Christmas - Homily 2

Homily 2 – 2007

Luke wrote his Gospel for adults - the whole of his Gospel, including what we call his Infancy Narrative, part of which we read tonight.  So, to see the narrative of Jesus’ birth as a sweet story meant for children is to misunderstand it.  The point of Luke’s Infancy Narrative was to sensitise his adult readers to issues that would become clearer in Jesus’ Public Ministry.  So what might be some of the issues raised by tonight’s story?

Jesus was born in a country that was under foreign occupation, Roman occupation.  The purpose of a Roman census - that had Joseph and Mary travelling from Nazareth to Bethlehem - was not to gain statistical information but to administer the imperial taxation system and to ensure that no one was missed out.

Roman occupation and taxation had led to an impoverished peasantry, and poverty in its turn led to unemployment, hunger and widespread sickness.  As Luke would show later in his Gospel, Quirinius’s census would cast a long shadow: the adult Jesus would minister largely to the oppressed peasants of Galilee; and he was, himself, eventually executed by order of the Roman Governor.

The parents of Jesus were among the poorer level of society.  Jesus was born in poverty - probably in the house of peasants, since a manger, an animal’s feed trough, wherever they were, doubled as a cot for the child.

As Luke tells the story, the first ones to learn of Jesus’ birth were shepherds.  Of the various rural occupations, shepherding was the most despised.  Shepherds were seen as social misfits, assigned to the margins of society – uneducated, unsocialised, and often violent.

Right from the start of the narrative, Luke was making clear that the impact of Jesus on the world of his day would be radical reversal.  Later in the Gospel, the adult Jesus would proclaim: blessed are you who are poor; blessed are you who are hungry; blessed are you who weep; blessed are you whom society excludes and reviles.

The message of the angelic choir – the revelation of the unseen meaning of Jesus’ birth – was that, in Jesus, God would be glorified and people would know peace through their recognition that all were equally loved by God: Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to all who enjoy God’s favour.  Consistently, especially in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus would reveal the merciful, compassionate, and forgiving God.  Through his own consistent behaviour, he would put a human face to the Mystery of Love that we call God.

Of particular interest to Luke would be the sign by which the shepherds would identify their saviour.  They would find a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.  In other words, they would find a child no different from their own new-born children – whom they too would have wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in an empty feed trough in their own meagre dwellings. Jesus, the revelation of God, would himself be indistinguishable from the poor and the marginalised of the world, with whom he would identify.

The Infancy Narrative challenges all of us who are disciples of Jesus – as does the rest of the Gospel of Luke and particularly the Passion Narrative – to a radical change of mindset.  The values and priorities revealed through the story are not peripheral to the story but touch into the essence of discipleship.  To know the peace proclaimed by the angelic choir we need to be drawn into the heart and the mindset of God, and to discover and be transformed in and by the Mystery of Love.

On which note, I wish you all a Happy Christmas!