeper who must decide if there is room for Jesus, who comes to us as impoverished child.
Is it any wonder that many Christians who never travel to the margins spend a lot of time wondering where in the world Jesus is? The shepherds knew where to find him because they were themselves people on the margins, not deemed fit for polite company. Unlike Waldo, Jesus is easy to find if you know where to look: among the poor and the outcasts.
As our first reading from Isaiah makes clear, the Lord comes to give light to those who’ve been walking in darkness. He comes to be a light for those who dwell in the land of gloom. Jesus comes to put an end to violence and free the oppressed. Rather than throwing lightning bolts from the sky like a pagan deity, who conforms better to our human ideal of what a god should be and do, the Lord comes to bring change both from below and within.
By his condescension and his self-sacrificing life, which culminated with his being lifted up on the cross, Jesus came to inaugurate a revolution of love. This looks like foolishness to a lot of people, even to many who profess Christianity. How do you win a revolution not only by forgiving but loving your enemies and doing good to them? Being a Christian means experiencing how you add by subtraction and win by losing.
In light of what our cultural observance of Christmas often becomes, these words from our epistle reading, taken from the Letter to Titus, can seem like a rebuke:
The grace of God has appeared, saving allThis passage helps us grasp that Christian faith is a mode of existence that places those to whom God has gifted it in the crucible between the already and the not-yet.
and training us to reject godless ways and worldly desires
and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age,
as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of our great God (Letter to Titus 2:11-13)
But tonight, my dear friends, we celebrate the already, the birth of Jesus Christ our Savior, even as we look forward to the not-yet of his return, which await in joyful hope. This is stated beautifully at the end of the first verse of O Holy Night:
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,Speaking of a “new and glorious morn,” it bears repeating something a friend wrote to me in a letter at a time when I was struggling: “Easter is coming. Easter is always on its way.” Merry Christmas.
Till He appear'd and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn
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