Emmanuel’s Saving and Refining Fire, December 23, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Mass of December 23
December 23, 2020
Mal 3:1-4.23-24, Ps 25, Lk 1:57-66

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click here: 

The following points were attempted in this homily: 

• In today’s final O Antiphon, we turn to Jesus and pray, “O Emmanuel, rex et legisfer noster, espectatio gentium et salvator earum: veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster,” “O Emmanuel, king and lawgiver, expectation and Savior of the nations, come and save us, Lord our God.” God-with-us comes to rule us, to show us how to love God and others, as the fulfillment of our longings for salvation. And in today’s readings we sense not only his proximity but what he will do when at last he comes.  “Lift up your heads and see: your Redemption is near at hand,” we pray in the Responsorial Psalm. We lift our heads, our hearts, our hands and our voices, because God is coming to be with us to redeem us in his kingdom and through his two-fold law of love.
• We see two aspects of this redemption in the readings today. The first is purification. The Prophet Malachi tells us that the Messiah — “the Lord whom you seek” who would “suddenly … come to the temple” — would be “like a refiner’s fire, … refining and purifying silver. … He will purify the sons of Levi, refining them like gold or silver that they may offer due sacrifices to the Lord.” Jesus’ essential work in us is to purify the treasure we hold in clay vessels (2 Cor 4:7). That process of purification is implicitly alluded to in today’s Gospel scene. At a superficial level, the reason why we have the birth and naming of St. John the Baptist two days before Christmas is that, historically, it preceded the birth of Christ, and since December 17, we have been traversing all of the proximate historical events of that first Advent. But the birth and naming of the precursor both point to the birth and naming of the one John came to announce, Jesus. John’s Mission was to purify, to help the people prepare the path for the Messiah to come, who would say at the Jordan, “Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. I am baptizing you with water, for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Mt 3:10-12).
• The second aspect of redemption is intergenerational love. Malachi announces the mission of John the Baptist, the new Elijah, and the Messiah to whom he would point. About John, God says, “Lo, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me … to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.” The mission of the precursor was to prepare the way and the day of the Lord, who would seek to reunite us as one family. Malachi talks about intergenerational reunion that begins not just with dry duties of familial piety and an extrinsic obedience to the fourth commandment, but something altogether full of love, that the hearts of parents and the hearts of kids would be turned lovingly toward each other. That’s one of the things that the Lord wants to have happen at every Christmas, that children, parents, grandparents, great grandparents, extended families all come together to be reunited in worshipping God-with-us. We know that the disunity that happens in families occurs because of sin, when people choose to act as gods or want to be treated as gods, determining the law. That’s why Jesus said he had come to bring not peace but the sword and that families would be divided three against two, parents against children, children against parents. This was not because Jesus came to divide — quite the opposite, he came to bring peace and unity — but when some members of the family place him first and other members of the family don’t, desiring themselves to be first, division ensues. The work of John the Baptist in calling us to conversion is summoning us to this intergenerational reconciliation. How important this is for forming a culture of life and a civilization of love, because the culture of death begins with discarding rather than loving family members. Parents make the choice ultimately not to embrace their children before birth or children make the choice not to care for their parents at the end of life. The message of Christmas, the living out of the Incarnation, involves this intergenerational love announced by God through his prophets and perfected by Christ.
• Both this purification and this intergenerational reconciliation and love are part of the kingdom, part of the law Christ perfects, part of salvation. They are all gifts. This is shown in the naming ceremony in today’s Gospel. Everybody presumed John would be named Zach junior and was shocked when St. Elizabeth told them he would be named John, since no one in his extended family had that name and it was the custom to name children after admired relatives. Since the husband and father had all the cultural rights at the time, they asked the muted Zechariah to indicate if he accepted the name and he famously wrote, “John is his name.” All were amazed not just at the surprising switch of names but at what the name John means: “God is gracious,” or even more precisely, “God does grace,” God gives us grace. Grace is not a thing, but a relationship, our participation as creatures in God’s own life. John’s name itself was a prophecy of what would come from the Messiah he would foretell: The Messiah would “do grace” and give us a participation in his life. As this Christmas Day prayer announced above that is retained in the present offertory prayer indicates to us, by his taking on our humanity, God has made it possible for us to share in his divinity. He refines and purifies us in his mercy so that we might be made the fitting abode of his holiness, so that we might become one family again that had been divided by the sins from the first family of Adam and Eve on down.
• And Jesus does that work most of all here at Mass. As we come forward today to receive within us the expectation gentium, the one all peoples wait for in suspense, we ask him to “do grace” in us, to purify us, to unite us. With the help of John the Baptist, each other, and all our Catholic spiritual siblings, we prepare to welcome Emmanuel as he wants to be received, as a Refining Fire. The famous Syrian deacon of the early Church, St. Ephrem, used to say that when whoever consumes Jesus in Holy Communion with faith, consumes “fire and Spirit.” Let us open ourselves up to the fire Jesus is, the fire that he brings at Christmas and at every Mass, so that, ignited by him in a loving communion, we may go out to set the world ablaze with the fire of divine love.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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