CHRISTMAS 2000
Introduction: God is so great that He can allow himself to become a little child. He is so strong that He can assume human weakness. He is overwhelmingly attractive that He draws everyone to himself. God is so free that He can bind himself to people and yet leave them free. This is the God we celebrate today, born of a human mother into a human family, into the world of real human beings. With hearts full of thanksgiving, and conscious of our frailty, we beg Immanuel to support our weakness as we ask pardon for our sins that he came to wipe away.
The HOMILY: “For when peaceful stillness compassed everything and the night in its swift course was half-spent, your all powerful Word bounded from heaven’s royal throne, a fierce warrior into the doomed land” (Book of Wisdom 18, 14-15).
The greatest things are accomplished in silence; not in the clamour of superficial display but in the deep clarity of inner vision, in the almost imperceptible start of decision, in hidden sacrifice and quiet conquest. It is in silence that the heart is quickened by love, and the free will stirs to action. The silent forces are the strong forces. The greatest events are accomplished in silence. And the greatest event of all was the descent of the Son of God from his throne on to this earth. It was the most silent event because it came from the infinite remoteness beyond the noise of any possible intrusion.
The Son of God became man, - “the Word was made flesh” (Jn. 1) in the womb of an unknown virgin, and it hardly echoed in the upper circles of the time, ignored by the Roman historians. No one but the young virgin knew that Divinity had set up its tent among men. At birth, his royal chamber was the animals’ stable, his throne the manger, his canopy the hanging cobwebs, the reek of the animal droppings the incense.
In this Child, God, having spoken at sundry times through the prophets, chose to reveal to man the mysteries hidden from all eternity. In this Child the infinite made an advance into the finite, a personal intervention, a divine transfusion by which we are transformed, elevated, redeemed; for whereas we were blind, now we see. As St. Irenaeus said: “there is one Father, the Creator of man, and one Son who fulfils the Father’s will, and one human race in which the mysteries of God are worked out, so that the creatures, conformed and incorporated with his Son are brought to perfection.” In this Child, God and man have a purchase on each other. He breathed our air, felt our pain, hungered, thirsted, laboured and loved, and by doing so gave our life meaning.
The Incarnation was a descent into the temporal, into the material, into this world of births and generations, into this world of buying and selling, this world of housing and education, to this world of leisure and hard work, this world of unemployment and taxes. The Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God, took upon himself all this in order to elevate and transfigure. Therefore, our salvation does not consist in a flight or retreat from this world; not a flight of the alone to the Alone; not an escape from our fellowmen and our day to day burdens. It is an injustice to the Incarnation to confine its effectiveness merely to internal graces. In every line of progress, spiritual, intellectual and material, the Incarnation must be the enabling leaven. And if that is so, it should be the rule and not the exception to have saintly workers and peasants, saintly statesmen and judges, merchants and soldier. All stages of life are graced, from childhood to adolescence, from marriage to retirement, up to the last day of our life. “All flesh shall see the salvation of our God” (Luke 6).
Wherever the Christ Child is adored there is at least some sense of mystery. Ignore that birth, and the road to power runs straight as a ruler to the death camps. Focus on that birth, and the road to a healthy humanity cannot be missed. This Infant touched off a revolution, a quiet prolonged thunder, from the recesses of the cave of his birth, founding a kingdom that is known by unconditional love and undiscriminating service. The centre of this dynamic process is the human heart; and the source - the Son of God, born in the heart of every man and woman today.
This Child the simple and the sinner come to worship. The Magi and we pay our loving adoration. He is not an ideal or abstraction, a gaunt empty figure beyond description; but a person in whom is the fullness of the Godhead, the most beautiful among men, victor over death and hell. Nothing great he puts before us to achieve except to love him, to be faithful to him and to give faithful testimony to him when the time comes. His desire is that we love him, that we love one another for him and that we believe in his love for us. Jesus dying lives, and living he dies daily like the grain of wheat or else he takes no root in our hearts. He comes into this world, dispossessed infinity, naked and cold, that each one of us may give him something: the universe for his stabled, for his manger our hearts, and their warmth. And as for the rest, we have no right to expect a status higher than that of the carpenter’s son.
May the hand of Christ bless our year
And the heart of Christ hold us dear
And all blest and happy things
Which the love of Jesus brings
Be ours until another year is here.
Introduction: God is so great that He can allow himself to become a little child. He is so strong that He can assume human weakness. He is overwhelmingly attractive that He draws everyone to himself. God is so free that He can bind himself to people and yet leave them free. This is the God we celebrate today, born of a human mother into a human family, into the world of real human beings. With hearts full of thanksgiving, and conscious of our frailty, we beg Immanuel to support our weakness as we ask pardon for our sins that he came to wipe away.
The HOMILY: “For when peaceful stillness compassed everything and the night in its swift course was half-spent, your all powerful Word bounded from heaven’s royal throne, a fierce warrior into the doomed land” (Book of Wisdom 18, 14-15).
The greatest things are accomplished in silence; not in the clamour of superficial display but in the deep clarity of inner vision, in the almost imperceptible start of decision, in hidden sacrifice and quiet conquest. It is in silence that the heart is quickened by love, and the free will stirs to action. The silent forces are the strong forces. The greatest events are accomplished in silence. And the greatest event of all was the descent of the Son of God from his throne on to this earth. It was the most silent event because it came from the infinite remoteness beyond the noise of any possible intrusion.
The Son of God became man, - “the Word was made flesh” (Jn. 1) in the womb of an unknown virgin, and it hardly echoed in the upper circles of the time, ignored by the Roman historians. No one but the young virgin knew that Divinity had set up its tent among men. At birth, his royal chamber was the animals’ stable, his throne the manger, his canopy the hanging cobwebs, the reek of the animal droppings the incense.
In this Child, God, having spoken at sundry times through the prophets, chose to reveal to man the mysteries hidden from all eternity. In this Child the infinite made an advance into the finite, a personal intervention, a divine transfusion by which we are transformed, elevated, redeemed; for whereas we were blind, now we see. As St. Irenaeus said: “there is one Father, the Creator of man, and one Son who fulfils the Father’s will, and one human race in which the mysteries of God are worked out, so that the creatures, conformed and incorporated with his Son are brought to perfection.” In this Child, God and man have a purchase on each other. He breathed our air, felt our pain, hungered, thirsted, laboured and loved, and by doing so gave our life meaning.
The Incarnation was a descent into the temporal, into the material, into this world of births and generations, into this world of buying and selling, this world of housing and education, to this world of leisure and hard work, this world of unemployment and taxes. The Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God, took upon himself all this in order to elevate and transfigure. Therefore, our salvation does not consist in a flight or retreat from this world; not a flight of the alone to the Alone; not an escape from our fellowmen and our day to day burdens. It is an injustice to the Incarnation to confine its effectiveness merely to internal graces. In every line of progress, spiritual, intellectual and material, the Incarnation must be the enabling leaven. And if that is so, it should be the rule and not the exception to have saintly workers and peasants, saintly statesmen and judges, merchants and soldier. All stages of life are graced, from childhood to adolescence, from marriage to retirement, up to the last day of our life. “All flesh shall see the salvation of our God” (Luke 6).
Wherever the Christ Child is adored there is at least some sense of mystery. Ignore that birth, and the road to power runs straight as a ruler to the death camps. Focus on that birth, and the road to a healthy humanity cannot be missed. This Infant touched off a revolution, a quiet prolonged thunder, from the recesses of the cave of his birth, founding a kingdom that is known by unconditional love and undiscriminating service. The centre of this dynamic process is the human heart; and the source - the Son of God, born in the heart of every man and woman today.
This Child the simple and the sinner come to worship. The Magi and we pay our loving adoration. He is not an ideal or abstraction, a gaunt empty figure beyond description; but a person in whom is the fullness of the Godhead, the most beautiful among men, victor over death and hell. Nothing great he puts before us to achieve except to love him, to be faithful to him and to give faithful testimony to him when the time comes. His desire is that we love him, that we love one another for him and that we believe in his love for us. Jesus dying lives, and living he dies daily like the grain of wheat or else he takes no root in our hearts. He comes into this world, dispossessed infinity, naked and cold, that each one of us may give him something: the universe for his stabled, for his manger our hearts, and their warmth. And as for the rest, we have no right to expect a status higher than that of the carpenter’s son.
May the hand of Christ bless our year
And the heart of Christ hold us dear
And all blest and happy things
Which the love of Jesus brings
Be ours until another year is here.
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