Christmas - Mass during the Night

Readings: Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14

The gospels, especially Luke, place the birth of Jesus in the wider context of what was happening in the world at the time. We are told that these events happened in the days of Herod, King of Judea (Luke 1:5). This was Herod the Great who, forty years before the birth of Jesus, had been declared ‘King of the Jews’ by the Roman Senate. A paranoid and ruthless man, he became renowned for his building projects, especially his restoration of the Temple at Jerusalem.

In relation to what was happening in Rome, Luke tells us that Jesus was born while Augustus was emperor (Luke 2:1). He was described as the prince of peace because under him war ceased, and there came about the pax romana also called pax augustana. It was Caesar Augustus who initiated this peace and so was called ‘saviour of the world’.

This is the background in Judaism and in Rome. We might be tempted to ask what was happening in other significant places in the world at the time of Jesus’ birth. What about Athens and philosophy, for example? That seems like an interesting question for us, who might be interested in philosophy, science and wisdom. The gospels do not tell us who Plato’s successor in the Academy at Athens was at the time of Jesus’ birth. It is likely that in fact there was no successor, the Academy having been destroyed, by a Roman general, about eighty years before the birth of Jesus.

But following Luke’s example in relation to Palestine and Rome, it seems like a legitimate thing for us at least to speculate about wisdom, knowledge, and philosophy, and to wonder how the birth of Jesus is to be related to those things, and how they were faring in the world. There are some hints about wisdom in the gospel passage that has just been sung (Luke 2:1-14). They are hidden in that simple statement by the angels to the shepherds, the sign they give to the shepherds, ‘you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger’ (1:12).

There is only one other place in the Bible where swaddling clothes are mentioned. It is in the Book of Wisdom, a text attributed to Solomon but actually written at Alexandria about a century and a half before the birth of Jesus. The passage in which swaddling clothes are mentioned is not really all that significant: the author is speaking about kings and how they are subject to the ordinary experiences of birth and aging and death. A new born king is placed in swaddling clothes and needs to be cared for in exactly the same ways as any other human infant (Wisdom 7:4). So not much about philosophy or wisdom but it establishes at least a tenuous link for us.

This link is strengthened in the reference to the manger. This was a feeding trough, a place where animals might find food. In Luke’s gospel there is a clear link between the manger at Bethlehem and the last supper. Bethlehem is the ‘house of bread’. The inn that had no room for the Holy Family (Luke 2:7) is named with the same term as is used for the room or boarding house where Jesus instructs his disciples to prepare the Passover (Luke 22:11). The last supper then becomes our Eucharist, in which we receive Jesus as the bread of life and the living bread. All of this links very strongly with wisdom, with the ways in which the Old Testament speaks about Lady Wisdom, going about the streets, inviting people to find shelter and sustenance with her, to come to her banquet of wine and eat her bread. That bread is the knowledge, understanding and wisdom that she has to offer, guidance for human lives, a true teaching, and so on. In the child who is born we see the fulfillment of such promises for he is God’s wisdom, feeding us with the Word of God and nourishing us with his Body and Blood.

There is another link between Bethlehem and philosophy: we can say that western philosophy began in a cave and that the Christian story also began in a cave (or a stable: in any case the shelter in which Jesus was born). Everybody who studies philosophy is told very quickly about Plato’s cave, his allegory about people sitting chained looking at images and shadows on a wall, thinking it is reality, then somehow one of them breaks free, turns around, finds his way back through the cave towards the light and out into the world. It is about reality and truth and the quest of philosophy to find truth and to live in the light.

With the birth of Jesus, we can say that Christian philosophy also begins in a ‘cave’, at Bethlehem. There are two striking contrasts, however, between Plato’s cave and the place of Jesus’ birth. One is that in Plato’s story the sun is outside and the one who seeks wisdom and truth must turn away from where he is and go searching for that light beyond or behind his immediate experience. With the birth of Christ, however, the Sun of Justice is found inside, in the cave. The Word is born for us in the midst of our darkness, in the place of our confusion and uncertainty and unreality. Wisdom has come to us to enlighten our darkness and lead us into truth.

The other contrast between Plato’s story and the Christian event is that the energy that moves Plato’s philosopher to search for truth is, as Plato says elsewhere, eros, a being captivated by beauty that stimulates and attracts and leads us on. For Judaism and Christianity it is God’s eros that originates things, takes the initiative and is the moving power of revelation and salvation. This may seem like a risky thing to say, to speak about God’s eros, but there is plenty of support for it in the Scripture readings we hear these days. On Christmas Eve we heard Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, proclaiming that it is ‘the tender mercy’ of our God that has brought about these events (Luke 1:78). And in the second reading at the Dawn Mass of Christmas Day, Isaiah re-assures us that we are a people ‘sought after, a city not forsaken’ (Isaiah 62:12).

The eros in us about which Plato speaks is also always at work, our desire for knowledge, understanding and truth, but its final destination is unclear. As Christians we believe that our desire is met by God’s eros, God’s love of humanity that has not only come to meet our desire but has also created it in the first place and sustains it. 

The final part of the sign given by the angels to the shepherds is that they will find a baby. That this infant is our Creator is the wonder of Christmas often stressed by preachers and teachers. It has this significance also: that the Creator has entered into our way of growing in knowledge, understanding and wisdom. He is not just a visitor, a kind of otherworldly being who decides to spend some time with us and then returns to where he properly belongs. No, the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. God became human, taking on our nature, entering into our situation, and experiencing what an earlier generation of philosophers would have referred to as ‘the human condition’. He entered into our way of growing in knowledge, understanding and wisdom, and he grew up in our flesh. Luke later tells us this: that the child grew in strength, wisdom and grace (Luke 2:40, 52). He did this so that we might enter into his way of knowing, understanding and being wise. He came to establish this communion with us, sharing our way of growing in wisdom and grace and thereby introducing us to His wisdom and grace. Our love of wisdom, our philosophy, terminates in him, he is the destination of our desire for truth, and he is the knowledge we seek.

So just as we know that it is not Herod, but Jesus of Nazareth, who is really the King of the Jews, restorer of the Temple, and messiah of Israel, and just as we know that it is not Caesar Augustus, but Jesus Christ, who is really the saviour of the world and the prince of peace, so we know that knowledge, understanding and truth are ultimately found only in Him who is wisdom and the way to wisdom, the wisdom that comes from God to order all things sweetly, come to teach us the way of prudence.

This homily was preached at Blackfriars, Oxford in 2009

24 December

Readings: 2 Samuel 7:1-5, 8-12, 14, 16; Psalm 89; Luke 1:67-79

Children, while enjoying Handel's Messiah, can also ask questions that draw attention to some amusing expressions in the great Christmas oratorio. 'All we like sheep', for example, begins a section about all human beings going astray just like sheep but for one child it provoked the understandable question, 'why do they all like sheep'? And 'what is the government doing on his shoulders' is another reasonable question raised by a different child, also listening carefully to the words.

In one community in which I lived there was a regular absolution on Christmas Eve from faults against the rule and for unfulfilled penances. The prayers used reminded the superior, and all of us, that he was responsible also 'for the government of the souls' of those in his charge. The readings of the Mass for Christmas Eve are about government, the kind of government exercised by God for the sake of the people.

Like all of us, perhaps a bit more than normal, King David is keen on self-government. He is keen to the extent of wanting to include God among those for whom he exercises responsibility. He will build a house for God. But through the prophet God points out to David that the government (and so the responsibility, the care) is in the opposite direction. It is God who has created David in the first place. It is God who will build a house for David. It is not so much that David will find a place for God in his world (how much that would add to David's power!) as it is that God will find a place for David in His creation (how much that adds to David's salvation!). God creates and governs all He has created. But God also allows human beings to share in His government of creation. With the birth of His Son he allows human beings to share in extraordinary new ways in God's own government of creation. 'Let what you have said be done to me'. We become participants in God's providence, not just passive recipients of it but agents of its progress in human history.

The responsibilities of government are always to ensure peace, security and prosperity for the people governed. These are the things promised in the Benedictus of Zechariah, the great canticle or prayer with which the Baptist's father hails his birth. Words are given to him again, the one who had been struck dumb by this new visitation of His people by God. The silence of the old dispensation is brought to an end and Zechariah, symbolising that old dispensation, finds words again to welcome the birth of the Word.

The constitution on which God's government of the people was established is the covenant he made with them. This founding document made first with Moses and then renewed through judges and prophets, made again with the House of David, will now, by God's mercy, be once again remembered and renewed. It is now about the tender mercy of God, God's kindness as saviour and redeemer, the grace of forgiveness and the knowledge of God that comes with being forgiven. A new covenant means a new basis for the government, a new treaty or agreement, a new relationship.

Like human governments, the care of God for His people is about peace, security and prosperity.  These things are promised and guaranteed by the new covenant established now. And just as the peace Jesus brings is a peace that the world cannot give, so too he offers a security and prosperity the world cannot give. The seal of the new covenant is the blood of the Son poured out for the salvation of the world. The terms of the covenant are set by the tender mercy of our God. The terms of the covenant mean an end to rivalry between God and humanity, and a shared responsibility for the unfolding of God's purposes across history.

Through this day and on into the night we watch for the coming of the Son. Through Him God will give light to those in darkness, those who dwell in the shadow of death. He will free us from fear and save us from the hands of our enemies so that we might serve him in holiness and righteousness. He will guide our feet into the way of peace.

23 December

Readings: Malachi 3:1-4, 23-24; Psalm 25; Luke 1:57-66

'The Lord you are seeking will suddenly come to his temple': it catches two aspects of spiritual experience and of the life of faith. On the one hand is the aspect of waiting, sometimes for a long time, for something to shift or change or emerge into the light, waiting for some insight or realisation, waiting, we might even say, for some revelation. On the other hand is the sense that when such things finally do happen, no matter how long they have been sought and no matter how deeply they have been desired, they happen 'quickly'. A bit like a death long expected, the moment in which the reality comes about always has a suddenness to it.

A story is told of a convent where a sister died at the age of 105: one of the sisters transmitted the news saying that her death was 'completely unexpected'. The truth in that comment catches this double sense, of something long expected nevertheless being marked, when it does come about, by an aspect of surprise, of suddenness. If we are tempted to be philosophical we might say that what we are talking about is a substantial or even a metaphysical change. Reality is not the same afterwards as it was before. That is true of anything that happens, of course, but here we are talking about radical changes that register with us: the world is a different place and we are aware of it. Even if we have been preparing and waiting, the reality, when it comes, is beyond anything for which we were prepared, beyond anything for which we waited. The world feels different afterwards.

So with the fulfillment of God's promises to Israel. They are fulfilled because God is faithful but they are fulfilled in ways beyond any expectation because it is God who is acting here. The prophet Malachi, the last voice of the Christian Old Testament, tells us that the Lord's messenger will purify the people and refine them. He will prepare a worthy priesthood to offer worthy sacrifices. His coming will be preceded by that of Elijah, a prophet sent to prepare his way, and to do it by turning the hearts of fathers to their children and of children to their fathers.

All this is fulfilled in the birth of John the Baptist, the one who is Elijah and the messenger of the Lord. It is fulfilled in the birth of Jesus Christ, the one who is the Messiah, the Lord come to visit His people. Within the domestic scene in the hill country of Judea, where the parents of John the Baptist argue with their kinsfolk about what name this child should have, we see this metaphysical or substantial change taking place. The world will never be the same again, not just in the ordinary sense in which this is true of any change. The world will never be the same again in a radical sense. The foundations of the world are shifted with these two births. Humanity is established in a new relationship with God as a result of these two births. What, then, will these children be? And we know something of the answer to that question.

To adapt the haunting phrase from the first reading, the heart of the Father which is eternally turned to His Only Son is now turned also towards us, revealed in the love of the One who is coming. And that love is revealed so that our hearts might be turned towards Him. The refiner's fire and the fuller's alkali, purifying and cleansing, come to us in the form of love, they work on us in the way love does, they call to us in the way love does, they cleanse and strengthen us in the way love does.

It is what we have always wanted. It is what we have desired and looked for: light, and life, and love. Let us be open to the surprising ways in which these promises are to be fulfilled in our lives. No matter how long we have lived and prayed and waited there is always, still, this moment when the Lord we have been seeking will come to us, His temple, and will come suddenly.

22 December

Readings: 1 Samuel 1:24-28; 1 Sam 2:1,4-8; Luke 1:46-56

I heard of a man who visited his wife every day in the nursing home where she spent her last years. She had dementia and needed constant care. His son asked him about the difficulty of doing this. 'It is not difficult at all', his father said, 'on the contrary, because she is as beautiful today as she was when I first met her'.

The Lord, the God of Israel, is saying this to Israel and to the Church, in the readings we hear these days and in the events they relate. God sees 'us' as beautiful and fruitful, even when we ourselves fear otherwise. This long love story between God and His people means that the ragged and aged lovers that we are, are found to be beautiful, are seen in our lowliness and poverty and need, are still awaited and are not just waiting.

We rarely think of this in Advent, that God too is waiting, for us. In his encyclical letter on the theological virtue of hope, Pope Benedict quotes Saint Josephine Bakhita, a Sudanese slave who became a nun in an Italian convent, a woman of extraordinary spiritual wisdom. 'I am definitively loved', she says, 'and whatever happens to me - I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.' What an extraordinary simple and profound explanation of 'grace': I am awaited by this Love, and so my life is good.

The Magnificat contains the same teaching: all generations will call me blessed (graced), because He who is mighty has done great things for me (for Mary, Elizabeth, Israel, the Church, you, me). There is no need to go looking to see who is meant by the poor and the rich, the hungry and the mighty, the lowly and the proud. It is us, all of us, and each of us, and every aspect of us: wherever our freedom responds to goodness and love we are poor and hungry and lowly, and so become rich; wherever it fails to do so we are rich and mighty and proud, and so become poor.

Hence our joy in these days, and in all the days of our life; not because we love God and wait for Him, but because God loves us and awaits us. 'I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.'

Advent Week 4 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Isaiah 7:10-14; Psalm 24; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-24

If it is to attract attention, a sign should be outstanding, striking, different, dramatic. And yet the sign offered to us at Christmas time is so ordinary: a young woman gives birth to her first child. The child's name might seem like an important clue: Immanuel, God-is-with-us. And yet we too call our children John, beloved-of-God, or Dominic, man-of-God.

It is when the life of Jesus is read with hindsight that the extraordinary nature of this ordinary sign becomes clear to the eyes of all who believe. It was the events at the end of Jesus' earthly career which revealed the mystery hidden, from the beginning, in his person. It was then that the stories about his conception and his birth were gathered. It was then that the way in which he fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies became clear. It was then that the wonder of his birth was recognised.

Saint Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, already expressed the fundamental Christian belief in what was later called the Incarnation. In Jesus Christ, two realities - the uncreated nature of God and the created nature of humankind - were united in a mysterious, unique way. He was a human being, a descendant of King David, a member of the Jewish race. This is what he was 'according to the human nature he took'. He was also, 'in the order of the spirit of holiness', proclaimed Son of God through his resurrection from the dead.

God had been with the people of Israel for centuries: in their joys and sorrows, in their faithfulness and inconsistencies, consoling and challenging them. But the Jews who were the first disciples of Jesus teach us that he was, for them, a unique presence of God among them. He is the fulfillment of the promises of the Old Testament, says Matthew. His conception itself was out of the ordinary, unique. He would save his people from their sins, says Matthew again. Through him we receive grace and we preach in honour of his name, calling people to belong to Jesus Christ, says Paul.

Looking back from the splendour of Easter and Pentecost, the full wonder of God's coming in the birth of Jesus Christ is to be seen. How extraordinary is this ordinary presence of God with us. He is the Lord and his is the earth and its fulness. He is the one who set the earth on the seas and made it firm on the waters. How strange that he should be with us in the helplessness of an infant. How mysterious that he should be present in the vulnerability which accompanied the fragile life of his human parents, Mary and Joseph.

The most extraordinary thing about this presence of God is just how ordinary it is. Here there is no violence to humanity, no assault on our senses, no rejection of what is ordinary, fleshly, profane and human. All flesh, all time, all space, all human living and struggle and toil, all loving and weeping and laughter, is sanctified, blessed, and made radiant by this en-fleshment of God. He has hidden himself at the heart of humanity, making our ordinary lives holy. In the words of a contemporary poet, speaking of the Eucharist, 'we break this ordinary bread as something holy'. Likewise we greet this ordinary person as someone holy. Holy with the holiness of God.

Could it be that God's hidden presence in the ordinary and the poor, in the fragile and the vulnerable, in powerlessness and simplicity, would inevitably escape us were it not for this revelation of God in human flesh which we celebrate at Christmas time?

20 December

Readings: Isaiah 7:10-14; Psalm 24; Luke 1:26-38

What is the difference between the question Zechariah asks and the question Mary asks? He says 'how can I know this, for I am an old man and my wife is advanced in years' (Lk 1:18). She says 'how shall this be, since I have no husband' (Lk 1:34). It can be difficult enough to see why he is criticized (and, it seems, punished) while Mary is praised. We might feel a bit sorry for him, an old man understandably confused by a strange encounter.

The angel Gabriel tells us that Zechariah did not believe while Elizabeth tells us that Mary believed. While the words of Zechariah and those of Mary are very similar, they express a radically different attitude. In Mary, by contrast with him, we find a receptivity that makes the birth of the Word possible.

The one to whom Mary gives birth is the Holy One, the Son of God. The sign given to Ahaz, of which Isaiah speaks, was the birth of Hezekiah, a good and righteous king, faithful in his service of the Lord, in this way a contrast to his father, Ahaz. Mary also gives birth to a good and righteous king, Him whom the liturgy describes as the 'fount of all holiness' (Eucharistic Prayer II), the one who 'gives life to all things and makes them holy' (Eucharistic Prayer III).

So God visits His people and reveals His glory anew. Notice also that Zechariah is in the Temple while Mary is at home in Nazareth. This new visitation and revelation does not happen in what seems like the obvious place, the Temple, the place of the presence of God's glory. It happens where there is a receptive heart. We need to beware of any proprietorial attitude towards God and His glory. Perhaps this is the crucial lesson to be learned from Zechariah's mistake: how do we leave space for God to do a new thing, God who, precisely because he is ever-faithful, is ever-creative? The Word can only come to birth where there is a believing heart. That is the space in which God can do a new thing.

19 December

Readings: Judges 13:2-7, 24-25; Psalm 71; Luke 1:5-25

Every child is a gift from God. It is one of the reasons why the Church has such a strong teaching about sexual behaviour. Our regard for the dignity of the human being is seen in how we receive and value children. They are among the most vulnerable people and how we treat the vulnerable is how we treat humanity as a whole.

In some situations this great truth - that every child is a gift from God - is more clearly seen. We read about two such situations at Mass today. The accounts are so close that some might be tempted to say that the second one is simply a retelling of the first. But there is no reason why God's gift of a child to elderly parents should not come about in ways that are very alike.

The parents of Samson receive him after a visit from an angel of the Lord. The child's arrival is a surprise, more obviously grace than is the fruit of other, more normal, pregnancies. But perhaps the arrival of such children is also to remind us of how extraordinary a blessing any pregnancy is: new life, a new human being, soon to be with us, 'trailing clouds of glory', as Wordsworth put it.

John the Baptist's conception is equally remarkable ('I am an old man and my wife is advanced in years'). Like Samson, John will be specially dedicated to God, a man with a mission on behalf of the people. The long hair is not so important as the fact that in each of these children of grace the Spirit of the Lord will be vibrantly present, powerfully active. God is at work among His people. Zechariah's mystification and subsequent silence is not all that strange as a response to a heavenly visitor and his initial incredulity is placed at the service of what God reveals through the birth of John the Baptist.

These remarkable pregnancies are recalled now, in the closing days of Advent, to set the scene for the most extraordinary conception and birth, that of Jesus, conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. Every child is a gift from God. This is true more than ever of the child whose birth we celebrate at Christmas, the only Son of the Father, the first-born of all creation, the first-born from the dead.

Today's 'O' antiphon speaks of kings falling silent before the root or stock of Jesse, the king of the House of David who is to come. Zechariah falls silent. We read in the Book of Wisdom (though in a very different context) that it was 'while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half gone' that the 'all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land that was doomed' (Wisdom 18:14-15).

In these final days of Advent let us try to find some moments of silence in which to give thanks for the child of God each one of us is; for the children we have known and know, each one a gift of God; and for the Child, the only-begotten of the Father, filled with the Spirit of truth and love, whose birth establishes our dignity, restores our hope, and enlightens all our darknesses.