Homily for Christmas Day at Noon

Homily for Christmas Day

Dec. 25, 2022
John 1: 1-5, 9-14
Holy Name, New Rochelle
Mass at Noon

“The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world” (John 1: 9).

Christmas lights at the LaSalette Shrine, Attleboro, Mass.

It’s the season of light, even tho we’ve just begun winter and are experiencing the longest nites of the year.  Houses are festooned with colorful lights, cities put extra lights on lampposts, New York and other cities stage grand lightings of Christmas trees; in Chandler, Ariz., they construct a spectacular multicolored “tree” out of tumbleweeds.  We decorate trees in our living rooms and put candles in our windows.  By instinct we love light, are drawn to light, and want to bask ourselves in light.

At the same time, we dislike darkness, even fear darkness.  Kids are afraid of the dark, we’re uneasy on dark streets, movie villains like Darth Vader often wear black, and fictional villains may bear names like the Dark Lord.

Christianity warns us against the Prince of Darkness.  Sin blackens our souls.  Into a world darkened by sin and under the power of Satan, God has sent his eternal Word, the Word that said at the beginning of creation, “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3).  “All things came to be thru him,” St. John assures us (1:3), and he gave life to plants, animals, and human beings.  He created a vast and good universe.

After human beings brought sin and darkness into creation, God continued to shine light upon us thru his divine revelation:  thru patriarchs, prophets, and his chosen people.  And finally, as the author of Hebrew says, “in these last days he has spoken to us thru the Son … thru whom he created the universe,” who shines with divine glory (1:2-3).

That Son of God entered human history, taking our flesh of the Virgin Mary, who gave birth to him at Bethlehem.  He is “the true light, which enlightens everyone,” come into our world, shining in the darkness (John 1:9,5).  Satan and his cohorts—the dark, bloodthirsty warlords and tyrants of our world, the drug lords, the human traffickers, the killers of the unborn, all the merchants of death—rage against the light.  Altho “the world came to be thru him” yet doesn’t recognize him (1:10), the light continues to shine.  Every Christmas reminds of that, renews our hope that we might truly “become children of God” because we believe in him (1:12). we believe in the light.

The reverse is true, too.  God’s Son became a human being because he believes in us.  He “made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory,” and he is “full of grace and truth” (1:14), which he brings us as gifts.  This wondrous divine activity is not “by human choice nor by a man’s decision, but of God” (1:13).  Grace and truth are the divine light bursting into our darkness, wonderfully restoring the dignity of our human nature (Collect), created in God’s own image.  When we accept the grace and truth offered to us by Christ, he makes us children of God, St. John says (1:12).  In Baptism, the Eucharist, and the other sacraments, our Lord Jesus re-makes us in his image, so that “we may share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity” (Collect).

This is the light and the grace and the wonder we celebrate today.