Christmas Day, 2009

Today Christians all over the world are keeping Christmas - not a Winter Festival, not Yuletide, not a Festive Season - but Christmas.
 We are keeping the birth of Jesus: Jesus born in Bethlehem, a small village some few kilometres from Jerusalem, Jesus born some 2000 years ago when Augustus was Roman Emperor, Jesus born of a virgin who had conceived him, not through any man, but by the Holy Spirit, Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger.
 We celebrate this birth as part - a precious part, a holy beginning, rich in meaning - of all we believe about Jesus, about who he is in the purposes of God and what he means for the human race.
 We celebrate Jesus’ birth more especially for 3 reasons. And first, as the fulfilment of prophecy, of the ancient Jewish hope. It’s strange how central , over the last century especially, the Jewish people have been and are to what is going on in the world. It’s meant to raise the question, Who are these people? It’s meant to make us remember. This people had already existed for almost 2000 years before Christ, and through their many experiences, astonishingly positive like the Exodus, dire in the extreme like the Exile to Babylon - through all this a hope had grown in them. It was a many-sided hope. Today’s 1st reading - from Isaiah ch. 52 - gives one expression to it. “Break into shouts of joy together, you ruins of Jerusalem; for the Lord is consoling his people, redeeming Jerusalem. The Lord bares his holy arm in the sight of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.” It was a hope for an epiphany, a manifestation of God, a saving deed of God with Israel as its first beneficiary, but meant in the end for all mankind. And today, we believe, this prophecy, this word, this hope - which is everyone’s hope really - has its first fulfilment. “At various times in the past and in various different ways, God spoke to our ancestors the prophets,” but now we say: “The Word was made flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory, the glory that is his as the only son of the Father, full of grace and truth.” “And all the ends of the earth - the whole of human nature - has seen the salvation of our God.”
 And so already to a second reason for celebrating this birth. Jesus was a prophet, the greatest of the prophets, but his birth is not simply the birth of a prophet. It’s not simply even the birth of the Messiah, the anointed King of David’s line, the fulfilment of that particular strand of hope. No, the God who spoke through the prophets now, “in the last days, has spoken to us through his Son, the Son that he has appointed to inherit everything and through whom he made everything that is.” We make such a do of Jesus’ birth because of who it is being born. It is the Son or Word of God, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, eternally begotten of the Father being born in time of a human mother. “In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” And now he has become flesh and dwelt among us. He has pitched his tent among us. He is Emmanuel, God with us. One of the Trinity is one of us. The Son of God is a son of man. Christmas reveals the Incarnation.
 And so to the third reason. The reading from Isaiah spoke of the “ruins of Jerusalem.” Often in medieval and Renaissance painting the stable of Jesus’ birth is portrayed as a ruin, a ruined palace. The ruined city, the ruined shack: they’re a symbol of ourselves, our societies, our world, and the whole of creation, ruined often enough by us. But now Jesus, God himself, is there among the ruins. There’s the third reason for celebrating this birth. It marks the beginning of our own, of our world’s, of the whole of creation’s restoration to wholeness. Christ comes to restore beauty and dignity to ourselves, to our lives, to creation, to the universe. “This is what begins at Christmas and makes the angels rejoice” (Benedict XVI). The earth is restored to good order wherever it gives God incarnate space to be born, wherever the Eucharist is celebrated and enters our lives with power. Without Christ everything falls into ruin. “In him all things hold together.” And in the figures of Christmas we see this beginning: in Mary and Joseph, in the shepherds and magi, in the angels and the star. The world is being reborn. “He came to his own domain, and his own people did not accept him.” And the pattern of rejection runs on through history. “But to all who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, to all who believe in his name.” And in them, the poor of spirit, the merciful, the gentle, the peacemakers, the people of humble love, the ruins are restored, “for they see the Lord face to face, as he returns to Jerusalem.”
 Yes, prophecy / hope fulfilled, God among us, the beginning of the world’s restoration: this is what Christians celebrate at Christmas. If it’s true, doesn’t it rather put any winter festival in the shade?
 
 But even if we’ve said all this, or had said it in all its force, would we have touched the heart of Christmas? This is where we need the Holy Spirit. What we come back to surely is the Child. It is the humility of God that, blessedly, defeats us today, turns us upside down, and turns us to each other.

 “There has fallen on earth for a token
 A god too great for the sky.
 He has burst out of all things and broken,
 The bounds of eternity:
 Into time and the terminal land
 He has strayed like a thief or a lover...

 ...unmeasured of plummet and rod,
 Too deep for [our] sight to scan,
 Outrushing the fall of man,
 Is the height of the fall of God.”
      (G. K. Chesterton).

 “Christ is born for us; come let is worship him.” Amen.

          Fr. Hugh, O. S. B.