Mass during Day
Dec. 25, 2019
Collect
John 1: 1-18
St. Anthony, Bronx, N.Y.
“O
God, you wonderfully created the dignity of human nature and still more
wonderfully restored it” (Collect).
The
1st chapter of the Book of Genesis speak to us of “the dignity of human
nature.” The Lord God created human
beings as the crown of his creation, and as the Psalms say, gave us dominion
over all other creatures (8:6-7; cf. Gen 1:28).
God created men and women in his own image (Gen 1:27), somehow mirroring
his beauty, goodness, and intelligence, and gifted with an immortal soul.
The Lord delighted to be a companion of his
human creatures; the Book of Proverbs tells us that Divine Wisdom “found
delight in the children of men” (8:31).
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| The Garden of Eden, by Thomas Cole |
The
opening prayer of the Mass then praises God for restoring the dignity of our
human nature. Foolishly, we destroyed
our dignity by sin, shattering the mirror image of God’s beauty, goodness, and
intelligence that we were, damning our immortal souls to separation from God’s
company. After their sinful
disobedience, “The man and his wife hid themselves from the Lord God among the
trees of the garden” (Gen 3:8), fearful of God’s presence.
It’s
not our souls alone that were damaged and doomed. We use that language a lot. But human beings are a unity of body and soul. Our wholeness, our salvation, comes when our
whole selves are in good health, or in the words of the prayer, are restored to
the original dignity that God intended—to immortality, eternal life of both
body and soul.
That
wholeness, that salvation, is the reason why “the Word became flesh and made
his dwelling among us” (John 1:14).
What
is a word? All of us with the
precious gift of speech use words to try to communicate something of what we’re
thinking, of who we are. To some extent
we succeed in doing so; it’s impossible to do so perfectly. We all struggle sometimes to find the right
words, and all of us suffer sometimes from others’ failure to understand what
we try to say.
Today
we celebrate God’s perfect communication of himself. The Word is the Father’s perfect and complete
self-expression, his only Son, God from God, of the very same divine and
eternal substance as the Father. That
Word who existed from eternity entered the created world as a human being: the Word became flesh at a given moment in
time—during the imperial reign of Augustus Caesar, while Herod was king of
Judea; and in a specific place, in Bethlehem of Judah.
That
divine Word made flesh, God united to our human nature, made human nature
perfect again—restored our human dignity.
The Son of God makes all of us again children of God: “to those who accepted him he gave power to
become children of God … born not by natural generation … but of God” (John
1:12-13). As the hymn “Hark! The Herald
Angels Sing” phrases it, God’s Son was “born that man no more may die, born to
raise the sons of earth, born to give them 2d birth.”
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From the lower church of St. Francis at Assisi
(Giotto)
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That’s
what we celebrate when we celebrate the birth of Jesus of the Virgin Mary. God’s only Son “humbled himself to share in
our humanity,” the prayer says, “that we may share in [his] divinity.” An exchange, so to speak, has taken place, by
which we—thru our sister Mary—give to God something, viz., human nature, and God
thru Christ gives us a share of divinity.
In his 1st letter, St. John tells us that the Father’s love bestowed
upon us in Christ makes us children of God, and when our God-gifted destiny is
fully realized (when we rise from the dead as Jesus did and enter eternal life)
“we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:1-2). The fullness of our restored human dignity is
to be one with our Lord Jesus, “wonderfully restored,” freed from our sins,
freed from death, sin’s penalty, forever happy in God’s company.
So
we “sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done wondrous deeds…. The Lord has made his salvation known,” and
we “sing joyfully before the King, the Lord” (Ps 98:1, 2, 6).
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