Newtown and Christmas

Homily
Solemnity of Christmas - Mass During the Day
St. Frances Cabrini Parish Hoxie, Kansas
25 December 2012
Daily Readings

O come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord!

To adore the infant Jesus is to do nothing less on Christmas morning than fall in love with him again.  In former times, no one could see the face of God and live.  Yet beginning today, God has taken on a human face, and to adore Christ is to begin to truly live.  Since eternity has entered time, we all live in the fullness of time, where mankind is not moving toward its eventual destruction but onward and upward towards its highest dignity, destiny and glory!  Through Mary , the exemplar of our Church, we have come to fall in love with the human face of God, who shows himself in the circumstances of Bethlehem to be so madly in love with us!

We celebrate Christmas this year, however, while the flags of our country are at half-mast, mourning the loss of her children.  Christ’s victory over evil is real but not yet fully extended, especially when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable children among us.  The evil hit so hard recently that headlines immediately began asking the question ‘where was God?’  With all due honor to those grieving families that wake up this Christmas morning with a damaged faith and unspeakable sadness, the news media had only to go to the nearest church to see where God was.  There on display were thousands of candles proclaiming that despite the worst evil, life is worth living, and the darkness has not overcome the light.  There on display were nativity scenes, showing that God does not distance himself from the vulnerability of being a helpless child.  There on display in the Catholic Church was a crucifix, showing the broken and lifeless body of Jesus, who did not think it beneath him to place himself in the worst kind of evil.  There in churches was the answer that has been there since the first Christmas, and the answer that will always be there.  God is Emmanuel.  He is with us.  In every situation, especially the worst ones, God is with us.  He goes before us.  He walks beside us, even if life takes us to the very depths of hell.

The reality of the most invincible person, the one through whom all things were made, allowing himself to be born naked, outside, in the cold, and wrapped in swaddling clothes teaches us a lesson that we must never forget.  To become a human person is to remember where we came from.  Christmas is the time to remember that we never stop being children. We know deep down that to become a human person is not to grow up and to get the freedom of intelligence and will to create our own reality, as good as these are for many people.  No, to become a human person is to continue to find our true and best selves in the Christ child.  To become a person is to find a way to remain poor and vulnerable, so that our personhood is based on nothing except being known and loved and protected.  As we learned in Newton, this view of human personhood, the true and lasting view, can only ultimately be guaranteed by God, who knows us and loves us and protects us from the evil of the world in ways no one else, not even our parents and school teachers can, from the moment of our conception until our natural death.  The creation of the world the first time by the virgin Father, our Father, was a glorious creation.  Yet the new creation that appears today through the birth of the virgin mother is better, for it is a creation that starts in poverty but ends with riches, that begins with vulnerability but ends with everlasting goodness, which is first touched by death but ends in everlasting life.  This is the new creation that as St. John says, is not born of natural generation, but of God, grace upon grace.  The sign of this new creation appears for us today in Bethlehem. 

Christ appears as a helpless baby to try to win our hearts again this Christmas, to make falling in love with the new creation, with God, and with humanity irresistible.  Yet there are too many who refuse to remember where they came from, and these will reject Jesus, and allow what this child means to scare them instead of winning them over.  Never mind, Jesus is willing to do even more to win us over.  This morning he does even more than asking us to imagine ourselves at Bethlehem.  He comes to us perfectly, right here, right now, and allows us to receive him even more intimately under our roofs, through the Holy Eucharist.  That’s why every Christmas is ultimately judged by what happens in our hearts and minds and bodies in just a few moments, for the birth of Jesus into our world takes on its most radical extension and conclusion in the Eucharist we have come to receive.  Ultimately, there is no Christmas without Christ’s Mass, and what happens right now is the most important thing of all.  Amen.