Christmas Day Mass

            Every year it seems we go through the same sort of ordeal during these holidays, the ordeal of finding out what really is the meaning of Christmas.  Is it found in the expression of love and friendship through the giving and receiving of gifts?  Is it rediscovered in the conversion of the Scrooges amongst us, who begin to see the joy of helping others and of seeing to the happiness of others?  Is it in all the so very needed family reunions and reconciliations?  In the table fellowship of feasting?  No, it’s not, at least not at all completely.  For all these things are very good and very needed all during the year.  The question, it seems to me, is why do they take on so much added significance during Christmas?  What is it about Christmas that makes Scrooge so unbearable and separation from family so painful and feasting together so important? 

            The answer, of course, is something we have to continually come back to over and over again -- every year in fact:  the secret to the meaning of Christmas is simply Christ.  It’s His birthday.  It’s all about Him.  But then the next question immediately confronts us.  Who is He?  And the answering of that question, which gives meaning, real meaning, to Christmas, is the unfolding of the mystery that is Christianity, that is the Church, that is the heart and soul of our faith.

            But answering that question about Christ is not easy, both because the mental effort is taxing and because the resulting insight makes tremendous claims upon our lives.  Who is Christ? is a question that has been asked repeatedly all through the two thousand years of Christianity.  Pontius Pilate, who handed Jesus Christ over to be crucified, asked it in a roundabout way:  Who are you? he interrogated the suffering Savior before him.  “Who do people say that I am?” Jesus Himself asked his closest followers.  “Who do you say that I am?” He pointedly asked them.  So the question must be important; our Lord Himself asked it.  It has been asked innumerable times, and many times it has been answered terribly badly. 

            “He’s just a man,” go the lyrics of Jesus Christ, Superstar.  Just a man.  Others have read of His life, the profundity of His teachings, His transparent goodness, and they have concluded that He must have been a kind of appearance of the divine among us, a kind of holy apparition, too good and holy to be human.  These two ideas, of course, are the earliest heresies that attacked the Christian understanding of Christ.  And the Church, in answer, reiterated that this One who was born of Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified and died was indeed truly man and yet also was, and has always been, adored and worshipped as God, whose divinity shone so brightly the Easter morning of His resurrection.

            Here then is the mystery of Christmas:  Christ Himself the God-man.  I warned you that grappling with this is both mentally taxing and morally demanding.  For in this the center, the heart of the Christian faith, Christianity rises so far above all the modern self-help psychologies and entertainment religions that cater to the emotions.  No, this, the Church’s understanding of Christ, an understanding gained from divine revelation, is aimed directly at the intellect and the will and the conscience of every human being.  And that understanding is, that key to the meaning of Christmas is this, what we have already heard read in the second reading and in the Gospel:  that the eternal and ever-blessed God who is the Trinity of the divine Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a Community of persons in Himself, decreed from all eternity that this happiness of His own being He would share with His human creatures; and in the fullness of time He accomplished this by sharing fully our own human condition.  We call this the Incarnation:  when the eternal Word, the Son of the eternal Father, eternally begotten of the Father and eternally united with the Father in a bond of love called the Holy Spirit -- when this Word, as St. John puts it, became flesh and made His dwelling among us. 

            The mystery of Christmas is this:  that in Christ, in the divine Person of the Son of God, divinity and humanity meet, are united forever, and the horrible cleavage between God and man occasioned by Adam’s no to God is healed.  Adam in his rebellion separated himself, humanity, from God.  In Christ, the new Adam, the human submits always to the divine.  “Father,” prayed Christ the night before His crucifixion, “if thou art willing, remove this cup of death from me; nevertheless not my will , but thine, be done.”

            Now we know, and can be ever reminded, why we celebrate Christmas the way we do, or should.  We are moved to give because we all have received such a great gift from God.  We remind ourselves of a special and needed solicitude for the poor, for God has been so good to all of us poor sinners.  We want to be with our families and to know reconciliation with them because God has reconciled us to Himself through Christ and invites us all into His family.

            The mystery of Christmas.  It is a riddle solved -- as much as it can be -- by renewing our understanding -- the Church’s understanding -- of Christ.  And so we see that all this stuff called doctrine and dogma and theology is not only important but immensely so, essential even; for it tells us not only why we do the Christmas kinds of things that we do, but it infuses all of it with deep and wonderful meaning.  The meaning of Christmas is simply living in the light of who Jesus Christ is, the eternal Son of God, the Savior of the world, born at Christmas.