HOMILY: CHRISTMAS DAY MASS 2107

In today’s Gospel, St John takes us to the very heart of the meaning of Christmas.  He does not paint a picture of Bethlehem, as do St Matthew and St Luke.  Rather, he proclaims the profound truth that Bethlehem stands for: that the Eternal Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us.  ‘He came unto his own and his own received him not; but to those who did receive him, he gave power to become children of God’.

But the profundity of St John’s testimony is equalled by the words we heard from the unknown author of the Letter to the Hebrews, in today’s Second Reading:

‘In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son…through whom also he created the  world.’  That is, the Eternal Word of God, Jesus Christ, who came to live among us, is God’s final, definitive Word to us.  All that God has ever wanted to say to us, all that God has ever wanted to reveal to us – about himself and about what it means to be human – is contained in Jesus, the Word of God made flesh.

The great sixteenth century Carmelite spiritual teacher and theologian, St John of the Cross, took up the words of the Letter to the Hebrews about Jesus being the final Word of God and the significance of this for us as Christians. He put it like this:

(The author of the Letter to the Hebrews) gives us to understand that God has become as if dumb, with nothing more to say, because what he spoke before (the coming of Jesus Christ) in fragments to the prophets he has said all at once by giving us the All who is his Son.    Consequently, anyone today who would want to ask God questions or desire some vision or revelation, would not only be acting foolishly but would commit an offence against God, by not fixing his eyes entirely on Christ’.

This teaching of St John of the Cross about Jesus being the final, definitive Word of God to us for all time has immense significance for us in our own time.  ‘Fix your eyes on him alone’, St John of the Cross says, ‘because in him I have spoken and revealed all.  Moreover, in him you will find more than you ask or desire’.  For many of our contemporaries – and maybe for some of us – these are hard words.  In our society and culture, ‘choice’ and ‘choosing’ stand very high in our list of priorities.

We believe it is our right to be able to determine what is right or wrong, what ‘spirituality’ is ‘true for me’, even what gender I may claim as my own.   We find it hard to accept the ‘givenness’ of our Faith – the ‘givenness’ of the Church’s moral teaching; even the ‘givenness’ of Jesus himself. .  We fear being branded as intolerant if we put a question mark against the claims of those who propose that Christianity must accept other, more recently founded religious traditions, as being of equal if not actually of superior standing to faith in Jesus Christ.

This Feast of Christmas offers us a wonderful and new opportunity to reflect on and appreciate more fully the richness of our Faith: to appreciate the infinite richness of what we have inherited though our membership of the Church.  Let St John of the Cross here again open our eyes to what God the Father has given us in his Son, born for us today: ‘Despite all the mysteries and wonders which have been discovered by holy doctors and understood by holy souls …there still remains more for them to say and to understand.  There are depths to be fathomed in Christ.  He is like a rich mine with many recesses containing treasures, and no matter how men try to fathom them, the end is never reached.   Rather, in each recess, men keep on finding here and there new veins and new riches’.

May this Christmas Day bring us a new and lively sense of the immensity of God’s love for us, as he has shown this to us in the gift of his only Son.