Christmas Midnight Mass—2001 Homily

The other day I was reading one of John Calvin’s commentaries on the Gospels—it might surprise you greatly to hear that your parish priest was reading Calvin—that arch-enemy of Catholicism, but there you go!

The reason I came across him was because my cousin who once studied for a doctorate in theology gave me a whole pile of old theology books—he had no more room in his house for them. The topic of his thesis was the common ground between Catholicism and Calvinism—coming from Scotland that was quite a relevant issue right at the beginning of the Ecumenical movement. So understandably among all these books we have quite a lot of John Calvin.

And what does Calvin say about the coming of Christ at Christmas?

Christ is revealed only to a few witnesses, and that at dead of night.
Further, while God had at hand many of rank and high ability as witnesses,
He puts them aside and simply chooses shepherds, of little account with men, of no reckoning ...
If we desire to come to Christ,
we must not be ashamed to follow those
whom God chose, from the sheep dung,
to bring down the pride of the world.

What wise words. Calvin tells us to drop all our sophistication, all our learning, all our modernity and follow those shepherds reeking of sheep dung who were the first witnesses to the pride of the world.

The King of the Universe is no fool, he does nothing without a purpose—and often his purposes have far more profound depths than we can ever plumb. He did not appear to those shepherds by accident, it was quite deliberate.

What poetry there is in the fact that Christ the Good Shepherd should appear first to those who would understand his mission more clearly than anyone.

But is it just poetry? Who is to say that those shepherds were not there thirty years later when Jesus spoke those words I am the Good Shepherd, I know my own sheep and my own know me? And if one of the did hear those sublime words would not his heart burn within him and his mind be taken back to that special night of the hillside of Judea?

In the summer I went to visit friends in Romania and we stayed in the beautiful valley of the River Moldova. On the hill on the opposite side of the valley there was a shepherd’s hut and a sheepfold. For some hours each day we used to sit out on the balcony of the house spending hours chatting and imbibing a glass or two of wine; it was a very relaxing holiday! And frequently as we whiled away the time we used to watch the shepherd on the hill through a set of old Russian binoculars.

We could easily see that the shepherd had three fierce dogs—they had to be fierce because there are still bears and wolves and lynx in the Romanian forests and the dogs have to protect the sheep from them.

I had never thought of shepherding as hard work but in watching his activities each day I was amazed at what a busy and extraordinarily hard task his was. The sheep are up on the hills most of the year and each morning and evening the shepherd took them out to a different part of the vast hillside for pasture—and those are very steep hills, any of us would be exhausted just contemplating a hike up them!

The sheep were in constant movement and everywhere they went he went. He brought them in during the middle of the day and took them out again in the afternoon. He had, of course, also to milk all the ewes and there were about eighty or more sheep.

I discovered that with the milk he made cheese which at the beginning of winter was divided up among the villagers according to the number of sheep they had placed in his care. His task was a hard and relentless one with no day of rest and he was surely also very lonely up there on the hillside.

Jesus is the Good Shepherd; he told us the great parable on the subject of the Lost Sheep which is recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and in the Gospel of John he categorically states I am the Good Shepherd.

But as we have seen this title is prefigured from the very moment he entered the world through his first appearing to those shepherds.

We are his sheep and we know he cares for us; Christ accompanies us wherever we go, he guards and protects us, he keeps us together as a community and he will bring us to our true home safe and sound. He really is our Good Shepherd and ever will be.

We can easily get lost in the romanticism of the first Christmas Day; we go down to the school and see the children in their nativity play. We put up our decorations including the Christmas Tree; we join in singing the Christmas Carols and perhaps we listen on the TV or the Radio to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from Kings College, Cambridge; we buy presents and invite the neighbours round and we drink mulled wine. You really would have to be as hard-hearted as Ebenezer Scrooge not to like Christmas.

But none of this really touches on what Christmas is about. If Christ had not come we might have a mid-winter festival just the same. Whatever it was Ancient Britons celebrated in mid-December we would surely have carried on and there would have been just as many accretions over the years.

But Christmas is not about bonhomie and presents and snow covered fir trees and mulled wine—it is about Christ, and about the salvation he won for us.

Christmas is a feast for believers; it is a feast for those who really believe in the divinity of Jesus; for those who really believe that this little child is actually the Christ—the Messiah who was foretold so long ago. It is a feast for those who follow his teaching and who have committed themselves to observing his commands.

We celebrate not so much the birth of a baby as the first appearance in the world of our Saviour. We, who without him would be slaves to sin, joyfully celebrate the anniversary of the birth of our salvation.

This is not bonhomie, this is serious joy—if you can say such a thing—it is joy for a purpose, joy for a real reason, joy because our Divine Saviour is here amongst us.

We live in what you could call a post-11th September world. The war in Afghanistan is probably not yet over, Argentina faces financial collapse, the conflict between the Israelis and the Arabs goes endlessly on and on, the world’s organised crime syndicates seem to operate largely unchallenged, racism is rampant, exploitation and corruption are endemic in many countries and poverty is still the lot of most of mankind. In other words things are pretty much the same as they always were.

It is into this world that the Christ Child came and he came to the shepherds, and the Holy Innocents, to the widows who give their mites, to the bereaved, to the crippled, the possessed, the mad, and to the children. This is the Good News, this is salvation, this is a cause of joy.

And we celebrate not with a banquet and fine food but with the simplest of ingredients—bread and wine representing the life that was poured out for us—these simplest of ingredients that become the most precious gifts of all—the body and blood of our Saviour.

In the Eucharist we celebrate on this Blessed Night we pay the highest honour and tribute to the tiny vulnerable child whom we acknowledge to be the King of Kings and the Lord of All.

He is the Son of God come to share our life and whose greatest desire is that we share his life and join him in his journey on earth and in the life to come forever in heaven.