Year B / Christmas / The Nativity of the Lord
Readings: Isaiah 52.7-10 / Responsorial Psalm 98.1-6 (R/v 3c) / Hebrews 1.1-6 / John 1.1-18
Memories. They have the power to make us smile and laugh when we recall happy times. They can also make us weep in grief or sigh in regret because of a hurtful past. In such moments, memories can trap us in the pain of disappointment or free us with thanksgiving. It does not take much to trigger a memory in all of us: a sound, a taste, a smell, an image, even words or phrases, bring us back to someone, some moment, some experience.
Our memories of Christmas past play a big part in how we celebrate Christmas today. Of Santa Claus and carols and gifts. Of shopping and baking. Of family feasting and greeting. Of those special curries and festive cakes. Even, of particular Christmas Masses, or homilies or manger scenes that made the Christmas story come alive for us.
A treasured memory I have is of being 5 or 6 years old with my family cleaning up our house on Christmas Eve, decorating the staircase railings with Christmas cards and trimming the Christmas tree—all of us making room for Christmas Day and eagerly anticipating it.
What are your cherished Christmas memories?
Personal memories are powerful. Shared memories of God are more powerful. They are universal and they reside deep within everyone. They influence us individually. Collectively, they shape the whole course of human events. Christmas returns us to this more powerful memory of God. Our shared memory of a God who could, and would, play an active role in human life and for human history. Our gospel proclaims this truth: “and the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1.14).
While Christmas is about many things for many people, the one truth underlying all of them is that Christmas reminds all that God chose to intervene to save us.
Intervened in the life of one couple. Not an ideal couple. Mary was unwed, pregnant, an illiterate young girl. Joseph’s ancestry was stained and soiled: his ancestors included scoundrels, thieves, schemers, foreigners and adulterers, as Matthew and Luke remind us in their gospels. Yet, when the time came for God to intervene and save, God chose this woman’s womb and this man’s family to bear his beloved son to the world.
Intervened also by choosing Bethlehem, an obscure Jewish village in Roman occupied Israel for Mary to give birth to her son. And with no room in the inn, by providing a manger, the messiest, dirtiest, poorest of spaces, for Mary to lay her son to sleep and Joseph to stand watch beside.
Intervened most of all in the form of a baby. Tiny. Vulnerable. Insignificant. Yet, this is Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, and God for us and our salvation.
As we remember the first Christmas and how God intervened in the life of Mary and Joseph, not such a perfect couple, and we look at our own imperfect lives, we can hope. For if God can work in the life of Mary and Joseph, God can surely work in my life too.
As we remember the first Christmas and how God intervened in the life of Joseph's family full of scoundrels, thieves, schemers, foreigners and adulterers, and we look at our own messed up families, we can hope. For if God can work in Joseph’s disordered family, God can surely work in our families with their own black sheep, difficulties and failures
As we remember the first Christmas and how God intervened in the history of one town, one country, and he did it amidst the odor and squalor of a manger, we can hope. For if God can be born in a stable 2000 years ago, then he can be born amidst the chaos, violence and uncertainty of our world today
As we remember the first Christmas and how God intervened in the quietest of ways, in the silence of an ordinary night, and in the smallest of ways, in a tiny babe, we can hope. For if God can come like this once, then, God will come again and again into our lives today in the ordinary and in the simplest, indeed, always coming to be present to us.
Isn't this why we are here? To remember and celebrate this memory of God labouring for good at Christmas? If your answer is “yes”, as mine is, then let us renew our belief wholeheartedly today that “The Word became flesh and lived amongst us” (John 1.14)
It good and right then for us to join the psalmist and “Sing to the Lord a new song for he has done marvellous things” (Psalm 96.1). Yes, we have every reason to lift up our voices to rejoice and sing—not just together but with all creation: all lands rejoicing, the sea making a noise, the rivers clapping their hands” (Psalm 96.7-8)
Why such jubilant rejoicing? Not just because God has come to save. But because we can now see God’s glory. This is what the shepherds saw in the manger: Jesus, the face of God’s love. Recall these words from our second reading: “We are gazing at the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Hebrews 1.3). Isn’t this what you and I do in faith when we come to the manger to gaze upon baby Jesus—to glimpse God?
God did something remarkable at the first Christmas: God turned he relationship between Godself and humankind upside down. Until the birth of Jesus, no one could see God’s glory and live. In the Hebrew Scriptures God granted only Moses this gift to approach and see God’s glory. No one else could. But with Jesus’ birth and in his person, every person, whether male or female, slave or free, Jew or Gentile, saintly or sinful, can now approach God. We can because God in all his glory graciously approached us in Jesus. This is an act of unimaginable love because the unapproachable God became flesh, and came to us in a small child. And on the face of this child we see “his glory, the glory of the only Son of God, full of grace and truth” (John 1.14) This is the wonder and mystery of Christmas. This is our Christmas joy.
And all this happens because God intervened once, as God will continue to intervene. Intervene especially in our lives to bring us home to Godself, especially those who are afraid and confused, lost and in sin. Intervene because God will not spurn us, as God did not spurn Mary’s womb, Joseph’s messed up ancestry, Bethlehem’s insignificance, the world’s sinfulness.
It doesn’t matter that our lives or our families or world are imperfect. What matters is that we make a space, no matter how small, for God in our hearts. When we do this, God will do the rest to bring to birth Jesus in the Bethlehem of our lives and the mangers of our hearts.
May be then we will come to know the real surprise at Christmas—that as much as our hearts are restless until they rest in God, it is really God who has come to rest in us in Jesus. This is the Christmas proclamation. It is our Good News. And we will begin to realise this truth when we see how it is not Mary who is holding Jesus but it is God in Jesus who is actually embracing Mary.
For us, this Good News cannot just be a powerful or joyful Christmas memory. It is our hope-filled Christian reality: God always comes to us in love and with mercy. This hope empowers us to live daily: we know God will come repeatedly into the craziness of our lives, our families and our world to embrace us in Jesus—Jesus who did not come once but will come always to you and me because in God he wants to hold us, cherish us and cradle us, forever.
Modelled in part on a homily by the monks of the Society of John the Evangelist
Preached at Church of the Transfiguration, Singapore
artwork: adoration of the child by gerrit van honthorst
Add a comment