CHRISTMAS EVE- YEAR C
The Deeper Meaning of Christmas
(Isaiah 9:2-4, 6-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-16)
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“While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”
This timeless, familiar passage that marks the Christmas event, invites us to delve deeper into the meaning of this great mystery, the birth of the Son of God among us. We can do so through the eyes of two significant persons of our Church tradition, St. Paul and Thomas Keating, as well as the shepherds who were there that night.
For St. Paul, his first Christmas happened on the road to Damascus. Paul was a very religious person, a zealous Pharisee, who was actually persecuting the followers of the Way, as the first disciples of Jesus were called. He was going to Damascus to arrest and imprison, perhaps even kill, any followers of Jesus he could find when a brilliant light knocked him to the ground and blinded him. He heard the voice of Jesus identifying himself with the disciples he was persecuting. It was only after Aeneas prayed for him in Damascus that he regained his sight, and his life changed. The same Jesus who was born to Joseph and Mary and worshipped by shepherds, had appeared to him and changed his whole belief system. From then on, he set out to tell the whole Gentile world about Jesus of Nazareth.
To King Agrippa, Paul would put these words of Jesus: “I shall deliver you from evil people to open their eyes that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may obtain forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been consecrated by faith to me.” For Paul, Jesus was deliverance, forgiveness and belonging to the reign of God, and so he should be for us.
Thomas Keating was a Cistercian monk and a world-famous spiritual writer and retreat master. He wrote of the Christmas event that all limitations to human growth have been overcome. The divine light cuts across all darkness, preconceived ideas, prejudice, prepackaged values, false expectations, phoniness and hypocrisy. Thus, the humdrum activities of everyday life become sacramental, shot through with eternal implications. For him, because of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus, everything takes on greater meaning, everything becomes a sacrament of encounter with the goodness and love of God. And so it should be with us.
The shepherds who were the first to hear the Good News of the birth of a savior, and who were the first to go and worship him, can also help us deepen our appreciation of this mystery. According to Corbin Eddy, in is commentary in the Living with Christ, the shepherds were the ones who would examine the new born lambs for any flaws or defects, and thus determine which ones would be accepted as sacrificial lambs for the Temple worship.
As such, they were the ones who could first appreciate the significance of the newborn infant, wrapped in swaddling cloth and lying in a wooden manger, who was the Lamb of God already being prepared for sacrifice on the wood of the cross. His ultimate destiny would unfold when, after his sacrifice had been accomplished, he would once again be wrapped and laid to rest in the tomb, awaiting rebirth into Easter glory as the bread of life and light for the world. As participants in this Christmas Eucharist tonight, we can enter into this amazing drama beyond anything the shepherds could ever have imagined.
A young couple who experienced the deeper meaning of Christmas is Ron and Nancy who were eating at a restaurant with their baby son Eric. A street person who was obviously drunk came into the restaurant and for some reason caught the attention of Eric, who cried out to him. The man responded with some baby talk that embarrassed the parents as all the people in the restaurant were watching the inter-change between the child and the man. They ate in silence, hoping that they could get away without speaking to the man. However, he had positioned himself between the mother and the door as they were leaving, and just then, the child leapt into the drunk’s arms. There was a moment of deep tenderness as the child and the man hugged each other, and the drunk began to shed tears. Finally, he pulled the child away from himself, handed him back to his mother, and in a choking voice, thanked her for just giving him his best Christmas gift. The mother, for her part, made her way to their car, crying tears of joy and shame, for she had just witnessed Christ’s love shown through the innocence of a tiny child who saw no sin, who made no judgment, a child who saw a soul, and a mother who saw a suit of clothes. She was a Christian who was blind, holding a child who was not. She felt it was God asking…. “Are you willing to share your son for a moment?”, when HE shared His for an eternity. The ragged old man, unwittingly, had reminded her, “To enter the Kingdom of God, we must become as little children.”
The Eucharist is also an extraordinary encounter with Jesus, born among us in the wood of the manger, who died for us on the wood of the cross to save us from our sin and to make us into a holy people who would strive to follow him in truth and love.
May our celebration tonight empower us to see beyond the ordinary to the deeper meaning of the events of our lives, and to be a light to others as Jesus was a light to the world.
