What
follows is offered as a homily for early in
the Christmas season (that
is, the season that begins late on December
24 and lasts through the
feast of the Baptism of the Lord). It attempts
to do mystagogy from the
ritual that is the season itself. Thus the homily
echoes some words of
Advent, draws on that great breadth of Images
that fill these weeks
(especially those of Luke and Matthew), and
begins to reflect on what
it might mean to keep such a season in the winter
of 2004-05. This text
might be the basis for the homily on Christmas
itself, or on the next
day which is Sunday and the feast of the Holy
Family, or even on
the first day of January.
Gabe Huck
Year
after year most of us are quite content to skim rather lightly the
surface of this mystery that comes after the four weeks of Advent and
lives in our midst through Epiphany until the feast of the Lord's
baptism. We might argue that our lives have enough stress and even
sorrow to them. We need a little time that's just joy to the world, a
cozy time to try again to let gifts work some magic between us. So it
is understandable if we just skim along on the lovely surface of
Christmas. The harsh details of the story itself are best swept out of
sight. Give us an unbloody birth, meek animals, a stable so cozy and
warm.
Cozy and warm are good things. The carols we sing convey
a certain sweetness, well-worn words and pleasant tunes. The lights on
the tree, the cards, the parties and family gatherings, even the gifts:
all are intended to bring some beauty into our lives, to revive or mend
or strengthen relationships. All sorts of human societies have found
ways to celebrate feasts that allow the ordinary to be put aside and
the "once a year" sights and deeds and sounds invite us to some renewal
of self and community.
But Christmas asks and offers more.
Begin with this. Some bishops make it a regular practice to celebrate
Christmas Mass in a prison or jail. Our positive reaction to this
probably comes from a common feeling that in prisons much of what we
demand of Christmas is impossible. So we think: "Isn't that great? The
bishop is going to be with people who can't have a real Christmas."
"Bravo!" we say. But let's listen to this, a letter written more than
sixty years ago by a prisoner in Germany. The writer, a scholar and
ordained minister in his thirties, had been arrested for being part of
a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. As Christmas 1943 approached, he
wrote to his parents: "For a Christian there is nothing peculiarly
difficult about Christmas in a prison cell. I daresay it will have more
meaning and will be observed with greater sincerity here in this prison
than in places where all that survives of the feast is its name."
The
letter-writer then says that there are things about Christmas a
prisoner can understand better than anyone else. He names three of
these things. First: "That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness,
helplessness, and guilt look very different to the eyes of God from
what they do to us." Second: "That God should come down to the very
place that we usually abhor." Third: "That Christ was born in a stable
because there was no room for him in the inn." The letter's author,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, would survive that Christmas and one more; he was
executed just days before the war ended.
Perhaps we ought to
hope that those bishops who visit prisoners on Christmas are doing so
because they wish to be near this mystery. Listen again to Bonhoeffer's
letter when he reflects that the prisoner can understand Christmas:
"Misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and guilt look
very different to the eyes of God from what they do to us." What
exactly is he talking about? What does a prisoner know about how
anything looks in the eyes of God? Perhaps it is this: Take away all
the cards and trees and lights and sweets and parties and gifts and
shopping. Take them away by force. Then, Bonhoeffer says, if you
survive, if you still hold to Christmas, you will begin to see that at
the heart of it is something that could not be grasped by those who
give their energy and attention to the warm and cozy things. With all
that stripped away, the prisoner might see that this seasonal telling
of the story of a birth is something amazing: "Misery, suffering,
poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and guilt look very different to the
eyes of God from what they do to us."
Is that the truth about
Christmas? Imagine if someone were to say: "You there, you are a
Christian, right? You keep Christmas, right? Well, tell me this: What
is it that moves you to give glory to God and sing about peace on
earth?" Would our answer be likely to include something about a glimpse
- and perhaps only a glimpse - of how God sees misery and suffering,
poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and even guilt? Do the stories and
scriptures and songs of Christmas tell us about this? Have we been
listening? Have we been singing?
We know the stories that are
told at Christmas, but perhaps we somehow learned to censor parts of
them. For example, half way through Advent this year we heard a passage
from Isaiah that began with a vision of a day to come when the desert
and the parched land will bloom. That's the familiar part. But did we
also hear Isaiah say: "Strengthen the hands that are feeble, make firm
the knees that are weak, say to those whose hearts are frightened: Be
strong, fear not." Did we ask, "Who, me?" Am I the one with feeble
hands and weak knees, or am I the one who is to find those who hands
are feeble, whose knees are shaking with fear? What does that have to
do with Christmas?
Or consider the shepherds. They show up in
lots of carols and all the crèche scenes and most of the cards. Do we
know the shepherds, or have we just heard the story so often that we
never consider what it means that of all the people on earth, it is
shepherds who got called into our story, our crèche, our carols and
cards? The truth is: Shepherds were on the bottom rung and they weren't
going up. Shepherds are the people with nobody else to look down on.
They don't know how to read, they have some horrible habits and
diseases, they smell bad, and they don't know the first thing about
being good citizens or good Jews. Nobody ever boasted: "Hey, look,
there goes my son. He's a shepherd!"
So what kind of a way is
this for the story of Jesus to begin? Is it some testimony to how deep
is the mercy of God that even these lowly shepherds are called to the
manger? Or is it that only those with absolutely no claim to any
respect or power had imaginations large enough to deal with singing
angels and a brand new baby crying in the feeding trough of the barn
animals? Remember what prisoners know about Christmas: "Misery,
suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and guilt look very
different to the eyes of God from what they do to us." Helplessness.
The helplessness of the shepherds in their world. The helplessness of
the infant. It is very hard for us who so fear and even despise
helplessness to take this in.
The shepherds and the stable are
in the story told by Luke's gospel. Matthew's gospel knows nothing
about shepherds, nothing about a stable. But Matthew has some things
that Luke doesn't know about. Matthew begins the story of Jesus' birth
with a family tree that goes all the way back to Abraham. One person
was the father of another person, who was the father of another person,
for 42 generations. Except for this: Matthew breaks with the customary
way of doing such things and in four cases he actually mentions that
some of these men had mothers! Astounding! But that's only the
beginning. Here are the four women Matthew mentions as ancestors of
Jesus: First Tamar, who pretended to be a prostitute so that she could
seduce her father-in-law; then Rahab, not one of the Israelites but a
foreigner who supported her family with prostitution; then Ruth,
another foreigner; then Bathsheba, Uriah's wife forced to be David's
mistress. Far from giving Jesus noble ancestors, Matthew's gospel
begins by saying: You're not going to like this. It isn't all seemly
and proper. It doesn't make the Christmas cards. It's about the stuff
that prisoners understand.
And what about the conclusion of
Matthew's best-known story of Jesus' infancy? That story begins with
Magi, wisdom-seekers who tried to read the stars and such. Their visit
to King Herod sets up Matthew's drama. On stained glass windows we see
over and over the star leading the way, the Magi offering their gifts,
even the narrow escapes of the Magi and the Holy Family. But what about
the bloody climax of the story, soldiers killing babies? Perhaps that
comes too close to home. What is this except a challenge to ponder with
those keeping Christmas in prison how "misery, suffering, poverty,
loneliness - just think of those mothers! - helplessness, and guilt
look very different to the eyes of God from what they do to us."
Sisters
and brothers, these stories are too beautiful and too hard to hear
alone. We come to hear them as the church because only in this
communion can the full truth begin to dawn on us, only when we have
each other, only when we need each other. All the days this year from
December 25 to January 9 are the days of Christmas. In those sixteen
days we gather five times - Christmas, Holy Family, New Year's Day, and
the first two Sundays of January called Epiphany and Baptism of the
Lord. Together on these days we not only tell the stories, we come
round the table and we give thanks to God for so loving the world, for
loving the world in this amazing way - the way glimpsed best perhaps by
prisoners, the way that led Luke to tell of shepherds and Matthew of
brutal murders and a scandalous bunch of ancestors.
At the
core of that thanks we give to God is our willingness to see with the
prisoner's eyes all of the misery, all of the suffering and poverty,
all the loneliness and helplessness, and even all the guilt that swirls
around us. Every Christmas is grounded in the way God's mercy embraces
the world and its poor now. That is just as true in this grim year 2004
when the rich, armed to the teeth, are more and more separated from the
poor, when millions upon millions of innocents die deaths we know well
how to prevent, when fear is once again used by the powerful to hang on
to their power. All that is incarnate in us, made flesh in this
assembly. That word made flesh is the very stuff of the Christmas
season and for that we should well give glory and thanks to God.
Copyright © Gabe Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for Celebration, the worship and preaching resource
of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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