Christmas Midnight Mass, December 25, 2010

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Anthony of Padua Parish, New Bedford, MA
Christmas Midnight Mass 2010
Vigil: Is 62:1-5; Acts 13:16-17,22-25; Mt 1:18-25
Midnight: Is 9:1-6; Tit 2:11-14; Lk 2:1-14
Dawn: Is 62:11-12; Tit3:4-7; Lk 2:15-20
Day: Is 52:7-10; Heb 1:1-6; Jn 1:1-18

The following text guided today’s homily:

• There is something beautifully symbolic about the tradition of Midnight Mass. It shows that Christians are so eager for Christmas to begin that they want to start celebrating at the first moment that the clock strikes midnight and the calendar turns to December 25. So many of us who ordinarily never go out late at night and are often at this hour dressed in pajamas and sleeping soundly adjust our sleep schedules to get up, put on our best clothes and head out alert to the Church.
• The Christmas midnight Mass is the antithesis of the growing tendency to try to make the practice of the faith convenient and easy. There was a large article in the Los Angeles Times yesterday describing how over the past few decades, many parishes have been changing the time of Midnight Mass to a more “acceptable hour,” one that allows people to squeeze it in between Christmas Eve dinner and still allow people to be in bed by 12, so that families can get up earlier in the morning to open up presents. True midnight Mass, therefore, is a bulwark against the propensity to fit the celebration of Christmas and the worship of God into our crowded life; it is, rather, an annual reminder that we are called to make our lives revolve around the mysteries of faith and that those mysterious realities are worth changing sleep patterns and inconveniencing ourselves.
• For this reason, it’s highly fitting that the Gospel at Midnight Mass focuses on the shepherds awake in the fields to whom the angels appeared with the message of good news of great joy. As Pope Benedict reminded us in his Christmas Midnight Mass homily last year, the example of the shepherds emphasizes — as perennial lessons for the Christian life — two sets of crucial Christian virtues that are on display and cultivated in the celebration of Midnight Mass.
• “The story of the shepherds is included in the Gospel for a reason,” Pope Benedict stressed. “They show us the right way to respond to the message” announced not only to them, but to us: the message that “a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” is born for us, that “God is with us.” This message, Pope Benedict underlined, “cannot leave us indifferent. If it is true, it changes everything.” Looking at those who attended the first midnight celebration of the birth of Christ, Pope Benedict queried, “What is it that these first witnesses of God’s incarnation have to tell us?”
• The first lesson, he said, is that “they were on the watch. They could hear the message precisely because they were awake.” The first Sunday of Advent each year features a Gospel passage that reminds us that we need to awaken and remain alert for the Lord is coming like a thief in the night. The shepherds are models of what it means to be awake and alert for the Lord’s arrival. In order for us to hear the message they did and respond, we, too, must be awake, the Holy Father said. We, too, must become a “truly vigilant people.” He contrasts this vigilance receptive of an encounter with God with living in a dream world that makes us miss God’s promptings. Midnight Mass shows us what should be occurring in us spiritually throughout the year, staying awake so that when God speaks and calls, we’re listening.
• The second lesson the shepherds show us is how prompt they were to respond to the angels’ message. “They made haste” to go to Bethlehem, the Gospel passage relates. “What had been announced to them was so important,” the Pope underscored, “that they had to go immediately. What had been said to them was utterly out of the ordinary. It changed the world: the Savior is born; the long-awaited Son of David has come into the world in his own city. What could be more important?”. They couldn’t wait to act. “No doubt they were partly driven by curiosity,” the Pope noted, “but first and foremost it was their excitement at the wonderful news that had been conveyed to them, of all people, to the little ones, to the seemingly unimportant. They made haste – they went at once.”
• Pope Benedict contrasted the shepherd’s “haste” in heading to Bethlehem — in treating the news as more important than everything else in their lives — with the way many of us are accustomed to respond to God. “In our daily life, it is not like that,” Pope Benedict said. “For most people, the things of God are not given priority, they do not impose themselves on us directly. And so the great majority of us tend to postpone them. First we do what seems urgent here and now. In the list of priorities God is often more or less at the end. We can always deal with that later, we tend to think. The Gospel tells us: God is the highest priority. If anything in our life deserves haste without delay, then, it is God’s work alone. …The shepherds teach us this priority. From them we should learn not to be crushed by all the pressing matters in our daily lives. From them we should learn the inner freedom to put other tasks in second place — however important they may be — so as to make our way towards God, to allow him into our lives and into our time.”
• The annual tradition of Midnight Mass reinforces both of these lessons the shepherds teach. It is an outward sign that we are awake and alert for the coming of the Lord and so excited for his arrival that we are willing to sacrifice everything else to greet him with joy and love as soon as he arrives. It is a public and personal reminder that Christ needs to be prioritized over sleep, convenience, presents, family members, and other good things. It helps to manifest that God is God in our lives, that he is our highest priority, and that we would rather postpone everything else in life than delay giving him the response of loving adoration he deserves. Even for those who may struggle to live with this type of Christian receptivity and response throughout the year, it is at least an annual occasion to put things back in their proper order and restore God and our relationship with him to their proper places.
• The example of the shepherds, reinforced by midnight Mass, points to the real drama of Christmas and the drama of our life.  Christmas is first and most about God’s incredible love for us, that, in order to save our lives, he became small, taking on our human nature, becoming an embryo, then a little baby, in order to redeem our lives. But that’s only part of the drama. The second part is our response.
• We can respond well, like the shepherds did, like the wise men did, like Mary and Joseph did, all of whom totally adjusted their lives to the reality of Christ’s coming into the world. Or we can respond poorly, like the inn-keepers, whom as we know didn’t have room for Jesus; or the scholars of the regal court, who, when apprised that the newborn king of the Jews may have been born in Bethlehem, about six miles away, basically yawned; or most disastrously, King Herod, who when he found out that the Messiah may have been born, enviously dispatched his henchmen to try to execute not only him but all the newborn males all around Bethlehem.
• This is the drama, and it’s a drama that is still very much alive. Jesus Christ has come into the world as Emmanuel, which means “God is with us,” not “God was with us.” He has come to save us, but this salvation, as we talked about on Sunday, is not a one-time event, but a journey in which Jesus, like Moses, seeks to lead us through life to the eternal promised land. We, however, need to be willing to follow-him.
• This whole drama is encapsulated for us by St. John in the prologue to his Gospel, upon which the Church always will meditate later this morning at Mass during the day. St. John says that Jesus “was in the world, and the world came to be through Him, but the world did not know him. He came to his own, but his own people did not accept him.” This rejection of Jesus happened, of course, not only at his birth, but continued throughout his life. His fellow Nazarenes, after he told them that the prophecies about the Messiah were fulfilled in their hearing, fulfilled in Jesus, tried to throw him off a cliff. The majority of the Scribes and the Pharisees, outwardly the most religious of people, true scholars of the law and famous for their rigorous observance, rejected him. Many of his disciples — those who had heard his teachings, witnessed his miracles, and even followed him for a time — rejected him when he gave them the teaching on the Eucharist, that they needed to eat his flesh and drink his blood to have his life within him. The greatest testimony to how his own people rejected him, however, is the Cross, when his very people assembled in Pontius Pilate’s courtyard to clamor for his crucifixion, choosing Barabbas, a convicted murderer, over him.
• This negative side of drama, Jesus’ rejection, of course continues. In our own day, we see it in how so many people have tried to banish all references of him from public schools as if the mere mention of him is somehow injurious to our youngsters. We’ve seen it in how many people have tried to evict him even from the celebration of his own birth, treating, for example, the expression “Merry Christmas” as a bigoted expression or profanity for which one needs to apologize, and trying to pretend that this season is all about equivalent holidays like Hanukah or the invented celebration of Kwanzaa.
• But this rejection of Jesus doesn’t just happen from people who reject Christianity and try to treat it as a hostile force in the world rather than the fruit of a Church founded by God-incarnate himself for the world’s salvation. This rejection of God-with-us also happens in a lesser way by those who, perhaps like the inn-keepers, just don’t have time for the Lord, or like the scholars of the law, who, even though they know the truth, resist allowing the truth to inconvenience them in the least way.
• Just as he did in ancient Bethlehem, Christ continues to come to his own. God-with-us continues to remain with us. The question is whether we choose to be with him. At a practical level, the same Jesus who was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, comes down on the altar of every Catholic church every day in the Eucharist, but as recent surveys have shown, most Catholics don’t even come to be with him on Sundays, not to mention daily. The same Lord Jesus who was adored by the Shepherds and the Magi can still be adored in prayer, but many of us say that we don’t have the time to talk to him and listen to him in prayer each day. He came to teach us the way to heaven, the way to love God and others as he loves us, but many of us who call ourselves Christians prefer to live by our commandments, by our own ideas and teachings, when we find the teachings of Jesus difficult.
• If we’re really going to understanding the meaning of this season, if this Christmas is going to have the impact in our lives that God wants it to have, we first need to remember that Christ Jesus continues to come to us, his own through baptism. The drama and worth of our life will be determined by whether we accept or reject him in the present moment. Do we truly receive him, do we embrace him with love, do we truly allow him to be with us, to accompany us, to guide us, to lead us on the path of salvation, in short to share our entire life? Or do we prefer to keep him at a safe distance, convincing ourselves that all Jesus really wants of us is to visit him every once in a while, to celebrate his birthday with him each December, to congratulate him each Spring on his rising from the dead, or even to give one hour of the 168 he gives us each week by attending Sunday Mass or spending a few of the 1440 minutes he gives us each day in conversation. Jesus didn’t come into our world just to make a visit, to work a little magic, fix what was broken, and then leave us on our own. He came to share our whole life so that he could truly redeem us. As I said last week, Jesus came to be our full-time God, our full-time Savior, not our part-time Lord for whom we set the hours. If we haven’t truly received him yet into our lives in the way he wishes, this Christmas is the occasion for us to get more serious about our faith, to get conscious about his presence in the world and the presence he wants to have in my life.
• If we make that choice truly to receive Jesus, to welcome him without conditions and without fear, St. John tells us what the eternal impact will be. “But to those who accept him — [notice the present tense!] — he gave power to become children of God.” Accepting Jesus, accepting his desire to be with me, embracing his will to save me from myself and lead me to the House of the Father, this results in the most incredible miracle that can ever happen to me, one in many ways just as incredible as the miracle of incarnation and the birth of the Son of God in a Bethlehem stable:  It means the miracle of one’s being born again of God, of truly being his son or daughter, and, as beloved child, an heir or heiress to the most incredible treasure ever, and the only treasure that won’t corrode or be taxed. “See what love the Father has bestowed upon us in letting us be called children of God,” St. John wrote to the early community of those who had in fact truly accepted Christ. “Yet that is what we are.” That great gift of our divine filiation, our becoming sons in the Son, is something that we know began in baptism, but is not meant to stay there: it is meant to grow as we live according to our baptism promises as sons and daughters of God, as chips off the old divine block. This means that our lives must be different from all the rest, because we live with an awareness of God’s constant presence, with an awareness of how loved we are by him, and how others are loved by him, and how all that we are, think, say and do is meant to be related to God, to our dignity as his beloved children, and to our mission to continue the mission of the only Begotten Son in the world.
• St. Leo the Great, in one of his famous fifth-century Christmas meditations that the Church meditates upon in the Liturgy of the Hours each Christmas morning, spoke about the consequences of our becoming God’s children. “Christian,” he said, “remember your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature.” Christ became man, in other words, so that in him we may share his divinity, share in his holiness. The priest prays at the offertory, “May this mingling of this water and wine help us to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” This process of what the Greek Christians call divinization occurred in the life of the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph: sharing in Jesus’ life changed their lives and helped them become holy. The same process of divinization happened in the life of the 11 apostles; although totally ordinary men, they all became extraordinary in holiness, because when they were called by Jesus, they left everything immediately to follow him. This is what we have seen in the lives of so many saints, from so many different ways of life, including some who were formerly great sinners. Once they heard the little hands of the baby Jesus knocking on their hearts, they opened those hearts, embraced Christ and continued to embrace him full-time in life. That’s what the Lord not only wants to do in us, but will do in us, provided that we genuinely and wholeheartedly receive him with, as he himself says, with all our minds, hearts, souls and strength.

The drama of our life, in the final analysis, will have a happy or a tragic ending depending upon how we respond to Christ who has come into our world not just as a little baby two millennia ago, but continues to come in the present, hoping to be embraced by us not just with a part of our life, but with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. Today God the Father wishes to say of us what he says of Christ in the second reading, “You are my Son. This day I have begotten you.” He’s waiting for our consent to bring about that miracle of rebirth and to give us the help to live in accordance with that divine dignity. He’s waiting for our consent by our staying spiritually awake, by our prioritizing him like the Shepherds did, and by our centering our lives practically on the reality of his being God-with-us still, especially in the Eucharist.

The readings for today’s Mass were: