Last week, some of us gathered in front of the TV to watch the 1951 Alastair Sim version of Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol, reexperiencing Scrooge’s overnight conversion to Christmas. In the Gospel, as in Dickens, while a lot happens during the night, it is in the morning when it all comes together and begins to make a difference.
Now one might respond that, of course, Christmas has been going on all around us for several weeks now – so much so that some people perhaps may be getting tired of it already! What is there that is new to say after weeks of Christmas carols and shopping and parties? And, anyway, what is there that is so new to say some 2000+ years after the event that we call “the First Christmas”?
Well, let’s start by imagining that it had never happened! Well, for one thing, we wouldn’t be here this morning! And this beautiful church, that has graced this urban center now for 140 years, would never have been built! And, whatever year this would be, it wouldn’t be 2025 – Anno Domini 2025, the year of the Lord 2025. What happened that First Christmas was so fundamentally important that, even now, we still calculate our calendar and date our years from it. But more important than numbers and dates, if Christmas had never happened, the whole history of the past 20 centuries would have been very, very different. And, even more important than that, we ourselves would be very different. As St. Augustine (354-430) so succinctly expressed it: “If [God’s] Word had not become flesh and had not dwelt among us, we would have had to believe that there was no connection between God and humanity and we would have been in despair.”
To which, some scowl might reply that, for all our holiday cheer, there is a lot less joy in the world than our carols claim. It has been a really rough year for a lot of people - people increasingly alienated from one another in our troubled and conflicted society, some struggling to buy groceries or pay a medical bill or, even worse, worried about being targeted for violent harassment and the dangers of deportation. It is not for nothing that we pray at Mass that we may be safe from all distress.
Our distress is real enough, as is our anxiety about it, but so must be our faith in the rest of our prayer - as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.
As St. Paul put it in his letter to Titus, from which we just heard, the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared, … so that we might be justified by his grace and become heirs in hope of eternal life. not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy.
And what better models for this than the shepherds, whose their openness to the angel’s surprising message and their enthusiastic response, took them to Bethlehem!
In standard Nativity scenes, the shepherds seemingly stick around forever. They’re still kneeling there when the Magi arrive. In fact, they stayed just long enough to find Mary and Joseph and Jesus. And then the shepherds went back to work and to their ordinary lives. But nothing for them would ever be ordinary again. They returned glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen. However socially insignificant they may have been, however ordinary the lives they returned to, the kingdom of God was being born among them.
And, however ordinary we and our daily concerns may seem today, the kingdom of God is also being born among us – if only, like the shepherds, we hasten to find it in Mary’s Son, whose coming into the world represents a decisive transformation of our world.
The same Son of God who revealed himself to the shepherds in the Son of Mary continues to reveal himself to us in his Church this Christmas morning. Like the shepherds, we hasten with wonder to find him and to be found in turn. And, as his Church, we continue doing what the shepherds did, making known the message about this child in whom the kindness and generous love, the mercy and forgiveness, of God our savior have appeared and forever more continue to appear.
Among us this Christmas morning, no less than among those shepherds so long ago, the kingdom of God is being born, breaking into our otherwise ordinary, self-enclosed world and offering it the precious possibility of hope, which happens to be the special theme of the Jubilee year that is coming to an end.
So, when the last carol has been sung and we disperse from here to our happy homes and holiday meals (or perhaps, as many must, to a somewhat sad or lonely home, or to a modest, maybe meager meal), may that same precious and powerful hope move us and fill us and change us, as surely as it did those long ago shepherds – and so transform our frustration into fulfillment, our sadness into joy, our hatred into love, our loneliness into community, our rivals and competitors into brothers and sisters, and our inevitable death into eternal life.
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