Readings of the day (for Christmas Mass at Night): Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96:1-2, 2-3, 11-12, 13; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14
This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada.
This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada.
A little over two thousand years ago, Caesar Augustus was emperor of
Rome. “Quirinius,” we hear today from Luke’s Gospel, “was governor of Syria.”
Would this not have been a terrifying world in which to be born; in which to
raise a family; in which to live?
I invite us to imagine the world of the time, under the so-called “pax Romana,” the peace of Rome. This
peace of Rome was a false peace; a peace gained in large part by suppression
and oppression. The peace imposed by those in power, by the likes of Augustus
and Quirinius, was a peace dependent on the greater political and military
might of Rome over its enemies. And anybody who challenged this rule by might
could find their well-being and even their lives in danger.
In this world governed by the “peace of Rome,” in a remote corner of the
Roman Empire, the village of Nazareth in Roman Palestine, there lived a faithful,
humble, quiet Jewish couple, Mary and Joseph. And do we not know how the story
unfolds from there? Mary, “engaged” to Joseph, finds herself “expecting a
child.” This child, revealed by “an Angel of the Lord” to “shepherds living in
the fields” and now to us as the “Saviour, who is Christ the Lord,” would bring
to this world a long-awaited peace, not the “peace of Rome” but peace that can
only be from God.
This child of Mary and Joseph, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whose birth
we remember and celebrate today, made the prophecy of Isaiah a reality: “For a
child has been born to us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his
shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting
Father, Prince of Peace.” And yet if we go back to the time of Isaiah, his
prophecy we hear in our celebration today is all the more remarkable because Isaiah
spoke it in a world that was anything but at peace.
The world and nation of Israel in which Isaiah lived and prophesied were
a world and a nation obsessed with peace, security, and authority, but only for
an elite minority of the people. On the surface, all was well in Israel of
Isaiah’s time, a nation at its most prosperous; its most powerful. But Isaiah
says to the elites, the kings and rulers of Israel, that all their wealth; that
all their prosperity; that the peace of the nation is fickle and superficial so
long as it remains concentrated in the hands of a few. Israel will be brought
low, its people exiled. Only then will true prosperity, true justice, true
authority, and true peace be able to take root and flourish in Israel and in
the world. This prosperity; this justice; this authority; this peace will uphold
the dignity of the least well-off. Nobody will be in need.
Returning to Jesus’ time, we hear from Luke’s Gospel that, sadly, not
much has changed from the time of Isaiah. The names of Israel’s and the world’s
rulers have changed, but the fickle and superficial peace of the end of the line
of Israel’s kings had become the fickle and superficial peace of Rome, hinging
as ever on the worldly might and wealth of a few.
Into this world “is born this day in the city of David [our] Saviour,
who is Christ, the Lord.” Into this world of fickle and superficial peace is
born, in a manger of all places, our “Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” This reality might raise for us some
questions: First, why would God choose to be born into this world as a helpless
and vulnerable baby in a manger? If this Jesus were truly the one Isaiah
foretold, “Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of
Peace,” why did he not impose God’s true peace on our world? Instead, Jesus
would die broken and shamed, helpless and vulnerable on a cross! Why?
We might answer questions like these (rightly) by saying that God’s way
is a way of mercy, not one of imposing but of inviting us and remaining with us
on this long journey toward the peace God has willed for our world since its
creation. But if this is so, then clearly God is more patient with our world
than I am and I anticipate many of us are. God sees, I imagine, a broken world
and yet a world never beyond the reach of true peace; of redemption; of
salvation. This is why God sent his only Son into this world, and why God
promises that Christ will return to this world at the end of time to complete God’s
work of redeeming and saving this world. But then what is worth redeeming and
saving in this world?
The answer to this question is right here among us. My sisters and
brothers in Christ, moments ago we heard from the letter to Titus that “he it
is,” our God, “who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all
iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good
deeds.” Are we not, then, “a people of [God’s] own who are zealous for good
deeds”? If we were not, I do not think we would be here. If we were not “a
people of [God’s] own who are zealous for good deeds,” there would be no
Church; no Christian faith; nobody to worship and to celebrate our memory as a
community of faith of Christ’s birth and our waiting for his return. And our
world would be poorer for it.
And so where does our zeal “for good deeds” leave us? At the end of this
Mass, I will send us forth with the Church’s blessing, inviting us to “go in
the peace of Christ.” We will “go in the peace of Christ” into a dark winter’s
night; into a world with many people who still “walk in darkness”; a world of
families; of human relationships; of entire nations deeply immersed in the “land
of deep darkness” of which the prophet Isaiah once spoke. And too often “deep
darkness” is masked by a fickle and superficial peace: A peace that may be the
mere absence of war; peace that is at best the temporary respite of tens of
millions in our world displaced from their homelands by war and persecution; so-called
peace that denies countless people basic human rights, beginning with the fundamental
right to life from conception to natural death; peace that is, not far beneath
the surface, gossip, passive aggression, and silence that block paths to truth
and reconciliation. This is false peace, not the “peace of Christ” in which God
and the Church invite us to “go forth” from this celebration.
No longer is Caesar Augustus emperor. No longer is “Quirinius… governor
of Syria.” In their place today are far more murderous leaders, if not a lack
of leadership that breeds war, terrorism, and other forms of extremism, much of
it happening in regions that are the cradle of our Christian faith, unchecked
and even encouraged by more powerful nations. Yet still, through Isaiah, God
promises us: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those
who lived in a land of deep darkness‒ on them light has
shone.” God promises us a redeeming and saving “authority” that “shall grow
continually”; the authority of the one we call “Prince of Peace.”
God’s promise; God’s Word; God’s Christ; God’s true peace lives among us
here and now. Our God respects our freedom too much to impose peace on us. And
so, in freedom, God invites us to “go in the peace of Christ.” God invites us
to go out willingly, to be the “great light” amid the sometimes “great
darkness” of our world. God invites us to sense, to take “great joy” in the
signs of God’s presence already in our world, and to be these signs by our zeal “for good deeds”; for words and deeds of
kindness, of generosity, of justice, and of peace.
Today this longing and
in places terrifying (and terrified) world celebrates the birth of its true
peace. From Bethlehem, “the city of David,” to Sherwood Park to the world may
we be a sign of our “Prince of Peace”; active, zealous signs of our “good news
of great joy for all the people: To
you,” to us, “is born this day… a Saviour, who is Christ the
Lord.”
