EARTHLY VALUES REVERSED

Homily for December 22^nd, 2018: 1 Samuel 1:24-28; Luke 1:46-56.

          Hannah, who appears in our first reading, is one of many women in the Old Testament who suffer for years because of their inability conceive a child. Accompanying her husband Elkanah on one of his annual visits to the sanctuary at Shiloh, Hannah prays for a child with such intensity and fervor that Eli, the priest on duty there, thinking she must be drunk, rebukes her and tells her to sober up.

          I’m not drunk, Hannah replies; “I was only pouring out my troubles to the Lord.” Reassured, Eli sends her on her way with the prayer: “May the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of him.” God answers this prayer, giving Hannah a son, Samuel, who would be the first of Israel’s prophets. On her next visit to Shiloh, Hannah thanks God, praising him in the words we prayed together as the responsorial psalm. She praises God who lifts up the poor, while humbling the rich and powerful.

          Mary’s words in the gospel, praising God for making her the mother of his Son, echo these words of Hannah: “My spirit rejoices in God my savior… He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.”

          Some three decades later Mary’s Son would speak words remarkably similar to those spoken by both his mother, and Hannah. We call them the Beatitudes, because each is introduced by the Greek word makarios, which means “blessed” or “happy.” The Beatitudes proclaim the reversal of all earthly values. Where worldly society says: “Blessed are the rich,” Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”  Society says, “Blessed are those who know how to live it up and have fun.” Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Where society says it is the powerful who are blessed, Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek.” And when Jesus says, “Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,” society says: “Be sure you get a good lawyer.” 

Jesus wants us to use the Beatitudes as a mirror; to ask ourselves, ‘Am I poor in spirit? Am I humble and merciful? Am I pure of heart? Do I hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness? Am I a peacemaker, or do I contribute to conflict through gossip, cynicism, and hate?’

Think about those questions, friends, and pray about them. Doing so is the best possible preparation for Christmas.

"ARISE, MY LOVER, AND COME."

 Homily for December 21^st, 2018: Song of Songs 2:8-14.        

       “Hark, my lover – here he comes springing across mountains, leaping across hills … My lover speaks, he says to me, ‘Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one, and come!’”

        These words from our first reading come from a short book called The Song of Songs. It is a collection of love poems portraying, in the form of an allegory, the love between the soul and God. In the passage we have just heard the human lover calls out to God, the Beloved. Christians have always understood the Beloved to be a figure for Jesus – which is why the Church gives us this passage, just four days before Christmas. The one calling out, “Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one, and come,” is Jesus. His love for us is passionate. He longs for us to be close to him always.

        One of the great interpreters of this book is the twelfth century French monk, St. Bernard. He begins his commentary on the Song of Songs with the book’s opening words, addressed by the soul to God: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” The kiss, Bernard explains, is the Holy Spirit, who binds Father and Son together in love. The kiss may also be understood, however, as Jesus Christ, who with his kiss unites divinity and humanity. Since we are sinners, we cannot raise ourselves all at once to the Lord’s mouth. We must first fall at his feet, kissing his feet in repentance. Then, as the Lord’s stretches out to grasp and steady us as we rise, we kiss his hands. “And finally,” Bernard says, “when we shall have obtained these favors through many prayers and tears, we humbly dare to raise our mouth to his mouth .... not merely to gaze upon it but – I say this with fear and trembling – to receive his kiss. ... And whoever is joined to him in a holy kiss becomes, at his good pleasure, one spirit with him.”  

                We don’t read the Bible like that today. Some people still do, however. Let me tell you about one of them, a Jewish psychiatrist before he was baptized at age 27 and became a Trappist monk at St. Joseph’s Abbey in western Massachusetts, where he died in November 2006 at the age of 97. A true son of St. Bernard, Fr. Raphael Simon (his monastic name), left us these beautiful lines:

 “To fall in love with God is the greatest of all romances.

            To seek him, the greatest human adventure.

             To find him, the highest human achievement.”                              

WHAT THE SHEPHERDS FOUND

Christmas, at Dawn. Titus 3:4-7; Luke 2:15-20.

AIM:  To instill a sense of wonder and joy at the incarnation.

 

The world=s great religions, someone has said, are all about the same thing: our search for God. To this general statement there is an important exception.  Christianity, and its parent, Judaism, are concerned not with our search for God, but with God=s search for us. At Christmas we celebrate God=s search, and his coming to us, in a special way. The readings at this Mass give us answers to three important questions about God=s coming. They tell us how God comes, when he comes, and why.

How does God come?

He comes in very ordinary and humble circumstances, to very ordinary and humble people. There was nothing dramatic about the birth of Mary=s child at Bethlehem. Few people took any notice C only a few outsiders, and three crackpot eccentrics. 

Shepherds were outsiders in the ancient world. Without fixed abode, like gypsies today, they were mistrusted by respectable people. Since they frequently grazed their flocks on other people=s land, shepherds were considered too dishonest to be witnesses in court. Because their irregular lives made it impossible for them to observe the strict Sabbath and dietary laws, observant Jews held them in disdain.

The so-called Wise Men, whose visit we commemorate at Epiphany, were eccentrics: astrologers of some kind from God knows where, who set off on a madcap journey, following a star. We call them wise. To their contemporaries they were screwballs who were not playing with a full deck.

Nor was the scene which these visitors found at Bethlehem as attractive as we make it appear in our Christmas cards and cribs. If Jesus were born today, it would probably be in a cardboard shack with a roof of corrugated iron in Africa, or somewhere in Latin America, without electricity or water: smelly, drafty, and cold.

How does God come? He comes in ordinary and humble surroundings, to people who live on the margin of society. That is how God came on the first Christmas. It is how he comes today.

When does God come?

He comes when we least expect him C when people have given up expecting him altogether. Matthew and Luke emphasize Jesus= descent from the great King David, and Jesus= birth Ain David=s city@ (Mt 1:17; Lk 1:27, 2: 4 & 11). They wanted to show that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, whose birth Aof the house of David@ the prophets had long foretold.

Almost six centuries before Jesus= birth, however, David=s royal house had come to an end. The revival of his long extinct dynasty after so great an interval was, humanly speaking, impossible. Moreover, the imperial census, which brought Joseph and Mary to David=s city, Bethlehem, was a humiliating reminder to their people that the nation over which David had once ruled as king was now governed by a foreign emperor across the sea. Rome, not Jerusalem, was the center of the world into which Jesus was born. At the very moment in which that world was set in motion by an imperial decree from its center, God was acting in an unimportant village on the edge of the empire in an obscure event from which we continue, twenty centuries later, to number our years.

Unthinkable? Impossible? Precisely! That is how God normally acts.  He comes to us when we are least expecting him; when we have ceased expecting him at all. He comes in ways that stagger the imagination and demolish our conception of the possible. The creator of the universe comes as a tiny baby, born of a virgin. 

Why does he do it?  Why does God come at all?

To these questions our second reading gives us the answer: AWhen the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared, [he saved us] not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy.@ 

God=s coming is not a reward for services rendered. He chose to come to us at the first Christmas for the same reason he comes to us today: not because we are good enough, but because he is so good, and so loving, that he wants to share his love with us, his unworthy, erring, and sinful children.

This explains too why he chose outsiders and eccentrics as the first witnesses of his coming. Before him we are all outsiders, all eccentrics. Before God we are all marginal, as the shepherds were, and the wise men. It is His love, and His alone, which draws us in from the darkness and cold of the margin to the light and warmth of the center.

It is because God gave us his love at the first Christmas that we give gifts to one another at this season. The love God gave us then, and continues to give us today, is neither distant, nor abstract. God=s love is a person who is very close to us.  His name is Jesus Christ.

"DO NOT BE AFRAID, MARY."

Homily for December 20^th, 2018: Luke 1:26-38.

          “Do not be afraid, Mary,” the angel says to the young teenage girl in today’s gospel reading. Her angelic visitor came direct from God. The encounter with the divine is never casual or routine. Mary’s response to the angel’s message, that she was to be the mother of God’s Son, shows her to be the model of trusting faith

          Yet Mary’s faith was not blind. She doubted and questioned. “How can this be?” Mary asked the angel who told her she would conceive her child without a human father. What Mary questioned, was not so much God, as her own ability to understand God and his plan for her life. Even in the midst of perplexity, Mary confessed that God knew best, even if she could not understand what he was about: “May it be done to me according to your word,” she told the angel.

          Mary’s assent to God’s plan for her was not a one-time thing.  It had to be constantly renewed, through many sufferings. When Mary and Joseph presented their child to God in the Jerusalem temple, Simeon told Mary that her Son would be “a sign which men reject,” and that Mary herself would be “pierced with a sword” (Lk 2:35). 

          Upon reaching manhood, Jesus left his mother, as he demanded that his followers should leave their parents.  At Jesus’ farewell meal with his closest friends there was, apparently, no place for his mother — though there was a place for her the next day, at Calvary. There, at the cross, Simeon’s prophecy, that a sword would pierce Mary’s heart, was fulfilled. Yet Mary went on trusting even when — as long ago — she “did not understand” (Lk 2:50).    

          Can there be any doubt that it is precisely Mary’s trusting faith which we need today? Which of us can fully explain or understand all that we have experienced in recent years? Today, more than ever, we need the kind of faith which Mary had, the faith she models for us: faith which continues to trust in God even amid things we do not understand and cannot explain.

          And so I invite you to supply the conclusion to the homily, by responding to the age-old prayer based on the angel’s words to Mary in today’s gospel:

          Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among

          women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.

          L  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of

          our death.  Amen.

 

A VOICE FOR THE WORD.

Homily for December 19^th, 2018: Judges 13:2-7, 24-25a; Luke 1:5-15.


          When the angel Gabriel visited the young Jewish teenager, Mary, to tell her that God wanted her to be the mother of his Son, Mary asked, quite naturally, how such a thing could be possible. To which the angel responded: “Nothing is impossible with God” (Luke 1:37).



          Both of our readings today show God doing the impossible. In today’s first reading, the recipient of a gift impossible for anyone but God is identified simply as “the wife of Manoah.” The Bible nowhere gives her name. She is unable to conceive a child. Numerous contemporary articles and books by unfruitful wives testify eloquently to the grief experienced by women whose dreams of motherhood remain unfulfilled. Manoah’s wife is visited by an angel who tells her that she will have a son who will free his people from their enemies.
 

          The woman in today’s gospel reading is named: Elizabeth, wife of the Jewish priest Zechariah. Both are far beyond childbearing age. This time the angel bringing the news that she will conceive and bear a son appears not to Elizabeth but to her husband. Zechariah is unable to believe that such a thing is possible. In consequence, the angel tells him, he will lose the power of speech until the promised boy is born. 



          In one of his sermons (293:1-3) St. Augustine uses a play on the two Latin words vox (voice) and verbum (word) to explain the reason for this. Zechariah’s son, John the Baptist, was called, Augustine says, to be a voice: vox – for the word, verbum: Jesus, God’s personal utterance and communication to us. While still in his mother’s womb, John’s voice was silent. Only when John, the voice for the Word, was born, was his father’s power of speech restored.

In a different but similar way, we too are called to be voices for God’s Son, the Word: at least by the witness of our lives. St. Francis of Assisi has said it best: 

“Preach always. If necessary, use words.”

CHRISTMAS DAY

ATHE WORD WAS MADE FLESH.@

Christmas Mass during the day.  Heb. 1:1-6; Jn 1:1-18.

AIM:  To explain the Incarnation and its significance for us.

 

It=s a strange gospel for Christmas, isn=t it?  Where, we ask, are the shepherds, the manger, Mary and Joseph? Where is their child? Instead of these familiar Christmas figures we have heard about abstractions: light and darkness, the Word becoming flesh.

Let=s start with another word: Aincarnation.@ It means Ataking on flesh,  embodiment.@ This building is the incarnation of an idea in the mind of the architect who designed it. It is the incarnation or embodiment too of the sacrifices that made its construction possible. Children are the incarnation of their parents= love. And Jesus is the incarnation of God. 

We cannot see God. Jesus shows us what God is like. That is why this Christmas gospel calls Jesus God=s Word. A word is used to communicate. Jesus is God=s word because he is God=s communication to us: not a lifeless, abstract statement, but God=s living and breathing utterance and self-disclosure.    

When we listen to Jesus, we hear God speaking to us. When we look at Jesus, we see what God is like. What do we see when we look at Jesus? We see that he preferred simple, ordinary people. He came to the world in a provincial village where nothing interesting or important ever happened. Jesus moved not among wealthy or sophisticated people, or among scholars and intellectuals, but among ordinary people. They were the ones who welcomed him most warmly. The rich and powerful and learned had difficulties with Jesus. Many were hostile to him. That was true then. It remains true today. 

Jesus was of the earth, earthy. In his youth he worked with his hands in the carpenter=s shop. His teaching was full of references to simple things: the birds of the air, the wind and the raging waves, the lilies of the field, the vine, the lost sheep, the woman searching for her one lost coin, leavening dough with yeast, the thief breaking in at night. Those were images that everyone could understand. Jesus taught also in parables: stories so simple that they capture the interest of children; yet so profound that learned scholars are still studying them today.

In preferring simple people and simple things, Jesus was showing us what God is like. He who is God=s utterance and word, God=s personal communication to us, is saying through all the circumstances of his life that God loves humble people.  God is especially close to those who feel that they are not in control of their lives; that they are the victims of circumstances; that their lives are a tangle of loose ends and broken resolutions.

In his earthiness Jesus shows us God=s love for this world and everything in it. Often we think of God and religion as concerned only with some higher, spiritual realm. That is wrong!  God loves the earth and the things of earth. He must love them, because he made them. And God does not make anything that is not lovable.  As John, the writer of today=s gospel, tells us in a later chapter: AGod so loved the world that he gave his only Son@ (Jn 3:16).

It is because God gave us his Son at Christmas that we give gifts to one another. The greatest gift we can give cannot be bought in any store. You cannot order it from an 800-number or over the Internet. You cannot wrap it. You cannot send it through the mail, by UPS or Federal Express. It is the gift God gave us at Christmas: the gift of himself. Even as a baby Jesus is God=s personal word and communication to us. In the words of our second reading, he is Athe refulgence [that means the shining forth] of [God=s] glory, the very imprint of his being.@

Look at Mary=s child: helpless, vulnerable, and weak, as all babies are. He is God=s way of saying: >This is how much the Lord God, creator of heaven and earth, loves you; enough to be become tiny, insignificant, vulnerable.= Jesus, the personal utterance and word of God, is God=s gift to you. He wants you to share this gift with others. You do so when, like God himself, you give yourself to others: when, like Jesus, you too love the company of ordinary people; when, like him, you remain close to the earth and the things of earth.

In a few moments we shall be offered our greatest and most important Christmas gift: the body and blood of our Lord, of Jesus who is God=s personal word to each one of us. The consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist are Christ=s body and blood: all his power, all his goodness, all his love. He offers all this to us:

C       not as a reward for services rendered;

C       not because we are good enough (for none of us is);

C       but because he is so good that he wants to share his power, his goodness, and his love with us.

Jesus gives us this greatest of all gifts under one strict condition: that what we here receive, we generously share with others.    

"BLESSED ARE YOU AMONG WOMEN."

ABLESSED ARE YOU AMONG WOMEN.@

Homily for 4^th Advent Sunday, Year C. Luke 1: 39-45.

AIM:  To present Mary as the model of faith, and to explain why we invoke her prayers.

 

How many people here are already tired of Christmas? It is only two days away. But outside of church you=d never know that. Long before Thanksgiving we started hearing Christmas carols: on the airwaves, in shopping centers and department stores, in the oozy wash of Muzak that tickles our ears in elevators and stores, and even comes over the telephone when we=re put on AHold.@

We all know the reason for this commercialization of Christmas. It=s Agood for business.@ Many retailers make a good part of their year=s profit during these final weeks of the year. We deplore this commercialization. Do we realize, however, that it has a Christian origin? We give gifts to one another at Christmas because it is the time when God gave us the greatest gift of all: his Son.

The Church hasn=t even begun to celebrate Christmas. Here it is still Advent.  The central figure in today=s gospel is not the Lord whose birth we shall shortly celebrate, but his mother. We heard her cousin, Elizabeth, call Mary, ABlessed among women.@ That phrase has been dulled for us Catholics by constant repetition. It is worthwhile pausing on this fourth Sunday in Advent to reflect on what Elizabeth=s words mean.  

Elizabeth called Mary Ablessed among women,@ and we repeat those words in the Hail Mary today, because of Mary=s trusting faith. ABlessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled,@ Elizabeth said at the end of today=s gospel. She was contrasting Mary=s attitude with that of Elizabeth=s husband, Zechariah. He had not believed the angel=s message, that he and his wife would have a son in their old age. Who can blame him? It seemed impossible.

Mary received the news of an even greater impossibility: that she would conceive a son while remaining a virgin. Like Zechariah, Mary questioned the angel: AHow can this be, since I do not know man?@ (Lk 1:34). The angel replied that her child would be conceived Aby the power of the Most High,@ for whom Anothing is impossible.@ Unlike Zechariah, Mary accepted the angel=s momentous news, and with it God=s call, though the reasons for both remained mysterious to her.

  Why was Mary=s child conceived without a human father? Was it because sexuality and procreation are sinful B or at least second-rate? Not at all. Sexuality and procreation are among God=s greatest and holiest gifts to us. And God does not make anything second-rate, and certainly nothing sinful. Jesus was conceived without a human father because he does not come, like all of us, his mother included, from within humanity. Jesus comes from outside humanity. He took human nature from his mother. But he had God for his Father. The Catechism says: AMary=s virginity manifests God=s absolute initiative in the Incarnation. Jesus has only God as Father@ (No. 503).

Did Mary understand all that in advance? Holy Scripture suggests very strongly that she did not. In the one recorded incident from Jesus= childhood, his parents= search for their twelve-year-old son, and their finding him in the Temple at Jerusalem, Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph Adid not understand what he meant@ when he told them: AI was bound to be in my Father=s house@ (2:49f). How then could Mary have understood the far greater mystery of her Son=s miraculous conception? 

There would be much more that Mary did not understand, and could not understand. At the wedding feast at Cana her Son seemed to speak roughly to her. Yet Mary went on trusting, as she had from the start, telling the servants: ADo whatever he tells you@ (John 2:5). Mark seems to suggest that Mary even joined Jesus= other relatives in thinking he was out of his mind (cf. Mk 3:21). 

The accounts of the Last Supper indicate that there was no place for Mary at Jesus= farewell meal with his friends. Yet when those same male friends Aall forsook him and fled@ (Mk 14:50), Mary remained faithful. We find Mary at the cross where her Son died. Our final glimpse of Mary in the New Testament shows her continuing faithfulness, as she joins Jesus= followers after his resurrection and ascension to pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit whom Jesus had promised (cf. Acts 1:14).

It is the age-old conviction of Catholic Christians that this prayer did not cease with the end of Mary=s earthly life, but that it continues in heaven. How often, when we are in difficulty or facing some crisis or suffering, we ask others to pray for us. Priests receive such requests all the time. A stewardess on an airplane said to me: AFather, will you pray for me?  I=m forty and I haven=t found a husband.  I=m getting impatient.@ And more recently the man who came to inspect my car before I turned it in at the end of the lease said, as he handed me the report: AWould you put in a word for my mother? She=s battling alcoholism.@ I have prayed for both of those dear souls, and shall continue to do so.

If it is right to ask our earthly friends to pray for us, how much more fitting to ask, as we Catholics do constantly, for the prayers of our heavenly friends, the saints; and especially of the woman who is now closest to God in heaven; who never gave up when things grew dark and she could not understand; who trusted and believed that God could accomplish in her and through her not merely the difficult, but the impossible. The Catechism speaks of the prayers of our heavenly friends for us when it says: AThe witnesses who have preceded us into the kingdom, especially those whom the Church recognizes as saints, share in the living tradition of prayer by the example of their lives, the transmission of their writings, and their prayer today. ... When they entered into the joy of their Master, they were >put in charge of many things= (cf. Mt 25:21). Their intercession is their most exalted service to God=s plan. We can and should ask them to intercede for us and for the whole world.@ (No. 2683) 

The best loved and most frequently used Catholic prayer, after the Our Father, combines the angel Gabriel=s greeting to Mary with the salutation of her cousin Elizabeth from today=s gospel. What better preparation could we make for Christmas than to pray this prayer all together? I invite you to do so now: not just rattling it off, but slowly, thinking about the meaning of the words; with devotion and with deep reverence. Please join me, as we pray:

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death.  Amen.

TWO KINGS

Christmas - Mass at Midnight

          Why did God come to us as a baby? Wouldn’t it have been more fitting for him to come as a powerful adult, descending on clouds of glory?  That was how Jesus’ own people expected him to come – which explains why most of them didn’t recognize him.  He chose instead to come as a weak, defenseless, and vulnerable infant. Why?

          In a book published over sixty years ago called Mere Christianity the English writer C.S. Lewis says this: “Jesus came as a baby because he needed to slip quietly, even clandestinely, through enemy lines.” The world to which Jesus came was not the world his Father had created. That beautiful, perfectly ordered world had been spoiled by human sin. Conflicts and wars, between individuals, groups, and nations, were never part of God’s plan. So at Christmas God’s Son was entering enemy territory. To escape detection he came as a tiny baby. He came to fight and overcome all the evil forces which had spoiled God’s world. He would not fight, however, with the weapons wielded by the rulers of that world.

          Who were those rulers? Luke identifies them for us: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus ... when Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Bethlehem, the town where Jesus was born, was then part of Syria. Caesar’s decree ordered a census. We read in the Old Testament about David taking a census of God’s people. God was displeased. Why? A census was an act of power. It enabled a ruler to control people: to decide where they could live, to tax them, to draft them into his army. God wanted David to serve his people, not to dominate and manipulate them. God alone was to be their ruler.

          One way of understanding the Bethlehem story is to read it as the story of two kings: Caesar Augustus, the far off ruler in Rome, king of the whole known world of that day; and then this tiny baby. He too was a king – but an utterly new kind of king. Consider the contrasts:

– There was “no room in the inn” for this baby king and his parents. Imagine what the hostel for travelers must have been like in that backward little town in Bethlehem. We’re not talking Motel 6 here. We’re not even talking about accommodations such as one finds in shelters for the homeless in any large American city today. The inn at Bethlehem was more primitive even than that. Even there, however, there was no room for this king. He was born in a shelter for animals: a stable, or perhaps a cave.

-- Where was the other king, Caesar Augustus? He was in one of his many palaces, all of them places of luxury. He was like the man in the Cole Porter song who sings:

“I’ve a shooting box in Scotland / I’ve a château in Touraine /

I’ve a silly little chalet / In the Interlaken valley /
I’ve a hacienda in Spain / I’ve a private fjord in Norway /
                  I've a villa close to Rome /

I’ve a shanty in the Rockies / I’ve a castle on the Rhine 

So wherever I may go / It’s such a comfort to know /

                That I’m never far from home.”

Yes, Caesar had the good life: protected, comfortable, secure, surrounded by every luxury imaginable.

– The newborn king in that cave at Bethlehem was wrapped in swaddling clothes, unable to make even the small movements of a newborn. The ancient Church Fathers say that the swaddling clothes remind us of his burial wrappings. He was laid in a feeding trough for animals.

– Caesar Augustus was the most powerful man in the ancient world. He wore only the finest clothes. To eat he could have anything he wanted. He drank only the finest wines. The infant king lying now in the feeding trough would often be hungry. At the start of his public ministry he fasted for forty days. He had come, however, to feed the whole world. He is still feeding his people today – with his powerful word, with his body and blood in the Eucharist. .  

– Wherever Caesar appeared, crowds gathered to cheer him, or at least to gawk and gaze. The only people who showed up for the birth of the infant king were some shepherds. How cute and nice they look cute on our Christmas cards and crèches in church. In Jesus’ day, however, shepherds in Jesus’ day were lowlife. They grazed their flocks on other people’s land. Their irregular life made it impossible to keep the dietary and other laws which were so important for Jews. Shepherds then were something like street people today – not nice people. Grown to manhood the baby would continue associating with people who weren’t very nice. “This man receives sinners,” his critics complained, “and eats with them.”

          The baby king in the feeding trough would die a criminal’s death – on a cross, an instrument of torture. Today we find a crucifix in every Catholic church the world over, and in many other churches as well. Not so in the Church’s early centuries. For Christians then the crucifix was a horrifying symbol of Caesar’s power, too frightening to display: “You mess with us,” it said, “And this is what we’ll do to you.”

          Over Jesus’ cross Caesar’s representative, Pontius Pilate, put up a sign in the three main languages of the day: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. “This is the king of the Jews,” it said.  It was a joke, of course, a taunt.

          Had the story ended there, Caesar would have won. But it did not end there. On the third day his tomb was found empty. He appeared, alive again in flesh and blood, to his frightened disciples who, when the chips were down, had all forsaken him and fled – all, that is, save his mother and some other women disciples, with the only male friend who remained faithful: “The disciple whom Jesus loved,” John’s gospel calls him. Those to whom the risen Lord appeared had every reason to be frightened at his reappearance. “We killed him,” they must have thought. “And now he’s back!” Back for vengeance? No, that was Caesar’s way, the way of the world, we call it; the way of those who say, “Don’t get mad. Get even. You send one of ours to the hospital. We’ll send one of yours to the morgue.”

          What is the first word Jesus says to those who have let him down and run away? “Shalom - Peace.” And then he breathes on them and says: “Receive the Holy Spirit” – the love that binds me to my heavenly Father, and Him to me. Through compassion and non-violent love the risen Lord restores order to the Christian community and through them to the world.

          That is what enabled Paul to write in his letter to the Romans, chapter 8: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Trial, or distress, or persecution, or hunger, or nakedness, or danger of the sword? ... Yet in all this we are more than conquerors because of him who has loved us. For I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities [there’s Caesar again], neither the present nor the future, nor powers, neither height nor depth nor any other creature, will be able to separate us for the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus, our Lord.” 

          I said earlier that we don’t know where Caesar was when Jesus was born, save that he was in one of his many palaces. If you go to the island of Capri in the Bay of Naples, however, the local guides will tell you that on the night Jesus was born, Caesar was in his palace there on Capri. Part of it is still standing. That night Caesar couldn’t sleep. All night long he paced up and down on the palace terrace. By dawn he’d worn out his sandals. 

          History or legend? There is no need to answer the question. What matters is what the story tells us. Something was happening that night which would change the world, forever. That, friends, is the heart of the gospel: that because of the baby king born that night, good is stronger than evil; light has shone in the darkness of our world and overpowered it; God’s mercy wipes away even the greatest sin; this world, with all its horrors, is still God’s world; God and his all-powerful, compassionate love are ours for the taking.

          Or, to quote Paul a final time, from the fifth chapter of his letter to the Romans this time: “the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom. 5:5).

In this holy night the baby in the feeding trough, and the man on the cross, are asking us just one thing: that we surrender to that love.