St. Dominic Catholic Church

Homilies

12/25/2017 Christmas Mass

This homily is based on the readings from the Mass at Midnight: Isaiah 9:1-6; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14

Away in a manger, no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head…

Joy to the World the Lord is come, let earth receive her King… 

These two all-time favorite Christmas carols in English point to the confounding nature of the Incarnation – the birth of God… as a mortal human being. Some Christmas songs emphasize his humanity, others his divinity, all while trying to acknowledge both realities. The birth of the second person of the Trinity, the Word of God spoken eternally by the Father and expressing the totality of the Creator, as a human being is impossible to understand. But one thing seems clear to me. We don’t want to be challenged by the humanity of Jesus, or Mary and Joseph, for that matter. Pay attention to Luke’s account of the birth.

Joseph and Mary live in Nazareth, a town so unremarkable that it is the butt of jokes. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” one soon-to-be disciples asks when told of Jesus’ hometown. Joseph travels from to Bethlehem with Mary, his betrothed, who is pregnant. If Jews along the way knew those details, they would have raised an eyebrow. Jewish marriage consisted of two stages: betrothal, which was more than engagement, because the couple were considered husband and wife, but the woman still lived with her parents. Only after the wedding would the bride move in with her husband and consummate the marriage. Mary and Joseph would have seemed to be a couple living together before the wedding - and pregnant, as well. How many of us would have been scandalized by them? They were poor, too; when they bring Jesus to the Temple for Mary’s purification, they offer the sacrifice of poor people: two doves.

When seeking shelter in Bethlehem, they are turned away from warmth, community, food and safety in an inn, and sent to a place where animals are kept. Our beautiful and sanitary Nativity scene helps us forget the poverty and cold, the stench of animal dung, and the rejection of strangers into which the Son of God was born. Joseph and Mary, at the birth of the child Jesus, had more in common with the people in the tents under the 2 overpass than us.

We are uncomfortable that God enters our world so humbly because of our pride. We’d prefer he was like us, and we try to make him like us. But it is the humility of God-made-flesh that was necessary to undo our pride. Pride is the original sin, and the source of all sin.  In the garden Adam and Eve fell prey to the temptation that still plagues us – the temptation to take the place of God. We succumb to this temptation every time we sin – when we know something is bad, and freely choose to do it anyway. When we sin we say, in effect, “I know God’s will, but I know better.” This is the yoke that Isaiah knew burdens us, the rod of the taskmaster, sin that keeps us beaten.

So God came among us as a fully human person, Jesus of Nazareth, to be the humble servant who does what we cannot and will not do. God enters the world uninvited, unwanted and unnoticed. Jesus of Nazareth, God-with-us, lives a fully human flesh except for sin. He only does the will of the Father.  He says this repeatedly in the Gospel of John. Because he does the Father’s will, he is executed as a state criminal. He is a threat to the powers of this world that are shaped and governed by pride. He should have been forgotten. Many other Messiah figures were killed and forgotten. He would have been forgotten if not for one thing: The resurrection.  Jesus’ disciples went to their deaths holding fast to the fact of his resurrection.  His resurrection means that his humility conquered pride; goodness and love conquered evil; death was swallowed by his death, offered as a sacrifice for us all.

So what must our response be?  St. Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, “Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” (Phil 2:5-8) So what must we do?  One Christmas hymn says, “Let every heart prepare him room…” We must empty our hearts, which, like the inn that rejected the Holy Family, is crowded with public opinion, the world’s moods, concern for what’s fashionable and with those who count in the management of the world’s affairs. We must empty our hearts because the baby laying in the stinking manger is also God, he is not satisfied with just a guest room in our hearts, or even a suite. He wants and deserves the whole inn – and furthermore he expects to redecorate it. He will hold an estate sale with the junk prized by the old man or woman in us, ruled by pride, who has to die.

The child given shelter in a place fit for animals in a few minutes will offer himself to us, and seek shelter in us. In communion with his humanity and divinity, Jesus will make the inn of our heart a temple for his Divinity.

Enter then, O Christ most holy;

Make a Christmas in my heart:

Make a heaven of my manger:

It is heaven where Thou art.