
December 25, 2024 – Christmas Day: Fr. John Edmunds, ST (@9:55 in the video)
December 25, 2024
CHRISTMAS – MASS AT DAWN: C
Isaiah 62:11-12
Titus 3:4-7
Luke 2:15-20
Christmas is special. The “most wonderful time of year” according to the song. Even those who don’t ordinarily notice things religious feel the tug of the season. For one thing it’s got some fantastic images – away in a manger, angels we have heard on high, we three kings of Orient are. But at its core Christmas is not about the fantastic, the unusual, the extraordinary. No, Christmas is about the most ordinary thing of all – a child being born. It is something we all have in common. As the Gospel for today reports, When the angels went away from them to heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go to Bethlehem to see this thing which has taken place.” When the angels go away, let’s go to see a baby. When the extraordinary left, the shepherds returned to the ordinary, to what they knew. Isn’t that always the way – after the game, the big party, the fiesta you have to go back to the mundane, the commonplace, the usual. The dishes need to be washed, the clothes put away, the decorations stored. However, even going back to ordinary life you remember and talk about the great plays, tasty foods, funny incidents. The special occasion needs to be reported on and embellished.
Something similar seems to have happened at that first Christmas. After the excitement and the clamor of the event itself there was the memory, the reminiscence. It was the report about what had happened that helped people to come to grips with the significance of that first Christmas morning. There is an old adage (which goes back to Julius Caesar!) that “Experience is the best teacher.” This is not exactly true. It is not experience that teaches but reflection on the experience, understanding the experience, plumbing the meaning of the experience that teaches. St. Luke lists three different ways that people reacted to the experience that they had at the manger. Those three reactions are not just about things back in the day but characterize contemporary feelings about Christmas as well.
St. Luke says first that all who heard about the events were “amazed.” Now, as then, we respond with amazement, wonder, awe when we are given a hint of the divine, when we are stretched out of the world of going to work and cooking supper and shoveling snow into a reality beyond ourselves. We can call this a spiritual response to an experience. The crowds were amazed at all the events swirling around the birth of the child. We might have similar experiences of amazement, awe, wonder when we watch the moon rise over Lake Michigan, when we see pictures of the Orion Nebula captured by the Webb Space Telescope, at the newly reconstructed Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, by observing the delicacy of the ear of a new-born infant, when we listen to Handel’s “Messiah.” David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, wrote about one such experience of amazement in his life. “One morning in April, I was in a crowded subway car underneath 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue in New York (truly one of the ugliest spots on this good green earth). I looked around the car, and I had this shimmering awareness that all the people in it had souls. Each of them had some piece of themselves that gave them infinite value.” On this Christmas morning we are all invited to look around and be amazed at the many manifestations of the spiritual which shows that our conception of the world is too small, that there is so much more to life.
A second reaction to the events in Bethlehem was that of the shepherds. We are told that they were “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.” We might call this the religious response to the experience. The spiritual response was one of amazement that there is more than we imagined to reality. The religious response is understanding that we only know the true meaning of our experience by seeing everything in the light of God. On that first Christmas the shepherds recognized that God was at work, that this was not just one birth among all the births that day but that it was according to the plan and action of God. We gather here on this Church Christmas Morning glorifying and praising God as well – for all of the things in our life which have brought us to this moment. When we reflect on our experiences we can see the radical goodness of God’s love. As a result, we have hope even in the dark times because of our trust that the God who has brought us this far by faith is not about to abandon us now.
The third response to the birth of Jesus according to St. Luke was that of Mary: “Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” We might call that the contemplative response or the faith-filled response. Mary had heard from the angel that her child was the “Son of the Most High,” that he would “save his people from their sins.” Yet the child who was born looked like any other child. Here he was after toil and trouble and labor. Here he was living as a poor man. Here he was soon to become an immigrant. Here he was, needing to face all the challenges that are part of growing up. Mary reflected on all that in her heart to discover that the plan of God was not found on some elevated plain but in the midst of living a human life with all of its ups and downs. That is our challenge as well. Like Mary we must reflect how our lives are in God’s hands. Mary learned, as we all must learn in turn, that the true meaning of experience of Christmas can only be found when we hold another person close to our hearts for they are, in fact, the presence of God for us.