Homily for Friday, 24 December 2021– The Nativity of the Lord, Mass at Night

Readings of the day: Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96:1-2, 2-3, 11-12, 13; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:10-14

At the end of 1932, Dr. Akiva Posner was the rabbi of a community of about 500 Jews in the town of Kiel, Germany. He returned home quickly to his wife Rachel and three young children, in time for sunset on the first day of Hanukkah, also the beginning of the Sabbath, to light the first of eight candles on the menorah on the window sill of the family’s apartment.

In Judaism, Hanukkah and its menorah have long been a symbol of resistance to oppression. The celebration of Hanukkah dates back to the revolt led by Judas Maccabeus (or Judah Maccabee) against the brutal occupying power in Israel, the Greeks under Antiochus IV “Epiphanes,” about 160 years before the birth of Jesus. Antiochus’ self-proclamation as “Epiphanes” was revealing enough as to who he thought he was: “Epiphanes” means “One who is made known”; Antiochus proclaimed himself to be a god. And he made the Temple of Jerusalem, Judaism’s most sacred site, into a place of worship of the Greek pagan gods.

In our Bible, in the Books of the Maccabees, we have the account of the Maccabean defeat of the Greeks, and the rededication of the Temple for worship of the one God of Israel. The Greeks had destroyed the vessels in the Temple that held fresh olive oil to keep the menorah lit for all eight days of the celebration of the rededication of the Temple. But the menorah’s central light, the shammash or “attendant” from which all the other lights are lit, stayed burning the whole time with the little oil the Maccabees had left.

Before her husband, Rabbi Akiva, returned home for the first sundown of Hanukkah, 1932, to light the family menorah, Rachel Posner took a striking, famous photo of the menorah against the window. Across the street from the Posners’ home in Kiel was a newly-dedicated Nazi Party headquarters in Kiel, with its stark brick exterior hung with swastika flags.

 

On the back of her photo of the menorah against this backdrop of evil and repression, Rachel Posner wrote:

“Juda verrecke.”

Die Fahne spricht;

“Juda lebt ewig.”

Erwidert das Licht.

“Death to Judah.”

So the flag says;

“Judah will live forever.”

So the light answers.

For our Jewish sisters and brothers, Hanukkah, which is usually at around the same time of year as our celebrations of Advent and the Nativity of our Lord Jesus, is the commemoration par excellence of the light and of life answering darkness and death. Hanukkah is also called Chag HaUrim in Hebrew, the Festival of Lights.

“So the light answers.” The light has answered the darkness, chaos, and death from the very first moment of creation, when God’s Spirit breathed over the face of the deep; the primordial chaos: “Let there be light.” And so the light answered. And so the light has answered many times in Israel’s history as God’s people. We hear today from the prophet Isaiah an affirmation of the light’s answer, God’s answer to darkness, chaos, and death. “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,” Isaiah says.

I find it a bit unusual that this prophecy from Isaiah is in the past tense. Isaiah proclaims that the people have already “seen a great light”; the light has already shone. I think we could pardon the people of Israel of Isaiah’s time if many (or most) of them were not able to accept and believe the message Isaiah proclaimed to them. In Isaiah’s time, Israel (and Judah, the southern part of Israel that includes Jerusalem and its temple) was surrounded by much more powerful empires: The Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Babylonians. And the Assyrians had invaded Israel from the north and progressed as far as the gates of Jerusalem. Israel’s and Judah’s kings were weak leaders in Isaiah’s time, trusting more in their treaties with other nations to keep these more powerful nations from invading Israel than they trusted in God. Judah, including Jerusalem, was extremely poor during this time. Yet it is at that time in Israel’s history when the prophet Isaiah exclaims, in past tense, that “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light”; that “on them light has shone.”

The light has answered the darkness, chaos, and death, Isaiah proclaims. This despite the observable fact that “death to Judah” and to Israel seemed to be around every turn. But “so the light answers.” Enough people were persuaded by Isaiah to trust that God’s light had never been extinguished over Israel; that Israel’s God was and would forever be Emmanuel (another of Isaiah’s prophecies), “God-with-us.”

But to continue to trust in God, in God’s light proclaimed by prophets like Isaiah, would be far from easy for the people of Israel. Their nation would be invaded and occupied by the more powerful nations around it, one after another. The people of Israel would be exiled to Babylon, and return to their homeland only to find their temple destroyed; their society and their religious traditions in need of rebuilding. There would be the later invasion and occupation by the Greeks, a rising world power just before the time of Jesus, and then the Romans.

All the while the dominant message seemed to be, “Death to Judah.” Death to Israel. Why persist in building and trying to rebuild a nation? Why persist in believing that God and God’s prophets would save the nation, Israel, from occupation, ruin, chaos, and death?

Amid what seems like the dominant message—gloom, darkness, chaos, occupation, death—once again the light has answered, we believe and celebrate today, in the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Luke’s Gospel begins tonight by mentioning the people who held political power in Israel of Jesus’ time: Caesar Augustus and Quirinius, “governor of Syria.” They were the occupying power; a Roman power that ruled by conquest, brutality, might-makes-right. Their power spelled “death to Judah”; death to Israel as a nation of God-with-us.

But it is into this world at that time and in that place, Roman-occupied Israel, that God chose to enter our human existence, through the Virgin Mary, under the saintly care of Mary and Joseph, into a manger in tiny Bethlehem, of all places. “So the light answers.” The light—God’s answer to the seemingly-prevalent darkness, chaos, and death—would first be revealed to humble shepherds “living in the fields.” These shepherds, who would be greeted by the “Angel of the Lord” with “good news of great joy for all the people” were, if we can imagine, even farther on the outskirts; the periphery of society than Bethlehem was on the periphery of Judah; of Israel.

There, to shepherds tending their fields, the light has answered first. In Bethlehem, “a child”—God’s own Son—“has been born to us.” This light; this good news of God who has become human, like us in all things but sin, is now entrusted to all of us. God’s luminous answer to darkness, chaos, and death—light, order, life, salvation—is, as Luke says to us tonight, “good news of great joy for all the people.”

What will we do to ensure this “good news of great joy” reaches “all the people”; that it reaches a world continually and desperately in need of God’s light, God’s joy that the birth of God’s Son brings? The Letter to Titus says to us tonight that this “good news of great joy” we receive and celebrate tonight changes our relationship with the world. “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all,” the Letter to Titus says. The same letter urges us “to renounce impiety and worldly passions… to live lives that are self-controlled, upright and godly.”

In short, the Letter to Titus invites us to live as a people who has received that “great light” that prophets proclaimed from long ago. The Letter to Titus invites us to live as the people who has received the greatest gift—salvation in and through God’s taking flesh in the person of Jesus Christ—that we could possibly receive, because we have received the greatest gift possible.

So the light has answered. And so, through us, God’s light continues to answer in our world. It may seem sometimes that darkness, chaos, and death have the upper hand in our world. It is even worse when events seem out of our control: A new and more contagious variant of a virus that has raged around our world for two years now, for instance. Our response to this; our response to acts of violence and injustice that still afflict our world; our response to attitudes and structures of sin latent in our very social fabric must be to proclaim and to live by the light we know we have been given and entrusted with.

There are and will be, in a figurative sense, many flags (although few as blatantly ugly as the swastikas hung across the street from the Posners’ apartment in Kiel in 1932); many signs in our world that will cry out: Darkness, chaos, death. Against this backdrop, we celebrate here tonight the birth of our Lord. We renew our commitment to carry in faith this light to our world by our celebration here tonight; by our acts of kindness; our acts of concern especially for the least well off; our acts of concern for the common good of all people, even over our good as individuals.

Against a backdrop that too often cries out, “darkness, chaos, death,” we celebrate and re-commit to live, beginning anew here and now, by the supreme and saving gift we have received by the birth of a Saviour, the Lion of Judah; the Lamb of God who would give his life to “take away the sins of the world.”

“Death to Judah.” So the flag says; “Judah will live forever.”

We as God’s people will live forever. The birth of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, has made it so.

And so the light answers.

Homily for Sunday, 25 December 2016– Nativity of the Lord

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.

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.”