Christmas Midnight—2000            

Homily

Tonight we celebrate the feast of the incarnation of Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Incarnation means made flesh. And what we are celebrating is the fact that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was born into this world two-millennia ago. He was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem, the City of David.

This is probably the most significant event in all of history, it was the beginning of our salvation which was brought to its fulfilment thirty-three years later on the hill of Calvary and out of the empty tomb in the hillside nearby.

We are right to celebrate—but our celebrations would make no sense at all with out the firm belief that what I have just said is true.

Logically this is surely right, the celebrations make no sense without faith. But we humans are rarely strictly logical.

There are celebrations going on all around us, and have been going on for weeks. They involve almost everyone in the country. I know a devout Hindu family who put a tree in their living room every Christmas. There are Christmas decorations in the most unlikely places around the world, places with hardly a Christian presence like Tokyo and Beijing—yet there you can find the tree, Santa and the nativity scene.

Here in Britain everyone tries to be a little more kind, a little more forgiving, a little more generous, a little more family-oriented. But none of this necessarily implies belief in God or Jesus as his Son.

Quite often nostalgia is mistaken for faith. We turn back to our childhood with nostalgic thoughts. We remember how things were long ago, the Christmases of our youth, the kindness of our parents and the hardships that they put up with so that we children would have a pleasant Christmas.

We think about the past and we reminisce about days long gone. And it is good that we do this; our lives would be empty and heartless without such thoughts, even if sometimes they lead to melancholy.

But Christmas for the Christian is not an event merely tied to the past, it has present and future dimensions also.

 

Yes, we look to the past, to the events not of our own childhood but to the birth and early childhood of Jesus Christ. We recall the story of those events which took place in Palestine so long ago. We recall the journey to Bethlehem, the census, the lack of room at the inn, the shepherds on the hillside, the angels proclaiming the birth of Christ, the magi following the star and so on.

We bring these events to mind, we reflect on their truths and wonder at the mystery of the birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Saviour of the World.

We realise that this tiny child was to grow up to manhood and to spend three years teaching a gospel of love and self-sacrifice and that he was to die on the cross and be raised from the dead three days later. And in faith we acknowledge that what he did won for us freedom from sin and opened for us the way to everlasting life.

All this is in the past, these are events that happened two thousand years ago, yet they are events of profound significance and their effects run down through the ages to us here today and well beyond.

 

The present-day dimension of Christmas is that it calls us to faith. We are drawn to the crib and so we are drawn to Christ. And as we kneel before him we are compelled to make an act of faith, compelled to admit our faith in the one true Saviour of the world lying there as a vulnerable little child.

And we are tested. Tested in our faith in the minutes, hours and days afterwards. We make our profession of faith here in this holy Eucharist on this most sacred night of the year and we go home and our faith is tested in the events of the following day.

Our faith is tested in the minor arguments and irritations in any family.
Our faith is tested as we call to mind a bereavement we may have experienced.
Our faith is tested in our anxiety about our own health or the health of a loved one.
Our faith is tested in worries about money or conflicts at work or problems with neighbours.
Our faith is tested by inappropriate desire, by addictions of one kind or another.
Our faith is tested in a thousand ways.

But the way to deal with all these tests is to return in our hearts to this tiny child here before us: a tiny child but yet the king of kings; the Saviour of the world; the only one who can truly save us from sin and heal all our ills.

He is our only true healer; he is our only true Saviour. He gave his life that we might live a new and better life, indeed that we might live an eternal life.

 

And then there is the future dimension to all this for he is most certainly the King of Glory. He already came once into our world but he will surely, as he has promised, come again.

At the end of time he will appear as the Lord of the Universe and everything will be laid bare and he will be the just judge who decides all. Each one of us will stand before him, we will see him face to face and we will experience his judgement: an awesome moment, a moment of truth beyond all others. But his judgement will, with our repentance, be a merciful judgement for it will be judgement by one who loves us even more deeply than we could ever love ourselves.

And then his Kingdom will come in all its fullness and in all its glory and we will be drawn into oneness with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

 

These tremendous past, present and future dimensions all come into focus on this tiny child born in unfortunate circumstances two thousand years ago. He had a very inauspicious beginning and was born into very humble surroundings—within a couple of days he was to become an asylum-seeker in a foreign country.

And these lowly surroundings are not without their significance, there is an important lesson contained there. The spark of life in each one of us is a reflection of the much greater flame that is the life of God, the life of the Holy Trinity. That means that surroundings and status are unimportant.

God regards the worst murderer in our nearby Eastwood Park or Leyhill prisons with just as much love as he has for you. In God’s eyes the poorest family is on a par with the richest and most powerful. Indeed many saints have attested that, because of the lowliness of Christ and the sufferings he endured, the poor have a higher priority in God’s eyes.

This is actually a cause of great joy; it is measure of the mercy and love of God for the greatest sinners and the poorest of the earth. Indeed it means that all of us are not just in with a chance but are each one of us the recipients of the love and mercy of God in full measure.

This is the message of Christmas, this is the message that this tiny and vulnerable child came to bring. It was not only a message but it was something he actually did, something he put into practice, something he brought into being. The manner of his life, the circumstances of his death and the glorious fact of his resurrection actually made all this true in a definitive way.

This little child is the greatest thing that has happened or ever will happen to the human race, he has saved us from sin, he continues to save us from ourselves, he will save us for God.

May God bless each and every one of you.
May he fill your lives with goodness and make you holy.
May he pour out on you all the joy and blessing of Christmas now and evermore.