Silent night! Holy night!How is the night bright? The night is bright when the Light of the World, the Son of God descends into this darkness. As the psalmist observed, singing to and about God: “Darkness is not dark for you, and night shines as the day.”1 This anticipates the Gospel for Christmas Day, which comes from the prologue to the Gospel According to Saint John:
All is calm, all is bright
What came to be through [the Word] was life,I love walking into the Church on Christmas Eve night. The tree by the bell tower is alight. Light is pouring out of the round window above the main doors and emanating through the windows along the north and south sides of the Church. Coming from the dark and the cold into the light and warmth of the Church takes on profound meaning. As our first reading for tonight, taken from Isaiah, puts it:
and this life was the light of the human race;
the light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it2
The people who walked in darknessWe gather to worship the newborn King. Yet, “born of the Father before all ages,” the Son of God existed before there was anything. In Him the past, the present, and the future come together. After being visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, a humbled, if not humiliated, Ebeneezer Scrooge, swears to the Ghost of Christmas Future: “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.”4 You see, to be made holy, you must first be made whole.
have seen a great light;
upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom
a light has shone3
One of the most neglected readings in the lectionary is our reading from the Letter to Titus. This beautiful passage brings some much-needed gravitas. “The grace of God has appeared.”5 Grace is nothing other than God sharing divine life with us and since this life is brought into the world by the Word, Jesus Christ is God’s grace. He is the One who saves us.
Salvation consists in being trained in God’s grace, trained to reject godlessness and worldly desires, trained to live temperately and devoutly “as we await the blessed hope.”6 Advent ended at sundown this evening. When viewed from a Christian perspective, history both before and after the coming our Savior is an advent, a time of expectant waiting.
The Lord’s Nativity is the third Joyful Mystery of Our Lady’s Rosary. The fruit of this mystery is poverty. It is poverty that brings us to Saint Luke’s account of the birth of our Lord. It’s important not to miss out on the poverty of the Lord’s nativity.
Even in modern translations, we still read that the Blessed Virgin Mary wrapped her newborn babe in “swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.”7 At the time those words were used to translate from the Greek they were not as stylized as they are now, more descriptive and less poetic then than now. What they sought to convey was that the Lord was born in a cold, dark cave surrounded by animals, wrapped in rags, and placed in a feeding trough.
Being no mere happenstance, the circumstances of the Lord’s birth matter greatly. How you follow the Lord through the sojourn of life greatly matters too. In the end, it is the only thing that truly matters. Celebrating Mass is what the Lord taught his followers to do. Mass gives this day its name: Christ mas. It is in the Mass that the babe of Bethlehem makes himself present under the unassuming signs of bread and wine.
Just as it was not glaringly obvious that the baby wrapped in rags and lying in a trough was God in the flesh, so it is not readily apparent that bread and wine, by the power of the same Spirit by whom the Son of God was conceived in the womb of the Virgin, are transformed into His body and blood.
In Holy Communion we receive the greatest gift imaginable: Jesus Christ. He is not the means to some other end. Just as in His sacrifice He is both victim and priest, He is both means and end. Therefore, it is truly right and just that we celebrate “the most sacred night on which blessed Mary, the immaculate Virgin brought forth the Savior for this world."8
Silent night! Holy night!
Son of God, Love’s pure light
radiant, beams from Thy Holy face,
with the dawn of redeeming grace
Jesus, Lord at Thy birth
1 Psalm 139:12.↩
2 John 1:4-5.↩
3 Isaiah 9:1.↩
4 Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol, Stave IV, “The Last of the Spirits.↩
5 Titus 2:11. ↩
6 Titus 2:12-13.↩
7 Luke 2:7.↩
8 Roman Missal. The Order of Mass. Eucharistic Prayer I, Communicates for the Octave of the Lord's Nativity, sec 86.↩
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