Year A / Christmas / Christmas Night
Readings Isaiah 9.1-6 / Psalm 95 (R/v Luke 2.11) / Titus 2.11-14 / Luke 2.1-14
"The grace of God has appeared, saving all" (Titus 2.11)
This is the Apostle Paul's message to Titus. We hear it on this most holy Christmas night. It must resonate with all of us for this truth is indeed God's good news for all peoples.
We see it in the new born child we remember again, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in this manger before us.
We hear it in the joyful refrains of every Christmas song we will sing tonight, each echoing the celebration of the psalmist and the angel: "Today a saviour has been born to us, he is Christ the Lord."
We believe it in the wondrous amazement and simple faith of the shepherds whose trust we imagine again propels them to seek out this little one in the manger, who we also long to come up close to and gaze upon his face after this Mass.
We know all this to be the truth we have long awaited for throughout Advent. Tonight it comes to be in this child Jesus who is born. Born again in no other place than in us. Our hearts are the very manger where he wants to dwell in. No matter how messy, chaotic or sinful our hearts may be, Jesus chooses our hearts to come and dwell in. And more than dwell in, he comes to save us.
Indeed the very place of true belonging -- where God and us are together -- is the space of our lives that God lovingly fashions with his own hands. Nothing we make will be good enough. So, let us rejoice!
What kind of a God does this for us? A God who comes in the vulnerability of a child. A mighty God who makes himself small to meet us. A powerful God whose powerlessness is his might. A generous God whose poverty is his richness. A merciful, compassionate God whose simple, innocent child-like love is unreservedly and always selflessly for all.
This is what we believe we see in Jesus lying in the manger. Only eyes of faith can help us see even more: the utter wonder and goodness of God who freely chooses to come to us in Jesus. He wants to be with us. He cannot bear to be separated from us. He desires that we encounter, know and be together with him through the relationships we share for he is with each of us.
To drive home this message that God chooses us, in Jesus God wraps himself in human skin. Our skin of whatever tongue or creed, whatever scars or wounds, or however we have made up to look pretty or am au naturel in our ruggedness tonight, or even however saintly or sinful our lives are, God intentionally wraps himself in our human skin. Skin that is finite, limited and temporal. Does this shock you?
God's action of wrapping himself in human skin expresses his singular desire to come and enter our lives. Enter not once but again and again. This is how God truly becomes God of our lives -- his goodness, ever giving; his faithfulness, ever present; his life never failing to be our life too. All this tells us that God’s love never ends. It also reveals how far God’s love will go for us: so far in coming down from heaven to us in Jesus. God made flesh – this truth should comfort us, give us peace, be our joy. Indeed, let us rejoice!
Isaiah reminds us tonight that God does all this because he jealousy loves us. This is why "the great mystery of Christmas continues to give us comfort and consolation," Henri Nouwen writes: "we are not alone on our journey." God is with us. Hear again the angel's proclamation: "Do not be afraid...a saviour has been born."
Knowing this, let us humble ourselves and join the shepherds to go in haste to find the Christ, this child in the manger. Let us not see. Let us adore and worship. God-is-with-us; his name is Jesus. He will save. Truly, we can be grateful. Sincerely, let us rejoice!
Something wondrous happens with Jesus’s coming. What was in us and in our lives, like words of anger or deeds of hurt, or even feelings of regret can now begin to fade into a passing darkness. This frees us to look ahead and anew to Jesus, God’s radiant light.
His light shows us the way to God. It enlightened the Apostle Paul who taught the first Christians to put on love, the love of God that binds all together. While Jesus was on earth, many experienced this love that guides all to God in Jesus’s flesh and skin.
Tonight Jesus comes into our lives. He wraps himself in our skin. This is the unexpected, remarkable gift of Christmas: Jesus being born in us, if we but let him. We should let God do this because as St Athanasius wrote, “In Jesus, God became what we are so that he might make us what he is.” His own, clothed in his love and imaged like his Son Jesus.
Dare we let God wrap us in the remarkable, unexpected love of Jesus come alive in us? Wrap us so that we become his light to bring others out of their own darkness to reconcile with God and one another?
May be if we dare, we might come to know that God’s love would this far -- really so very far -- for all of us to be saved and happy. Truly, we must rejoice! So, let us!
A blessed Christmas, my friends!
Preached at the Church of the Sacred Heart
Photo:
Add a comment