Homily for Christmas Nite Mass
Dec. 25, 2024
Luke 2: 1-14
Bridgettines and guests, Darien, Conn.
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| (by Govert Flinck) |
“In those days a decree went out from Caesar
Augustus” (Luke 2: 1).
“In those days” refers to what St. Luke has
already narrated, viz., the birth of John the Baptist and Mary’s conception of
the Son of God.
When Luke tells us that Jesus was born during
the reign of Augustus Caesar, he’s placing Jesus solidly within our human
story. The Son of God is truly
incarnate, entering our world with all its joys and its woes. He has become one of us in order to bring us
to God.
We don’t know the exact date of Jesus birth,
which is less important than the context of “those days”: a context of general peace, security, and
stability in the Mediterranean world, in the heart of the Roman Empire.
God chose “those days” and that part of the
world as the right time—in Galatians St. Paul calls it “the fullness of time” (4:4)—to
send forth the Savior of “the whole world,” to bring forth “on earth peace to
those on whom God’s favor rests” (2:14), “favor” or “grace” offered to the
whole of humanity, including society’s outsiders like the shepherds (and tax
collectors, public sinners, Samaritans, and Gentiles).
The world of Caesar Augustus, the Roman
Empire, was essentially at peace, with travel safe on land and sea, with
well-maintained roads connecting Jerusalem with Rome, Spain, and Gaul, with a
semi-universal language—the common Greek used thruout the eastern
Mediterranean, facilitating communication.
Therefore “the fullness of time” was the right time for spreading this
“good news of great joy for all the people” (2:10), the news of this Savior who
brings God’s favor to mankind. It’s not
coincidence but Providence that brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem “in those
days,” and “the time came for her to have her child” (2:6).
In this Eucharist, making present Christ’s
sacrifice for the redemption of the world, we pray that “the whole world should
be enrolled” (2:1) among Christ’s brothers and sisters, enrolled for eternal
life. We pray that this is a right time
for Christ to be in our lives.
We’re all familiar with the story of Jesus’
birth, with details that we’ve collected mentally and woven together from both
Luke’s and Matthew’s gospels. The shepherds whom we tend to romanticize help convey that God’s message is
for “the whole world,” that the “good news of great joy will be for all the
people.” Think of how shepherds look on
Christmas cards and in our creches, and what you imagine when you hear “The
Little Drummer Boy.”
In fact, the rabbis forbade pious Jews from
working as shepherds.
1st-century Palestinian shepherds were unclean, both literally and
religiously. They were dirty and smelly,
like their sheep—part of the point Pope Francis wants to make when he says priests
should have the smell of their flocks).
They lived on the edges of society wherever pasture could be found, part
of the mass of people whom Francis describes as “marginalized,” surviving on
the periphery of life. They were unclean
in their standing regarding Torah because they weren’t in any position to
observe the Law’s fine points, probably not even its basic points like sabbath
rest, ritual purifications, and the celebration of Passover or Yom Kippur. All that was hard to do while tending sheep
in the fields.
Yet it is to shepherds that God’s messengers
announce the coming of the Savior; not to King Herod or his courtiers, not to priests
or learned scribes. Few of those people would
be receptive to our Savior’s preaching; many would seek his life. But the lowly, the unclean, the outcast, the
dirt poor—these will be the 1st to seek and acknowledge the Savior: “Let us go to Bethlehem to see this thing
that has taken place” (2:15). This birth
is good news, as the angel says, for all
the people (2:10), which will be Jesus’ message when he undertakes his public
ministry. Pope Francis has said,
“Christmas is truly the feast of God’s infinite mercy.”
The shepherds recognize immediately that the
newborn is one with them. Those familiar
with the customs and culture of Palestine tell us that it was the poor who
wrapped their infants in swaddling cloths. (I don’t know what the rich did.) So the sign that the angel gives to the
shepherds—“you’ll find an infant wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a
manger” (2:12)—indicates an identification of class: this savior is lowly and poor.
The 2d part of the sign is that he’ll be
found lying in a manger, a feed trough for livestock. Again, those familiar with Palestinian life don’t
place this manger in a stable. It would’ve
been unthinkable, unconscionable, an unforgiveable breach of hospitality, for
Joseph’s relatives in Bethlehem—this is his family’s town—not to have taken his
family in, equally unconscionable for anyone in the town not to have taken in a
woman about to give birth. Rather, they
were lodged in that part of a peasant home where a poor family kept their few
animals at nite, maybe a donkey, a cow, or a couple of goats. Such living arrangements have been used by
peasants everywhere for ages upon ages, for both the security of the animals at
nite and the added warmth that they’d provide to the family in the adjacent
main room of the house. (Where there was
no room for Joseph and Mary to stay was in a guest room that some houses would
have had, because some other relative who’d come for the census was already
there. The Greek word often translated
as inn, suggesting to us the Marriott,
basically means “lodgings.”) Finding the
child in a manger tells the shepherds not that this child has been an unwelcome
stranger in the city but that he’s a peasant like them, sharing scanty,
borrowed space in a poor home like their own. (Matthew says explicitly that the magi found
the child in a house [2:11].)
All of which means this: the Savior has come to us as one of us. This child in the manger is God in human
flesh; God in our lowly condition; God approachable by the poorest of us, by
the least reputable of us—and by sinners.
Altho the angels’ appearance in the fields initially struck the
shepherds with “great fear” or awe (2:9), now they know that God really wants
to be close to them. The sign they see
confirms “what the Lord has made known to us” (2:15).
Luke continues in the passage following our
gospel reading: “When they saw this,
they made known the message that had been told them about this child. All who heard it were amazed by what had been
told them by the shepherds” (2:17-18). Like
the angels who had appeared to them, they became the Lord’s messengers, bearers
of the Good News of the birth of the Savior.
They became evangelists.
Sisters and brothers, we’re not innocent
bystanders of the God’s good news. The
Lord has “cleansed for himself a people as his own,” in the words of the 2d
reading (Tit 2:14); he’s cleansed us and made us his own. We have to make this known. Our Lord Jesus expects us to let others know
that he’s saved us from our sins, gives meaning to our lives, gives “peace to
those on whom his favor rests” (Luke 2:14).
We start in our retreat house and in our families, and when opportunity
presents, we let others know as well:
Jesus has come to us—yes, even to us!—and we belong to him!
