NO ROOM IN THE INN.
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 25th
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 our town? 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? 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.
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 --
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 --
when people have given up expecting him altogether. Matthew and Luke emphasize
Jesus’ descent from the great King David, and Jesus’ birth “in 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 “of 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: “When 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.
THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH.
Christmas Mass during the day, 2015. Hebrews 1:1-6; John 1:1-18.
It’s a strange gospel for Christmas,
isn’t it? Where 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.
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 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.
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, 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.
