Power to Become Children of God, Christmas Day, December 25, 2010

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Anthony of Padua Parish, New Bedford, MA
Christmas 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: 

POWER TO BECOME CHILDREN OF GOD

• We celebrate today a great drama, a drama that can often get lost not merely among department stores, trees and wrapping paper, but also sometimes among swaddling clothes and brightly burning stars.
• God loved us so much 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 see the response of the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph, we focus on the response of the Shepherds who came at once to see Jesus after having been alerted by the angels, and the Wise men who journeyed over the course of many months because of the indication of a brightly burning star. These were the ones who not merely recognized the greatness of what was happening to them and for them but readily changed their lives in accordance with this mind-blowing truth of the love of God that became present for us in the Son of God and Son of Mary.
• But we also see the response of the inn-keepers, whom as we know didn’t have room for Jesus, not to mention room for a pregnant woman about to give birth. We see it in the response of 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. And most disastrously, we see it in the respond of 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 last 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 was encapsulated for his by St. John in the prologue to his Gospel, upon which the Church always meditates on Christmas day.
  • First, the negative side of the drama, which we have to acknowledge and confront: “He 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 the 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 them. 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 even 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. But many of us choose not 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 most Catholics don’t even come to be with him on Sundays, not to mention daily. The Lord Jesus promised to remain with us always until the end of time, but still 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.
  • Jesus himself spoke of this rejection when he revealed to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque the love of his Sacred Heart in the 1670s. He said his heart — a symbol both of his humanity as well as his human and divine love — was wounded by the rejection and apathy he gets from most, including most of us, his followers: “Behold the heart,” he said, “which has so much loved men that it has spared nothing, even exhausting and consuming itself in testimony of its love. Instead of gratitude I receive from most only indifference, by irreverence and sacrilege and the coldness and scorn that men have for me in the sacrament of love.” By the Sacrament of Love, he meant of course, his real presence in the Eucharist.
  • 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 of our life, however, the worth of 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. Those who teach us what it really means to receive Jesus show that 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. The models for us about how to receive him are really the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph. Their whole lives were changed by Jesus’ conception and by his birth. From the moment the Archangel Gabriel came to Mary at the Annunciation, their lives would be changed forever. Their lives would be totally related to Jesus and to his mission, even while Joseph, for example, continued his trade. They were with him. They rejoiced with him. They sacrificed for him. They suffered with him. They now live with Him in glory. That’s what’s supposed to happen in 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 serious about our faith, to get serious 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,” reiterating that acceptance means truly to “believe in his name” and that becoming children of God doesn’t mean a nice metaphor, but rather that we are born “not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision but 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.” He then goes on to say that we’ll be rejected just like Jesus — “The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him” but stresses that this should not let us down. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed, but we know that when it is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” Then he talks about the moral consequences of our identity as sons and daughters in the Son: “Everyone who has this hope based on him keeps himself pure, as he is pure.”
• What he’s saying, in other words, is that it’s not enough for us to be baptized, which begins our divine filiation. We need to live in accordance with the reality of our baptism: we need to live as sons and daughters of God. This means that our lives are 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 Christ 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 we in him we may share his divinity, share in his holiness. This is what we saw occur in the life of the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph. Sharing in Jesus’ life changed their lives and helped them become holy. This is what we saw in the life of the 11 apostles who received Jesus not just on the outside but on the inside. 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.
• And so we return to the drama of Christmas, a drama that is very much present. The Lord Jesus has come into our world and is still here. The Word has become flesh and continues to dwell among us, now not in swaddling clothes, but under the humble appearances of bread and wine, so that he can truly be God-with-us not just outside of us but inside. There’s a reason why the Church teaches that the celebration of Mass is the “source and summit of the Christian life,” because for a life to be truly Christian — for your life to be truly Christian — it must take Jesus’ words seriously about his presence in the Eucharist, and come here not just to adore him but to receive him and from him the power that will transform us ever more into the sons and daughters of God he came to make us. The drama of Christmas has become a Eucharistic drama in which the vast majority of the world, and even 83% of those who call themselves Catholic, fail to receive the gift of Christ each Sunday. It’s a drama in which sadly so few — even among those who do come to Mass each Sunday — actually make Jesus in the Eucharist the source and the summit, the center and root, of their lives, by coming to receive him as often as possible and coming to spend time with him in prayerful adoration. But to those who do, Christ gives the power to become children of God, to live as children of God, to die as children of God and to rise as children of God to an eternal inheritance.
• The drama of our life, in the final analysis, will turn out to be a success or a failure 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 and to give us the help to live in accordance with that divine dignity. May we respond with the trust and faith with which Mary inaugurated this entire drama: “Let it be done to me according to your word!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: