Homily for Christmas Day 2006

I wonder if you are feeling, as I used to do, that this is a funny sort of Gospel for Christmas morning- where are the shepherds we had at the Midnight Mass and earlier this morning? Mary and Joseph, the ox and the ass, that’s what we want to hear about. Not very Christmassy, is it, all that stuff about the Word. Why does the Church offer us this Gospel on Christmas Day, what lessons are we expected to draw from it?

Matthew and Luke give us the stories that we know so well and love to hear every year of the birth of Jesus, God coming into the world as a tiny baby in the stable at Bethlehem, the event that our crib so beautifully illustrates for us. John does not do that. The stories in Matthew and Luke show us so much of the human side of Jesus’s birth- Mary pregnant and Joseph at his wits’ end trying to find them a bed for the night, the humble shepherds being scared out of their wits by the angels in the middle of the night. John doesn’t give us any of that. John’s Gospel is of all the gospels the one most anxious that we recognise that Jesus is not just a wonderful human being specially blessed and specially close to God, but that Jesus is also divine, is God. OK, he is a tiny baby who needs his mother’s milk and who needs his nappy changed, all of that, but this vulnerable little creature in Mary’s arms is God, God who has made himself vulnerable, God who has put himself literally in our hands.

To make his point, that Jesus is God, John uses this word “Word”, he calls Jesus “the Word”. “In the beginning was the word: the word was with God and the word was God”. Why does John do that, what is all that supposed to mean? I want to share with you the explanation that St Augustine, our great theologian from fourth century North Africa, gave to his congregation all those many years ago. He asked his congregation to think about what happens when you have a conversation with someone. First you think of what you want to say and the idea forms in your heart, and then you put it into words, you use your body- your lungs, your mouth, your tongue and lips, to give form to your idea, to give it voice, and then finally the person you are addressing hears and receives your idea, and takes it into their heart too. And the idea, although it has gone from me to you, hasn’t actually left me, the idea is still there in my heart, only now it is also in your heart. What a very clever way St Augustine had of explaining things! For you see what we call the incarnation, God taking human flesh and becoming a man, what we are celebrating today, is exactly that- a conversation with God which we are all now involved in, whether we like it or not. God’s great idea, the idea that he wants to communicate to us, is nothing less than himself, he wants us to understand to the best of our limited ability who he is, what his nature is, what he is about, what he is for. And to do that effectively, he uses the human body, he gives bodily form to his idea, he makes himself accessible and understandable to us in human form. And although God’s idea, Jesus, was now on earth in human form he was still nevertheless with God in eternity, because the idea is still in God’s mind although now it’s in ours too.

Have I lost you? I hope not. What I want to say essentially is that when someone speaks to us, when someone tries to communicate with us, we have to respond. What will be our response this Christmas to God communicating himself to us, coming to us as Jesus? When God came the first time, as a baby in the manger, he did not get much of a reception, did he? The human race did not respond very well- when he grew up, they only liked him when he said things they agreed with and when he got too challenging for them, they killed him. That’s what came of God putting himself in our hands. But God is putting himself in our hands today, at this very Mass. Not in the form of a vulnerable little baby now, but in the equally vulnerable form of bread, God is coming to us. When God came to the old Israel, the Jewish people he had chosen as his own, St John tells us “he came to his own domain and his own people did not accept him”. The Church as we know is the New Israel, and we are God’s own people, Jesus’s own brothers and sisters by the adoption that is our baptism, St Saviour’s is God’s own domain. And will it be said of us, “he came to his own domain and his own people did not accept him”.

Let us take Our Lord into our hearts at this Mass, let us take in and absorb the idea of God, the communication that God is desperate to have with us, let us take in Jesus and show him how much we are ready to accept him and make him welcome. How can we do that? Well, we can show love to Our Lord best by showing love to those around us. Let all our words today be words of love, words of love for the person who is cooking lunch, for your families and your friends, for the person who wants to watch all the programmes you hate most, for the person who has bought you socks when you distinctly asked for an I-pod, yes, even for the person who thinks you will like Australian Chardonnay…. And then you see, not only will you be receiving God into your life, but you will be communicating God, the God who is Love, to those around you. You will be passing on a wonderful rumour- that “the Word was made flesh and lived among us”.

In today’s Gospel we read “to all who did accept him he gave power to become children of God”. Dear Jesus, give us the grace to receive you into our hearts today, receive you and make you truly welcome in our lives. May this dear parish indeed be your own domain where your own people did accept you. Amen.