"THE CHILD GREW."

ATHE CHILD GREW ...@

Feast of the Holy Family. Luke 2:22-40.

AIM: To show that Jesus, like us, learned to love in childhood by being loved; and

to encourage the hearers to share their love with others.

 

What do we know of Jesus= childhood and youth? Virtually nothing.  Matthew records the flight of the holy family into Egypt. Luke gives us the story of the infant Jesus= presentation in the Jerusalem Temple, which we have just heard in the gospel. And he tells us that at age twelve Jesus stayed behind in the Temple after Mary and Joseph had started home, thinking their son was in the group with them. Otherwise the record is blank. No wonder that the first three decades of Jesus= life are called Athe hidden years.@

The obscurity surrounding Jesus= infancy and youth makes the concluding words of today=s gospel especially precious: AThe child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.@  Jesus= slow growth from infancy to manhood shows how completely he who was God=s Son entered into our human condition.

God could have sent his Son into the world fully mature, in a way so dramatic as to compel everyone=s attention. Instead Jesus made his entrance, like every one of us: quietly, inconspicuously. Like us, Jesus passed through the weakness and vulnerability of infancy; through childhood, adolescence, and early manhood. At each stage Jesus possessed the perfection proper to that age. He was the perfect baby, the perfect boy, the perfect adolescent, the perfect young man.  There was, however, real growth: physical, mental, and also spiritual.

That growth took place in the context of a family: a family like any other, yet also unlike any other. Luke introduces them at the beginning of today=s gospel, yet they speak no word throughout. Their silence is another aspect of those Ahidden years.@  

Were those years really so hidden, however?  Even if we have no record of them, it is not difficult to reconstruct from our knowledge of Jesus= public ministry something of what they must have been like. The early nineteenth century German novelist Jean Paul Richter writes: AWhat a father says to his children is not heard by the world, but it will be heard by posterity.@ Many of Jesus= familiar sayings surely reflect the atmosphere of simple trust in God, and undivided loyalty to him, which surrounded Jesus from his birth. It is fanciful to imagine Jesus first hearing in the carpenter=s shop at Nazareth such sayings as these?

ADo not be anxious about tomorrow; tomorrow will look after itself. Each day has troubles enough of its own.@ (Mt 6:34)

AThe one who endures to the end will be saved.@ (Mt 24:13;10:22, Mk 13:13)

AThe first shall be last, and the last shall be first.@ (Mt 19:30, 20:16, Mk 10:31, Lk 13:30)

Is it conceivable that any shoddy work came out of that carpenter=s shop? That its customers were kept waiting for things beyond the time they were promised?

Father Theodore Hesburgh, emeritus President of Notre Dame University and one of our country=s great priests, has said: AThe most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.@ Where did Jesus got his unsurpassed capacity to love even outcasts, lepers, beggars, and hardened criminals, if not from Joseph and Mary.

A film I saw years ago on natural childbirth showed more clearly than many words the effect of a mother=s love even in the first moments after birth. As the baby is placed for the first time in the mother=s arms, she cries out spontaneously: AO you beautiful baby!  I love you already.@ That is how each one of us learned to love: not from formal instruction or from books, but simply by being loved. 

Parents don=t wait to love their children until the little ones have done something to deserve parental love. Indeed, before birth, and for months thereafter children are so burdensome, to their mothers especially, that there is every reason why they should not be loved. Parents love their children nonetheless. And if they are good parents, they don=t stop loving when their children disappoint them, changing from the little angels they admired in the crib into grown up sinners like Mom and Dad. It is this experience of unmerited and unconditional love that makes it possible for us, as we grow up, to love others in return. Jesus too learned to love in that way. He learned about God=s love from experiencing the human love of Mary and Joseph.     

Do you see now why the Church gives us, on this first Sunday after Christmas, a feast in honor of the Holy Family? By recalling the atmosphere of love that surrounded Jesus from birth, and molded him in that long process of human growth referred to in the closing words of today=s gospel, we are reminded that this is the way each of us grew to maturity. This is how we learned to love, if we have learned at all. This is how we learned how much, and how unconditionally, God loves us.

Here is what one of the modern world=s great lovers, Mother Teresa, said about loving and being loved: AThe greatest suffering today is being lonely, being unwanted, being unloved; just having no one, having forgotten what it is like to have the human touch, human love; what it is to be wanted, what it is to be loved; what it is to have your own people. The greatest diseases are not leprosy, tuberculosis, or cancer. A much greater disease is to be unwanted, to be unloved.@

On this Feast of the Holy Family, God is asking each one of us, whom he has already made members of his family in baptism, and whom he loves totally and unconditionally, to be his agents in loving the unloved, the unwanted, the unlovable. Here at his holy table Jesus Christ, God=s Son, fills us brim full with his love C so that we can go forth from here to share that love with other people: His brothers and sisters, and ours too.

"THE OTHER DISICPLE SAW, AND BELIEVED."

Homily for Dec. 27^th, 2014: 1 John 1:1-4; John 20:1a, 2-8.

          “The other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first.” Why? There are two possible answers to that question. Both are probably true. First, "the other disciple," as he is called, was probably younger than Peter. That is what most Bible scholars believe. This is the man we celebrate today: St. John, author of our fourth gospel, written, Scripture scholars believe, between 90 and 100 A.D., well after Peter had been crucified in Rome.

In the gospel which bears his name he is identified throughout as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Known therefore as “the Beloved Disciple,” he alone of all the twelve apostles returned to stand beside the Lord’s cross, along with Jesus’ mother Mary and the other faithful women disciples, after the men “all deserted him and fled” at Jesus’ arrest the night before in the garden of Gethsemane (Mk. 14:50).

And it is this special love which gives us the second reason for John’s earlier arrival at the tomb. His love for the Lord was more intense than Peter’s. Once he heard that the tomb was empty, the Beloved Disciple had to get there, to see with his own eyes what had been reported. And it was precisely this special bond of love between him and the Lord which explains the closing verse of our gospel today: “”Then the other disciple also went in … And he saw and believed.” John is the only one of the Lord’s apostles who came to belief in the resurrection on the basis of the empty tomb alone. The others assumed that the Lord’s body had been stolen. They came to belief only when they saw risen Lord – and then only after overcoming their initial skepticism.

The American biblical scholar Fr. Raymond Brown, who died in 1998 at age 70, writes that John “was the disciple who was bound closest to Jesus in love [and hence] the quickest to look for him and the first to believe in him.” The Beloved Disciple was also the first to recognize the risen Lord standing on the shore after a night of fruitless fishing on the lake, and to tell Peter, “It is the Lord” (Jn. 21:7).

“Faith is possible for the Beloved Disciple,” Fr. Brown writes, “because he has become very sensitive to Jesus through love. … Love for Jesus gives one insight into his presence.” On this feast of the Beloved Disciple what better gift could we ask of the Lord than an abundant measure of the love that he has for us?

CHRISTMAS BLESSINGS, CHRISTMAS JOY!

                                                            at Christmas 2014

                                                             He became what we are

That we might become what He is.

-- St John Chrysostom

My very dear friends:

 

As I have done annually at Christmas since the start of this century, I send you once again my best wishes and prayers for a happy Christmas and the Lord’s richest blessing in the coming year. I do so with overflowing gratitude for the blessings I have received in the year now ending. Herewith a brief account --

 

In February I flew to London (for 52 hours!) to speak at the Memorial for my dearly loved friend, Emi-Lu (Kinloch) Astor, who died on December 27^th, 2013. From our first meeting at Easter 1948, when she was an 18-year-old London debutante, and I just graduated from Harvard, not yet 20 and about to enter an Anglican theological college (seminary) in England, we were like brother and sister. Our mothers had been classmates at New York’s Brearley School in the early 1920s. The service was held at St. Michael’s Church in Chelsea, where Hugh and Emi-Lu had married in November 1950. Hugh, who died in the late 1990s, kindly invited me to be one of his ushers. In the decades following I enjoyed countless happy visits to their beautiful country house near Reading, and witnessed the birth of their five children.

 

On April 3^rd year I celebrated the 60^th anniversary of my priestly ordination. I did so at the simple weekday Mass which I celebrate five times weekly at 6.30 AM for parishioners at Christ the King Parish, where I have been “in residence” for over 24 years. To my grateful astonishment there were over 80 people present, despite heavy rain and a tornado which touched down only a mile away, rather than the normal congregation of 10-20. In place of a homily I read them an updated version of the Litany of praise, thanksgiving, and repentance which I compiled for my 60^th birthday in 1988. You can find it on pages 322-325 of my autobiography, No Ordinary Fool.

 

On May 14^th I celebrated my 86^th birthday. In June I flew with a priest-friend to northern Germany for visits in Cologne, Osnabrück, and Münster, where I lived from 1965 to 1969, received conditional ordination as a Catholic deacon and priest, served as curate/associate in a German parish, and studied for the German Dr. theol. with (among other teachers) Prof. Joseph Ratzinger, now Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI. We returned to this country from Hamburg aboard the QUEEN MARY II. A highlight of the 9-day passage was the daylong stopover in Southampton. With my companion I went to nearby Winchester (20 minutes by train), where we met, in the splendid medieval Cathedral, the two Astor brothers and an English priest-friend now teaching at Oxord, and enjoyed a wonderful meal, with conversation like intellectual champagne. God willing, I shall repeat this trip and experience with another priest-friend in June of 2015.

From age 12 I have wanted to be a priest: I have never wanted anything else. Every time I served Mass, as a teenager, I thought; ‘One day I’ll stand there. I’ll wear those vestments. I’ll say those words.’ It was wonderful the first time I did that, on April 4^th, 1954. It is, if possible, even more wonderful today.

 

Not all of those 60 years have been happy. That does not happen in any life. Some have been bitterly unhappy. But if you were to ask me, “If you had your life to live over again, knowing in advance the worst that priesthood would throw at you, would you still choose priesthood?” – I would answer without hesitation: “In a heartbeat! I would change just one thing. I would try to be more faithful, and above all more generous.”

 

My joy in priesthood, which causes me to say every day, more times than I could ever tell you, “Lord, you’re so good to me, and I’m so grateful,” is best expressed in what I have written about my celebration of Mass in No Ordinary Fool (p. 305f):

 

The eucharistic prayer is for me, the heart of the Mass. Seldom am I unmoved by the narrative of institution with the words of the Lord himself, “This is my body,” and “This is my blood” I recite the words slowly, with reverence and awe. Those precious moments with him, repeating his words, are quite literally the high point of my day. No man ever longed more ardently for the arms of his beloved that I for that daily encounter with the Lord.

 

I became a priest not to be with people, but to be, in a specially intimate way, with the Lord.  I honor priests who experience this intimacy through pastoral ministry.  I consider them my superiors: better priests, and better human beings. I experience intimacy with the Lord most of all at the altar. Ministering to people can be fulfilling – but also frustrating. Not everyone wants what the priest has to offer.  God always wants us. The worship I offer him at the altar is imperfect. Yet he never spurns it. And, for me, the offering of that worship never palls.  

 

In His love your deeply grateful friend,

 

Jay Hughes

  

 

 

"YOU WILL BE HATED BY ALL BECAUSE OF MY NAME."

Homily for Dec. 26^th, 2014: Acts of the Apostles 6:8-10; 7:54-59; Mt. 10:17-22.

          A priest fifteen or perhaps more years ordained, told me recently that he was concerned about the overly rosy image of priesthood being offered to today’s seminarians. The recruitment material sent out by Vocation Directors is full of success stories. All the photos on the websites of today’s seminaries show young men laughing, smiling, and joking.

         None of this is false. Thousands of priests testify to the joy of serving God and his holy people as a priest. I’m happy to be one of them. The late Chicago priest-sociologist and novelist Fr. Andrew Greely said: “Priests who like being priests are among the happiest men in the world.” In support he cited sociological surveys that show over 90% of today's priests say they are either "happy or "very happy" in the priesthood.

          The result of all this happy talk, my priest-friend told me, was that young priests who have a bad day, a bad week, or who encounter rejection or failure, start thinking that perhaps they have chosen the wrong vocation and should abandon priesthood. Jesus never promised his disciples that they would have only joy, success, and happiness. Both of today’s readings are about the price of discipleship. “You will be hated by all because of my name,” Jesus says at the end of today’s gospel. Only after these words warning about the cost of discipleship does he proclaim the good news: “But whoever endures to the end will be saved.”

          Christmas is a feast of joy, of course. But today's commemoration of the first martyr Stephen reminds us each year that this joy has a price. In a dispute with his enemies,  Stephen cries out: “Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” Infuriated by the supposed blasphemy of those words, his enemies take Stephen outside the city and stone him to death. Omitted from our first reading are Stephen’s dying words: “Lord, do not lay this sin to their charge.” Jesus too suffered outside the city. Among his Last Words was the prayer: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Speaking a few years ago to a group of priests about the increasing secularization of our society, Cardinal George of Chicago said, in what he recently admitted was an “overly dramatic fashion”: “I expect to die in bed; my successor will die in prison; and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.” Mostly omitted by those who quote these words, is the good news which the cardinal spoke in conclusion: “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.”

"BLESSED BE THE LORD."

Homily for December 24^th, 2013: Luke 1:67-79.

          The Old Testament has a number of stories about women unable to conceive who become pregnant through God’s intervention. The one which most resembles the story of Elizabeth and Zechariah, the parents of John the Baptist, is the story of Sarah and Abraham. In both instances the parents are long past the age of childbearing. Three visitors come to Abraham and tell him that when they return next year, Sarah will have a son. From the tent nearby, where she is preparing a meal for the visitors (as required by the oriental law of hospitality for strangers) Sarah overhears the conversation and laughs at the absurdity of an old woman of her age giving birth. Whereupon God asks, “Why did Sarah laugh?” To which Sarah replies, “I didn’t laugh.” And the Lord responds, “Yes, you did.” (Genesis 18:1-15)

          In the case of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, an angel brings the message that his wife will have a son while Zechariah is alone, performing his priestly duty of offering incense in the Temple. The angel also says that the boy will be called John. Zechariah says he cannot believe the news. Because of this unbelief, he loses the power of speech  – and, as we learn later, his hearing as well. Thus he is unable to tell his wife about the angel’s announcement or the child’s name.

          This explains why, when they come to name Elizabeth’s baby, people are astonished to hear his mother say he will be called John; and her husband  -- still unable to speak, or to hear what his wife has just said – writes on a tablet the words Elizabeth has just spoken.

          Immediately Zechariah’s speech and hearing are restored. We might expect a conversation between him and Elizabeth about how they had agreed on the same name. Instead Zechariah immediately breaks out in the hymn of praise that we have just heard, called ever since the Benedictus, because that is the first word of the hymn in Latin.

          What does all this tell us? It says that in our relationship with God praise and thanksgiving come first. We come to Mass first of all to worship. We come, that is, not to get but to give. And all experience shows that those who give most generously also receive most abundantly.

"HE WILL BE CALLED JOHN."

Homily for December 23^rd: Luke 1:57-66.

          At the circumcision of John the Baptist, eight days after his birth, “they were going to call him Zechariah after his father,” Luke tells us. Scholars tell us that in New Testament times a child’s naming was the right of the father. The naming of Mary’s Son was an exception: he had no human father. That was why the angel Gabriel told Mary in advance, “You will give him the name Jesus.”

          John’s father Zechariah had lost his voice when he failed to believe the angel’s message to him that his wife, though long past childbearing age, would have a son, “whom you shall name John” (Lk 1:13). He had thus been unable to tell Elizabeth that the angel had already disclosed the name of the son she would bear. We now learn that Zechariah is not only mute but deaf. So he cannot hear his wife saying: “He will be called John.”

          To get confirmation of the name, the bystanders have to question the deaf father by writing him a note. Imagine the astonishment when he confirms the name already chosen by his wife by writing: “John is his name.”

          “Immediately his mouth was opened,” Luke tells us, “his tongue freed, and he spoke, blessing God.” Those final words are significant. With his speech restored, Zechariah speaks first of all to the Lord God, blessing and thanking him for the humanly impossible gift he and his wife have received. “Blessed be the Lord the God of Israel because he has visited and ransomed his people.” The Latin word for “blessed” is benedictus. So the canticle or hymn which Zechariah speaks is known by Catholics as the Benedictus. The Church incorporates Zechariah’s words into her daily public prayer, in the Office of Lauds or Morning Prayer.

Happy are we, if we do the same: by praising and thanking God for the blessings he has already bestowed on us, even before we start asking for things.

"THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH."

Homily for Christmas, 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: "incarnation." It means "taking 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: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son" (John 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 "the 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:

--      not as a reward for services rendered;

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

--     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.  
  

.     

WHAT THE SHEPHERDS FOUND

Homily for Christmas, at Dawn. Titus 3:4-7; Lk 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.

"NO ROOM IN THE INN"

Homily for Christmas Midnight.  Luke 2:1-14.

AIM: To help the hearers make room for Jesus Christ.

 

          We have less hard information about Jesus’ birth than most people suppose.  We don’t even know the date: December 25^th was not selected until the fourth century. Nor do we know exactly where Mary gave birth to her child, save that it was not in what then passed for an inn at Bethlehem.

          The innkeeper was a busy man in those days. The roads were full of travelers, because of the Roman-imposed census, which required people to return to their native town to be placed on the tax rolls. There was much to do at the inn, and money to be made. According to the age-old law of supply and demand, guests were doubled up, and prices raised. When Mary and Joseph appeared at his door, the innkeeper saw at once that these humble travelers were not the kind of guests he was looking for. He might have said, “You can’t afford it.” Instead he told them, a bit more tactfully, “No room” — and slammed the door. The innkeeper never knew it. But with those two words, “No room,” he had missed out on the greatest opportunity life would ever offer him.

          It would be unfair to portray the Bethlehem innkeeper as a bad person. His words to Mary and Joseph, “No room,” would be repeated often in the next three decades. For the world to which Jesus came had in truth no room for him, though it was his world. As we shall hear tomorrow, in our third Christmas gospel: “He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him” (Jn. 1:11).

          The ancient world into which Jesus was born had in Rome a temple called the Pantheon, with room for a hundred gods. But for the Son of the one true God there was no room in Rome’s Pantheon. Nor was there room for him in his own country — until people finally found room for him: on a hill called Calvary. 

          Has the situation changed in two thousand years? Would there be room for Jesus Christ if he were to come to the world today? to St. Louis? A person would have to be bold indeed to be confident of an affirmative answer to that question.  Down through the centuries, and still today, the innkeeper’s words resound: “No room, no room.” And doors are slammed at his approach.

          Why is there no room for Jesus Christ? Because people are afraid — afraid that if they give him room, he will take too much room; that little by little this man will take over their lives, changing their interests, their priorities, their plans, until they are no longer recognizable. 

          Is this fear justified? I must be honest with you: it is. If we admit Jesus Christ, he will indeed change our lives, and us. He will take all the room there is.  No wonder that people are afraid. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” we read in the letter to the Hebrews (10:31).

          There is, however, something even more fearful. It is this: to try to shut out this guest. For unlike other travelers, Jesus will not go away. He will continue to knock on our door, no matter how often we tell him, “No room.” The hand with which he knocks bears the print of the nails which pierced him in the place where, finally, people did find room for him. His persistence, like his patience and his love, are more than super-human. They are divine. He is the personification of the love that will never let us go.

          Today, in this hour, Jesus Christ is asking for room in your life. He asks one thing, and one thing alone: that you open the door. 

          Some verses of an old hymn, little known to Catholics, say it best.

          O Jesus, you are standing, outside the fast-closed door,

          In lowly patience waiting, to pass the threshold o’er.

          Shame on us, Christian people, his name and sign who bear,

          Shame, thrice shame upon us, to keep him standing there.

 

          O Jesus, you are knocking, and lo, that hand is scarred,

          And thorns your brow encircle, and tears your face have marred.

          O love that passes knowledge, so patiently to wait.

          O sin that has no equal, so fast to bar the gate!

 

          O Jesus, you are pleading, in accents meek and low,

          “I died for you, my children, and will you treat me so?”

          O Lord, with shame and sorrow, we open now the door;

          Dear Savior enter, enter, and leave us nevermore.