Christmas - Homily 11

Homily 11 - 2017

Who am I? I am John. Who is the child in the crib? That is Jesus. Well, those are our names. But our names really tell you nothing. They don’t tell you who am I, who he is. Perhaps that can’t be answered. I have managed to construct a sense of my self, a self-image, over time, and to project it more or less successfully. But as time goes on, I am constantly getting to learn more and more how far from the reality that familiar self-image is, and who in fact I really am. And who is that? There is more to me than me. St John put it this way, “In the beginning was the Word [the Logos, the blueprint]. The Word was with God and the Word was God. Through the Word all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through the Word.” So what is making me real, what is making me exist, what is allowing me to be John, is the Word of God. And that is true not only for me but for everyone and everything else that is real, that exists. This is fascinating! What about Jesus? There is a difference. Of him, St John wrote, “The Word became flesh. The Word lived among us” – The Word allows me to be real; but the Word became Jesus.

The Word, then, did not come into the world only with the birth of Jesus, two thousand years ago, give or take. The Word has been in the world since the beginning. The Word has been the source of the world’s realness from the moment of the Big Bang [and the scientists tell us that that was 13.6 billion years ago, give or take].

It is interesting to ponder the evolutionary trend observable over the world’s history. I start off from the premise that God is love, or even better, God is loving – more verb than noun. God’s loving expresses itself as God’s Word, and acts in the world as the energy source that moves the world. Initially it took the primitive forms of matter and energy in their varied expressions. Then through inanimate creation, to living things like plants, to sensate things as bugs and animals, till eventually living animals became conscious of themselves as homo sapiens, and began then to think and eventually to love.

Even the Hebrew people seem to have had some inkling of this presence of the divine in creation. Did you notice this morning’s Responsorial Psalm, “Sing to the Lord all the earth, tell.. his wonders among all the peoples. Let the heavens rejoice and earth be glad, let the sea and all within it thunder praise, let the land and all it bears rejoice, all the trees of the wood shout for joy..”

That evolutionary development climaxed when the Word itself moved from being the reality source of humans to finally becoming human in Jesus. Through our incorporation, then, into the risen humanity of Jesus, celebrated in baptism, we are drawn even more deeply into the mystery of the Word made flesh. As love intensifies and becomes more and more universalised, we move into closer and closer unity with each other and with the created world. St Paul shared his intuition thus: “God wanted all perfection to be found in Christ and all things to be reconciled through him and for him, everything in heaven and everything on earth, when he made peace by his death on the cross.”

Humanity has further to travel yet. But the birth of Jesus that we celebrate tonight serves to remind us that we are on the way, and that God is serious. In the meantime, it is imperative for us to realise our radical oneness with all creation through the Word of God that constitutes the reality, the existence, of all that is.