Christmas Homily

Christmas Homily 2009
St. Frances Cabrini Church
Hoxie, Kansas
Year for Priests

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Everyone is telling me I have to go see the movie The Blind Side. I’m not a big movie guy, I’m more of a sports guy, but since this movie involves some football, I may go see it. From the trailers, I sense that this really is a great Christmas story. A rich family encounters a young man lost in the cold, and lost in life. They take the risk of bringing this young man into their comfortable life, and the result is almost miraculous. The young man, despite every bad break he has had in life, compounded by his own weaknesses as a person, is able to turn his life around, and to become a success. But the key in the movie is that the rich family takes a chance. They go outside of their comfort zone, and their perfect life, in order to try to win the soul of this young man who was lost. And despite every reason that it shouldn’t work out, it does.

The story of the Bible, and the story of our salvation, is like the Blind Side. The story is a story of God changing Himself, especially when He doesn’t have to. God is perfect in Himself, lacking nothing, and not needing to create anything to be happy. As we learn in revelation, God is a perfect communion of three persons who love each other so completely that they are able to share one nature. This perfection, like the cozy family in the Blind Side, lacks nothing. The Trinity has everything, and creating the world adds nothing to the greatness of the Trinity. But like that family in the Blind Side, we see in the story of our creation, the Trinity is willing to go outside of itself. The result is creation, the universe, and you and me, made in the very image and likeness of God, sharing in the intelligence and will of the holy Trinity.

God stops, as it were, like the family in the Blind Side, to share some of who He is. So from the beginning of the story, we see that God is love. He does not need to share Himself, but since God is not just Almighty and Everlasting, but also Love, God creates. Love takes the risk of sharing, even when you don’t have to. The result is that even though you and I do not have to exist, we do. We are real because God is love.

Of course in the story of our salvation, we see, and we experience, that God is also just. We are all going to die. That is justice. When Adam and Eve fail to love, they receive the punishment of death, a punishment that we share in. Since the time of Adam and Eve, it is possible for all of us to catch a lot of bad breaks in life. Life is still overwhelming good, but it is tenuous. Lots of people catch bad breaks even in a good world. Creatures that do not always love can not always live. What would it mean to live forever but to never have to love? The vocation of man is to love, and so those who do not love cannot live. That is justice, and God is just. We see this in the punishment given to Adam and Eve, we see it in the great flood, we see it in the vengeance that God takes upon His enemies.

But in the story of our salvation, this justice of God is always giving way to God revealing Himself to be love. Throughout the story, God continues, like He did at the dawn of creation, to go outside of Himself. God refuses to call us, his greatest creation, an experiment gone bad. Instead, he continues to raise up righteous men to lead His people, He gives the law and the prophets to correct those who stray from Him, and what is more He makes a promise that He will never abandon His people and that He Himself will come to rescue His people. God puts forward the promise and hope of a Messiah who will make everything the way it is supposed to be. God’s justice while never fading, always gives way in the story to the revelation of God as love. In the story, we see that God will never stop going outside of Himself. It is his nature to do so. God is love.

A person who is love, when He is unable to change the person He loves, instead changes Himself. This is the miracle of Christmas that we celebrate with great joy tonight. God, since He is just, is unable to remove the punishment that gives our lives shape and meaning, the punishment of death. And God, since He is love, is not willing to stop sharing and to take back the freedom that allows us to go as far away from Him as we want to. So what does love do in this situation? Love, instead of forsaking the one it loves, forsakes itself. Unwilling to go away from us who continue to go away from Him, God instead goes away from Himself, and who He is in perfection, in order to take up our human nature. God did not need to create the universe, much less did He need to create us in His image and likeness, and much much less did He need to become One of us. But because God is love that is so far beyond our understanding, He forsakes Himself to born of a Virgin. Like the rich family that goes outside of itself and places everything they have at the disposal of the young man they pick up, so too the mystery of the Incarnation, where out of love God places everything that He is within the context of our human nature. Jesus, the one born of the virgin, is truly and fully God. God joins all of Himself to the human nature of Jesus. God, who is love, is all in! Jesus is true God, and true man, as we say in the Creed.

Because God is just, it was written from the time that man had become sinful that no one could see the face of God and live. But in the mystery of the Incarnation, God who is love has forsaken Himself so completely that the exact opposite is true. God has forsaken Himself in the Incarnation so completely that to see the face of God is no more threatening to our humanity than to encounter a helpless baby! In fact, God has forsaken Himself so completely that to see the face of this child is not to die, but to live. For this is eternal life, to know the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. To see the face of Jesus Christ, which is possible because of this holy night that we celebrate with such joy, is to see God as He really is, to see Him as pure love, a love so far beyond our imagining, and to heed the message of the angels to the shepherds, to not be afraid of this love, but to proclaim it to the world with great joy!

My dear friends, see what love the Father has for us His children. See how far God’s mercy and love go beyond His justice, so that we need not fear Him, but can encounter Him truly in the Christ child. When God forsakes Himself to become one of us, because He is love, He does not do it comfortably. He is born on the move, in the cold, in poverty and completely vulnerable. In the Christ child, anyone who has caught a bad break in life, and there are millions that have, and many in this Church tonight, can find hope in the baby Jesus. Being born in the most humble and vulnerable of circumstances, all who are made vulnerable by sickness and every kind of natural evil can know on Christmas that Jesus is coming to be with them. We rejoice in Jesus’ coming on this holy night, for He is truly Emmanuel – God with us! There is not a circumstance in our lives, and not a corner of the world, where God is unwilling to go to be with His people. Christmas teaches us this. God will forsake Himself to go anywhere, for He is love. So whenever we find our yoke being hard and our burden heavy, we can look in hope to Jesus, and can imagine how he would live the circumstances of our lives, and know that with Him the yoke will be easier, and the burden lighter, for He is willing to carry it with us.

Christmas is a special, special night, a night where all the promises God has made to us are renewed in the hearts of man, where all things become possible for those who hope in Christ’s coming. For not only has Christ come among us at Bethlehem, he continues to come to those who look to Him. For all those who choose to be with Jesus, the future will be much different than the past, and with Him, the story of each one us will have a glorious ending!

And yes, my friends, the story of Christmas, the story of Christ’s birth, which is an important point in the story of our salvation which is already too good to be true, is a story that will give way to another chapter that is even better. This baby Jesus, who even being born in poverty is already greater than Caesar Augustus and all his armies, who has legions and legions of angels that will ensure that His kingdom will never end, is destined to not only share the circumstances of our lives, but to even take on our sinfulness. Jesus will not only join us in all the bad breaks life will give us, he will even take on the bad breaks we make for ourselves, through our personal selfishness. And so even on Christmas, we do not end the story with Hark the Herald Angels Sing, but we end the story with the celebration of Mass, recalling that God because He is love will forsake Himself even beyond the manger in Bethlehem to the wood of the cross, where His love becomes even more unbelievable and palpable to us. Through the Eucharist, the saving mysteries of Bethlehem, where God becomes truly with us, and Calvary, where God Himself offers the sacrifice that saves man, come forward in history and are fully present to all who have come to encounter the living and true God as He really is. God is love – and as far as we may go away from Him, He forsakes Himself to go farther. God is love – He is Emmanuel – and tonight He chooses to be with us His children, wherever we may be. +m