Christmas - Homily 12

Homily 12 - 2019

I believe that it is important as we come to celebrate today’s Feast to be watchful for the mystery present between the lines. Whatever about the details of the story, the overwhelming reality is that the child referred to in the story really is our “Saviour”. God has become human.

Not only did God become human, but became a child, totally dependent for his existence on the care and love he encountered in his parents. Their love even influenced his developing human personality. If any child looks like his mother, this child surely did, given that he inherited no other DNA than hers. Then, as he grew, he would have picked up his parents’ ways of doing things, their funny sayings, their accent.

This helpless child reveals to us the heart of God as much as does the dying Jesus stretched out helplessly on the cross. When we stop and think, both the infant Jesus and the tortured, dying Jesus do exert in their different ways a remarkable but real power of a unique kind – the power of love. The only power that can give life is, in one shape or other, the power of love. Check it out! That is the power of God [who in fact is nothing but love]. God’s is the “love that moves the sun and other stars” [as the Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, wrote centuries ago] – the power that creates and energises the immense, ever-expanding universe, and everything and everyone in it.

It is breath-taking to think that the power behind everything that is and moves in our universe is the power of love – never forced on us but there for the finding. That was the power condensed into the heart of both the newborn Christ and the crucified Christ.

I often wonder, sadly, why, after all that Jesus said and did, we almost instinctively image God as almighty, all-powerful, majestic and glorious when God’s own default option is love and mercy? It seems too easy to fashion God in our image than to allow ourselves to be shaped according to God’s truth.

To touch the mystery revealed [or concealed?] in today’s Feast, we perhaps need deliberately to stop, to sit, and quietly and joyfully take time simply to ponder.