The stories we tell make sense of our lives. The words sung by the choir at the beginning of this Christmas Mass not only tell us what has taken place, but they tell us what is taking place: hodie Christus natus est nobis…
Today Christ is born to us. Today Christ is given to us. “God’s grace—God’s gift—has been revealed,” is how Saint Paul, in today’s Second Reading, makes sense of Christ. Christ is the gift of God. This is the story of Christmas that our faith gives us, and that the Gospels tell us. There are other stories of Christmas also—heart-warming, full of longing, stories that express some of our deepest desires to be with those precious to us, to give to them, and truth be told, to be welcomed and loved by them. And while they stimulate, one might ask if, and how, and what they sustain.
Life’s true stories always surprise. The stories that save us almost always surprise us, sometimes very painfully, but they always bring us to see who we truly are, and how life truly is. As Séamus Heaney once put it in a radio interview, “I think you’re inspired by surprise. You have to be surprised by yourself.” (RTÉ interview, 2009)
God is never “same old, same old,” and the gift our Father in Heaven gives us in Christ—the gift we mark and celebrate at Christmas—is alive and full of surprise. If I have a prayer for us all this night, it is that we come to know the living Christ in all his surprise and wonder, and in all his power to bring us home to ourselves and home to God.
Christ is the surprising gift of the living God. Our history as a church, however, has not always helped us see in Christ the gift of God. Like all gifts, the gift of Christ needs to be received. If the gift of Christ remains unwelcomed—unopened, as it were—then Christmas remains much less than what God is offering us.
But what does it mean, to receive the gift of God? Do we receive Christ only as a harmless infant, lying snugly in a manger, warmed by the breath of an ox and a donkey? A Christmas that is only about children and the child Jesus is not the Christmas of our faith. Tonight’s Gospel puts us on a deeper, more surprising, path.
In the Gospel tonight, the angel calls the shepherds to discover what God is doing. “Today in the town of David, a Saviour has born been to you.” (Luke 2:11). Not just born, but born to you. “To you,” to the shepherds, to those who were not important, who were to all intents and purposes invisible in their society, out in the fields in the dark of night. The Gift of God is given to those whom nobody saw. This is the surprising story of the Good News. Equally surprising is the response of the shepherds: “Let us go to Bethlehem to see this thing which the Lord has made known to us.” (Luke 2:15)
The shepherds did not stay “in the fields close by,” looking up into the sky (see Acts 1:11), but travelled “to see for themselves this thing that the Lord [not the angel!]—had revealed to them.” (see Luke 2:15, the Gospel for the Dawn Mass of Christmas Day) To welcome the gift of God, might we not, like the shepherds, go to see for ourselves, with our own eyes (see 1John 1:1), what the Lord is revealing to us, the signs his presence, and the reality of his call? Yes, God speaks to us too. The Lord speaks, not only to others, but to us. The word of the Lord is not just a word that was spoken long ago, but God speaks today. God speaks to us now. Christmas is not a story of the past; Christmas is God’s call to us now.
The word of the angel to the shepherds is not a word that has them sit on the hillside marvelling at an apparition. The word of the angel brings them out of themselves; the word of the Lord brings us to others. Being closed in on ourselves is the essence of darkness. The light of Christ conquers that darkness which isolates, which cuts us off from others, from God, and from ourselves.
To come to the crib is to be confronted with the mystery of God, who would come to us, not only as one like ourselves, but would come “as child.” To celebrate Christmas is to ponder the way God comes to us, the way God saves us. It is to travel towards where Jesus is, he who became last of all and servant of all (see Mark 9:35), and who—in humility and simplicity—will always “travel the second mile” (see Matt 5:41) with us (see Matt 1:23, cf. Matt 28:20) and for us.
To welcome Christ, the Gift of God—is to travel to the Bethlehem of God’s compassion. It is to travel along the road of mercy, to allow “our feet to be guided on the way of peace.” (see Luke 1:79). We might ask ourselves whether we have the courage to be compassionate in the difficult situations, that at some time or other confront us all. Jesus’s way is not the way of violence and exclusion, imposing limits and constructing barriers, but of welcome. Jesus’s way is a way of acceptance and welcome. “Neither do I condemn you” (John 8:11) is his word to the woman caught in adultery. Jesus’s word is a word of encouragement for those who had given up hope, those who have walked in darkness (see Isa 9:2), and who needed to see something of the light that is God’s hope and confidence in us. In this context we might examine our response to those who come to us seeking refuge. We might do well to make our own the perspective of Pope Francis, and ask if a “culture of encounter” is possible, a country in which no one is excluded, in which we genuinely realise that we are all sisters and brothers, and see each other as such?
Of course, were we to admit that those who come to us seeking refuge are the same as us, it would no longer be possible to make of them the convenient scapegoats for so many of the enduring issues our society faces: be that the housing crisis, or the challenges confronting our health service, or the risk of polarisation which does not seem to dissipate. To live in this way, might mean facing up to the question of who we ourselves are! That is a more difficult question. However, to face up to it is to become who we are. This can be very painful: not only do we have to do this on an individual level, but we have to do this as people in community—every living marriage, every living relationship, every living family, and every living friendship has to come to terms with who and what it is. That is something that happens in real living.
The gift of God we celebrate at Christmas is the living Son of God. A faith without the living Christ is faith which is reduced to an idea, only a shadow of the gift that God gives us in his Son. A faith without the living Christ remains an abstract idea, a myth which has some place for a distant God, but which misses out on the warmth, the compassion, the consolation, and indeed the salvation, that is given to us in Emmanuel—the one who is God-with-us. When Christ remains an idea, and God—his Father and ours—remains distant and cold, is it any wonder why our churches feel cold, and our faith loses its vigour?
God sends Christ into the heart of our world, to bring us into his own heart. God sends us his Son, not only to us in our wonder and weakness, but also into our very ambivalence and ambiguity, so that following him, we might become who and what we truly are.
At Christmas we celebrate Jesus, the gift of our humble God. As we bend down to pray before the child Jesus, may we discover the life that is to be found in bending down before those who are not as fortunate as we are—before those weaker, younger, the older and more vulnerable, those who are different to us, the stranger—the very life of Christ in the heart of every person, the dignity of God in the face of everyone.