What does Jesus want for Christmas?

Homily

Solemnity of Christmas

25 December 2023

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

What do I want for Christmas?

Well it's equal parts scandalous and pitiful to say.  For the fourth year in a row, I want someone to hold me.  When I first confessed this desire during COVID, people assumed social distancing has gotten to me.  I got more than a few pity hugs.

But I'm not ready to give up on this Christmas wish, at least not yet.  It's still what I want.  It's a primal need and desire for every baby born into the world.  I'm still a baby, maybe we all are.  I can't live without love, without someone to hold me.  It's what makes me most human. Maybe it's what you want too.

More importantly, I dare say it's what Jesus wants for Christmas.  His pivotal question is the best one for Christmas.  He appears most intimately as a baby on Christmas night to ask you a deeply personal question. Will you hold me?

For a baby, need and desire are blurred.  At Christmas, Jesus dons the disguise, inviting you into the paradox of this strangest of nights.  Jesus disguises His desire for you, as need.  He helps you by being helpless.  He loves you by begging your love.  On this ridiculous night, when everything is turned upside down, He doesn't stop there.  He feeds you by being consumed.  He finds you by hiding, betting on your faith to search for Him.  He restores life by getting killed.  He crushes enemies through the defeat of poverty, nakedness, homelessness and rejection.  Jesus makes sense of you by becoming an absolute joke.

Yet the already too foolish scene of Bethlehem is about to give way to Jesus' most surprising disguise.  How will He ask you the ultimate Christmas question - will you hold me?  In just moments, the cave gives way to this altar, and the manger to that place in your soul where only Jesus in the Eucharist can reach.  You're about to put the Mass in Christ's Mass, you see, for the original and precise and only meaning of Christmas is what you let happen when Jesus asks you through the gift of his body to the very depths of yours - will you hold me?

I have no idea how your touch and your answer will save the world.  I just know that's what Jesus wants for Christmas.  His whole trick tonight is designed to slip by your defenses to reach that place where you're still afraid, alone or stuck.  If He asked you what you wanted for Christmas, you might get scared and say I'm fine. Don't worry about me. So instead he asks for what He wants, and begs you to hold him.

The fate of Christmas turns on your answer, and your touch. That's His decision to bet it all on you, not mine.  So He is born for you tonight, just in case any or each of us may dare to say yes, Lord.  I will hold you.  On this strangest of nights, my yes might be flipped into the discovery that I'm the one being held. The dream of what Jesus and I both want for Christmas, might really come true.

+mj