Homily for Christmas Eve

Homily for
Christmas Eve
Dec. 24, 2011
Collect
Is 62: 1-5
Christian Brothers, Iona College, N.R.

Nativity set designed by Fr. Don Rooney, Church of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception, Fredericksburg, Va.

“We wait in hope for our redemption” (Collect).

Like our redemption, Christmas is here, but not quite here. All of the Christian liturgy celebrates “Christ present and yet to come,” a phrase that could be called the particular tenor of our celebration this Christmas eve.

The Collect, our opening prayer, recapitulates Advent: “We wait in hope for our redemption.” Then it alludes to our welcoming joyfully the Father’s only-begotten Son, i.e., as we remember his long-awaited birth; at the same time we pray that “we may also merit to face him confidently when he comes again as our Judge.” He is present, having already come thru his incarnation, his resurrection, and his eternal life. He is yet to come, to come back as the divine judge of each of us—as the early days of Advent forcefully remind us each year.

“We wait in hope for our redemption,” for Christ is about to be born and to begin his mission of saving the human race from sin and death. The birth and the beginning have already occurred in history and won’t be repeated. His saving activity in our hearts goes on and on as much as we admit him into our lives, and in that sense he is forever being reborn. He will return “as our Judge” to complete what he began at Bethlehem, what he continues in our souls, by raising us from the grave and granting eternal life to all who have waited for him in hope—and in faith and charity.

Isaiah’s prophecy (62:1-5) this evening may be read on multiple levels. On the 1st level it’s simply about the rebuilding, the restoration, of Jerusalem after the exile. On a 2d level it’s about Christ’s victory over death, accomplished in Jerusalem, “shining forth like the dawn, like a burning torch” (62:1), a victory that effects a different kind of restoration, the rebuilding of our relationship with God. On a 3d level it’s about our joyful union with the victorious Christ, or rather his union with us: “As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you” (62:5). That word “builder” alludes not only to the One who has engineered the return of the exiles and the rebuilding of the Holy City, but also to the One who constructed the universe and who thru his Son re-makes the universe, restoring mankind to the divine image.

On this feast of the incarnation and birth of the Son of God—the one known in his earthly life as “the carpenter’s son” (Matt 13:55), which could also be rendered as “the builder’s son” or “the craftsman’s son” or “the framer’s son,” with obvious connotations of the One who built the universe—on this feast we celebrate, we rejoice, that God has made himself one with mankind, divinity has united with humanity. In the breviary, the psalm-prayer after Ps 45 acknowledges, “When you took on flesh, Lord Jesus, you made a marriage of mankind with God” (LOH 1:831). The wedding feast of the Son, of the Lamb of God, on one level is the marriage of his divinity with his humanity in the incarnation, and on another level that wedding feast is the eternal celebration we hope for, according to the Book of Revelation: “Blessed are those who have been called to the wedding feast of the Lamb” (19:9)—called not merely to witness that wedding but to be the spouse of the Lamb (“your Builder shall marry you…so shall your God rejoice in you”). The spouse of the Lamb is what the Church is, in the teaching of the Sacred Scriptures as well as of the liturgy.

Welcoming joyfully this coming of the only-begotten Son, welcoming joyfully this marriage of divinity with humanity, we are made worthy of the Son (“say but the word and my soul shall be healed”!), and by his grace, then, “we may also merit to face him confidently when he comes again as our Judge.” The Judge shall cause all of us who are his disciples, the members of his Church—it’s our hope and our confidence—to be “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, holy and without blemish” (Eph 5:27), so that we might be his worthy bride, “sanctified and cleansed” (5:26) by the gift of his calling us and forgiving us.

At every Mass we pray that “we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity” (prayer at the mixing of water and wine), and in the 3d Preface for Christmas we proclaim joyfully, “By this wondrous union” of “our frailty” with the Word made flesh, “we, too, are made eternal.” This is the hope that “gladdens us year by year,” as the Collect says. The redemption begun at the Word’s 1st coming in Bethlehem will be complete when he passes judgment, cleansing judgment, saving judgment, upon all who hope for his coming again.