Isaiah 9:2-7 Titus 2:11-14 Luke 2:1-14
Once upon a time there was “a land of deep darkness”. In fact, it was more like an empire spread over all over the world as we humans know it. Under the “yoke of its burden”, “the rod of the oppressor”, under “the boot of the trampling warrior”, to use the prophet Isaiah's phrases, everyone suffered. All people “walked in darkness”. Many resigned themselves to this, all were compromised one way or another, some even collaborated – more and more as the time passed in fact, as it became increasingly more difficult to even imagine a different, alternative reality. There have always been good men and women, true, but they had to keep quiet under the rule of terror.
The Promised Land was somewhat better off than the rest of the world, it enjoyed a limited independence from the Empire due to a string of direct interventions by the kingdom of light. Though darkness prevailed there too; yet some of the religious laws and customs were those of the kingdom of light, even if not many lived by them and hardly anyone took them to heart and let himself be transformed. Some holy men would arise there every now and then, and they inspired others to quiet resistance. But these prophets were like outspoken opposition leaders, they were like dissidents in authoritarian states. And they suffered accordingly, inevitably ended up being persecuted and killed under the repressive regime of darkness. Though there has never been any doubt that light would prevail in the end, for a very long time it looked like the empire of darkness would take the entire human race with itself at its final downfall. The agents of the regime, however, never succeeded in completely extinguishing hope. One day the kingdom of light would launch a mission to save us from this sinking ship, a Saviour would come and turn things around. Good people in the Promised Land kept praying and looking for signs.
The first real breakthrough came some years before the event we are celebrating today. A spy was planted in the kingdom of darkness. Like every good spy, this one also absolutely did not look the part. Her name was Mary: she seemed like a perfectly ordinary girl from a poor family. The disguise was perfect, “a chestnut in its bur”, as one of the later theologians put it, speaking of her Immaculate Conception – thorns and spikes on the outside, that is, a normal human body, but on the inside purity unseen since the creation of Adam and Eve, a soul full of God's grace. The agents of darkness paid no attention to her, preoccupied as they were with the upper echelons, with emperors and senators. In fact, the secret was so well-kept that Mary herself had not fully realized what she was being trained and prepared for, until a messenger from the other side arrived one day and enlightened her. Suddenly everything fell into place, suddenly it all made sense, the various movements of her heart and all the thoughts and observations about the reality of living in perpetual darkness. And she said yes.
Immediately, close on the heels of the messenger, and of Mary's yes, Light itself then came over her. And she became pregnant with the Saviour. Some nine months later, while she and her husband were in a town called Bethlehem, summoned there by the oppressive bureaucracy of the empire, “the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.” And so began the mission to save us, so that we may be spared the fate of the kingdom of darkness when it falls. Light itself appeared right in the midst of the evil empire, shining through the body of this little Child, unsuppressible from now on, spreading like wildfire. From there it would jump from one human heart to another like a spark. The kingdom of darkness would not only be defeated at the end of times, but it would also be robbed of us who had been its slaves. Another uprising has begun, but this time, under this newly born Saviour King, the fighting is joyful, full of hope. Those fallen in battle with the light in their hearts, are collected from the battlefields by the messengers of light and carried away to safety. And now, all over the world, apart from individual hearts secretly on fire with love for the King and for his Mother Mary who brought Him forth, there are places like this monastery, pockets of resistance, liberated enclaves, communities and families, all united in a vast underground network called the Church.
If this seems like a fairy tale to you, fair enough. If it looks like an idea for a dystopian Science Fiction novel, then that's probably because I'm reading a well-known novel of this sort at the moment. Plus, I was born and spent the first ten years of my life on the other side of the Iron Curtain, when it still existed. When I talk about the lack of hope, about oppressive regimes, I know what I'm talking about: it comes naturally to me. Someone else would tell you the same story in a different way, set in a major key perhaps, while I'm always wallowing around F flat somewhere. All these stories sound like fairy tales, beginning with Scripture itself: but they are in fact truer than what we call life; there's more reality to them than to what we are looking at with our own eyes. We speak and sing of Christmas the way we do, not because it's fiction but, on the contrary, because the reality of it is so profound, so beyond us, that we are thrown back at this fairy tale language. The King was born of the Virgin Mary today! We have seen a great light. Let us come closer to the Child to bathe in His light, to catch the divine fire from Him.
DSP