Christmas - Homily 6

Homily 6 – 2011 

It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of your friends and acquaintances won’t be in church this Christmas.  I know some of mine won’t.  It leads me to ask why am I here?  Well, I’m often here.  

Why am I here tonight?  Basically, because I believe that Jesus is God.  I believe it quite strongly, even though I know I hardly understand what that means.  I’m here tonight because I also want to remember – to remember that 2000 years ago [which is just like yesterday, if I think of the billions of years that the world has been evolving since that primal Big Bang that was the start of the whole process] – just 2000 years ago, God came into this world in Jesus – looking for us, inviting us, calling us.  In Jesus, the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us.  I believe that things have been different ever since.

But I want to remember more.  While he was among us, no one really recognised who he was, [though some, only a few, did think that he was special].  It took his mysterious resurrection, and its effect on them, for the insight to grow that he was truly God among us – Emmanuel.  God came among us and was largely unrecognised.  If God were to come among us today, as one of us, how would we recognise him? What would God be like?

It’s worth reflecting on tonight’s story as Luke put it together.  Luke was writing in the light of Jesus’ later death and resurrection.  He was making two points very clear from the start.

The parents of Jesus were no-bodies.  To the Roman power-brokers of the day, they were numbers, ordered about, just to be conveniently counted, so that they could be taxed accordingly.  Luke has Mary, Jesus’ heavily pregnant mother, away from home, giving birth where she could, and having to use an animals’ feed-trough as a make-shift cradle.  All this was after Luke had had an angel tell her that her son would be the long-awaited Christ, the Messiah to end all Messiahs.

Luke reinforced his message by having, as the first to know of the birth, a group of derelicts, shepherds, people right at the bottom of the social order – who were told that the new-born baby, poor, homeless, like them, was none other than the Lord – God.

In coming among us in this way, was God putting on an act? or does the life of Jesus reveal the way God is? Perhaps, we need to change our expectations of God – and of power, of God’s power.  We tend to think that God can do anything that God likes – but, perhaps, we don’t reflect enough precisely on “what God likes”.

God is about creating, giving being; and, as we move up the scale of beings, being opens up into living, and living into loving, and loving presupposes freedom.  When dealing with human persons, creatures able to love, called to love, who grow only by responding freely to love, God’s only power would have to be the power of love.  Use of any other kind of power would diminish human freedom and human dignity, rather than enhance them.  

When God became human in Jesus, the only power Jesus used was love.  There was never any coercion in Jesus, never any violence – just constant respect, care, love, and, necessarily [given the mess we make of ourselves and of society], a persistent offer of forgiveness.

With his story of the birth of Jesus, Luke was setting up his readers to recognise the face of God in the unfolding story of the adult Jesus, the story of his life and teaching, the story of his dehumanizing, degrading, and brutal death, and of the effect of that death – his resurrection.

Luke was telling his readers that the meaning of life is love, and that the way to life to the full is love.  We’re inconsistent, we struggle… but we know it and we want to do better.  It’s why we’re here tonight – to remember, to celebrate, and to renew our determination to keep learning.  We forget at our peril.

On which note, I wish you all a truly happy Christmas!