CHRISTMAS MIDNIGHT MASS
December 25, 2009
Lk 2
REFLECTION – well before Mass
THE END OF ADVENT (Rowan Williams)
He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
Has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
Wakes choking on the mould,
The soft shroud’s folding.
He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
Opens on mist, to find itself
Arrested in the net
Of alien sword-set beauty.
He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
And penny-masks its eye to yield
The star-snowed fields of sky.
He will come, will come,
Will come like crying in the night,
Like blood, like breaking,
As the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.
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HOMILY
THE PERSON IN CHRISTMAS
Each year we come on this night to profess our faith in the person who was born on this night.
It is the faith of the first believers in Jesus. We stand in the traditionof faith they have given us.
It was faith in his person, new born on this night.
It was faith in him, an adult among the people.
It is faith in him, risen from the dead.
It was faith in his person, new born on this night.
They believed in his person. They believed in who he really was. In his identity. Who was He? He was God’s Son in a unique way. Not in the way all Jews, and all people, all of us, can be called children of God. No one else could ever be called Son of God in the way this man Jesus was. From all eternity he was born of God.
They looked back at his coming into our world. He was born there, too. Mary was his mother. She brought him into the world. We call it Christmas, the feast of his nativity. But that nativity is a symbol, and a revelation of his eternal birth as Son of the eternal Father. When you look at him in the crib, you ask who he is, and you believe, and you know, that he is one of us but not just one of us, he is Son of God. The Son of God, and one of us.
That is our faith tonight. This is not a celebration of the birth of any baby. This is not dressing up to meet Santa Claus. We are not acting out childish fantasies. Our conviction that Jesushere tonight is the center of our existence is not a figment of credulous and uneducated people taking things too literally. It’s true. It’s faith. And it changes our own history and redefines our role in it.
It was faith in him, as an adult among the people.
Who was he when he grew up?
Jesus was big. He was big in intellect. He could cut away trivialities and get down to reality. He had a clear, incisive mind and could cut through the sham. He could and did ask disturbing questions.
He was big in integrity. He moved freely among men and women of loose morals with a tenderness and grace and enjoyment of their companionship matched only by his unselfconscious integrity.
He was big in his enormous sense of living. He was intensely at home in the world. He was ‘abnormally’ close to God. Where he was, God was. What God did, he did. He gave new life to the handicapped, to the social outcast, to the depraved. He was tirelessly active in service of people. He loved them.
He was big in originality. He had a new and fresh and original picture of God as outgoing Mercy. He exposed religious complacency. He invented parables like a brilliant cartoonist. He distilled the real point and left out the accessories. He was alive with an absolute, inextinguishable life. He made you feel that if you didn’t live that life, you were as good as dead anyway.
It is faith in him, risen from the dead.
The first believers thought that if someone was going to rise from the dead, it could only be this man. It could only happen to him. Their sense of who he was took them to the edge of that faith. It made them think that it was actually unreasonable not to believe it….
The first believers had faith in Jesus Risen. It is real faith. They had no guarantees. Either you do have the capacity to believe that, or you don’t. They did. They believed he was Alive after death in a new way, that he was God’s Son in a special way, that he represented God to them in a unique way. Many of them were set apart from synagogues for thinking like that. All of them were ready to die for that conviction. Many of them did.
They believed that he was Alive with an irreversible, inalienable Life. History went on around them, and they still lived in it, but they had a unique, undeniable experience that no reasoning of any kind could destroy. They believed in Jesus, Risen. It wasn’t some theory that death is life or defeat is victory. It wasn’t some nuance in their sense of death, as the end of human resources, or as the bankruptcy of moral effort, or as a freedom larger than secular self-reliance. They had faith in him, risen.
It might seem strange when we celebrate the nativity of Jesus, to talk about his resurrection. But the resurrection is the core of our faith, and through our faith in Jesus risen, we can begin to understand Jesus the person.
The first believers had such faith in this person that when they heard he had risen from the dead, they knew it was true – because of who he was.
In Jesus’ time, most Jews didn’t believe there was anything after death for the individual. Sheol meant it was all over. Pharisees were an exception. They did believe in resurrection, but it would come for everyone at the end of time. As Jews they knew that in the climax of history, there would be a great collective event – God’s culminating act that would take everybody into a new realm of God. It wasn’t part of ongoing history, it couldn’t happen piecemeal. It couldn’t happen for anyone any earlier than the end of the world..
Christian faith believes it could, and it did. That is why as Christians we are in touch with someone who has entered into the fullness God had in mind for everyone at the end of history. We are still here,history is still going on around us, we are part of it, but we are more than that. We are witnesses, we testify by our attitude to life that Jesus has gone ahead of us, that it all makes sense, and that there is indeed something to hope for. Because there is someone to love.
It is faith in three things about him. It is a faith in him, in his person, new born on this night.
It is faith in him, asan adult, among people. It is faith in him, risen from the dead.
Let your hearts respond to that tonight. This is Christmas. Christmas is coming for the whole world, through what Jesus did. Christmas has come for us tonight. We know, and we are celebrating tonight. We are telling the world we believe it.
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