Christmas Day

Christmas Day: Gospel Readings:
Midnight Mass: Luke 2: 1-14
Mass at Dawn: Luke 2: 15-20
Mass During the Day: John 1: 1-18
Christmas Day is upon us, and for this week I thought it might be worth reading with you the three gospels, at least one of which you will be hearing on that day. Take the three of them together, and they speak of the richness of the mystery that we celebrate at Christmas.

The first reading is Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus. As so often, Luke plays his “three-card trick”, persuading us to look in one direction, while all the time the real business is elsewhere. So he starts by pointing to the most important people in the world, the Emperor Augustus in Rome, and Quirinius his local representative, who press buttons in their office in order to hold a census, “and everybody started journeying to get onto the census, each to their own city”; but actually Luke is not at all interested in this great historical event (which is in any case unknown to historians). His focus is not even on Joseph, whose details occupy most of the next sentence, but on Mary, “his fiancée, who was pregnant”. This comes as the most tremendous shock; but Luke is a gospel of shocks, and we had better get used to it. Now there follows another shock, for this baby, which has already been identified as “God’s salvation” and “Son of God” finds “no room at the inn, and is placed in a “feeding-trough”. Nor is Luke finished with the shocks, for the witnesses summoned by God have nothing to do with the upper echelons of polite Roman society: they are “shepherds” (think of cowboys – living right on the edge of society), to whom “the angel of the Lord” appears “and the glory of the Lord shone round about”. As the massed choirs of heaven praise God and sing “Glory in the highest to God, and on earth peace to those of good will”, we join, somewhat dazed, in the general applause, and learn that Christmas is rather a shocking time.

If you are at the Dawn Mass next Sunday, the shock deepens. For our cowboys, once the angels retire into heaven, now think the unthinkable, and say to each other “let us go as far as Bethlehem, and let’s see this affair that the Lord has made known to us”. Not a hint, you see, of their prime responsibility, which is to look after the sheep in the face of all that threatens them, from wolves to rustlers to other shepherds. Luke’s readers would have seen the point immediately: the good news about Jesus is something that demands instant attention. What happens is that “they went in a hurry, and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the feeding-trough”. Once again, we notice that the one who matters most is mentioned last, and seems the least significant; Luke is a genius for this “three-card trick”. So the shepherds report “that had been spoken to them about this child”, evoking universal wonder (something that is very common in Luke’s gospel). Then Luke introduces an idea that will come again, “while Mary was keeping these things, comparing them in her heart”. This, I think, is Luke’s advice to the reader: as Mary does, so must we do, and meditate on what this story means in our life. Meanwhile the shepherds do what we also must do: “they returned, glorifying and praising God, for all that they had heard and seen, as it had been spoken to them”. That last phrase is used three times in the passage, and it carries an important Christmas message: what God says, comes true.

If you go to mass during the day next Sunday, you will find yourself breathing the very different air of the opening verses of John’s gospel. Not much happens here, but a stage is set; or rather, two stages: “up there” and “down here”. The “Word” belongs “up there” with God, and comes “down here”, risking the encounter with “the darkness” and with “his own who did not receive him”. What links these two “stages” is the astonishing proclamation that “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us”. And the deep truth from which it springs is that “no one has ever seen God”. So how do we know God “up there”? Only because “the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, that is the one who has made God known”. That is the message that should have us throwing our hats in the air, this Christmas Day.