Christmas - Homily 15

Homily 15-2022

Suddenly with the angel there was a great throng of the heavenly host, praising God and singing: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace to men who enjoy his favour”.

What was Luke [from whose Gospel this evening’s passage was taken] trying to achieve by bringing a chorus from “the heavenly host” into his story? Did he want his readers to take the angels’ message literally, and carefully to dissect its possible meanings? I am inclined to think “No”. I see the whole story as a poetic construction designed by Luke to alert his readers to the mystery of the Jesus whose actual deeds and words he would soon share with them [with us?] in the main part of his Gospel.

The angels’ message is poetic metaphor designed to get his readers in the small early Christian community to which he belonged to listen carefully. Luke wanted them to make sense of the actual deeds and teachings of the adult Jesus in the light of their own experience as disciples over the years since their personal conversion to the risen Christ.

Luke seemed to sense that the coming of Christ was leading to a radical change of era in the world in which they lived. As we heard tonight, Luke’s introduction to his story of Jesus’ birth clearly situated the action within the world of the Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus.

According to tonight’s Gospel passage Mary and Joseph had to go to Bethlehem precisely because Caesar desired to have some idea of the size of the populations of the various nations he had brutally conquered so that he could tax them accordingly.

Caesar had prided himself on the “Roman Peace” that he claimed to have brought to the world, ignoring the fact that that peace had been achieved by the cruel subjugation of everyone else. He considered himself to be the world’s saviour; and the Roman Senate even went so far as to give him the title of ‘Son of God’.

If written eighty years earlier, during the life of Caesar, Luke’s Infancy Narratives would have been seen as treasonous.

So what sense do you make of the angelic message, “Peace to all who enjoy God’s favour”? Jesus? or Caesar? It is a significant time to raise the question, because most of us, I think, are wondering what on earth is happening to our Church, and what will be its immediate future? Indeed, what is happening to our world at the moment? A lot of keen minds are currently chewing over that question also.

These questions are becoming increasingly relevant against the backdrop of possible, even threatening, nuclear warfare — unless a handful of powerful nations are prepared to face the obvious, even at the price of ‘losing face’. Arguments over climate change, or an unwillingness to change the status quo, could also lead to the world quickly destroying itself.

In all this, most of us as individuals feel so powerless.

Is it time to listen seriously to Jesus? For him, the way to peace, the only way to peace, is for us all to choose to replace our habitual ways of regarding each other as competitors, as threateningly different, as nuisances or whatever, but as brothers and sisters. Until there is a palpable “mood”, or at least a ‘critical mass’ of convinced people in our world committed enough to mutual respect and care, to cooperation and mutual caring, violence of some kind will inevitably remain unchallenged.

Can we find some time during these otherwise busy days to look carefully at the little boy in the crib, and ask ourselves, “Powerless? or powerful?”

We may even go deeper, and ponder, “Is his way of love powerless? or powerful?”

And even, if I feel uncertain, “Is now the time to experiment and find out for myself”?