CHRISTMAS (MASS DURING THE DAY) HOMILY YEAR C
Is 52:7-10 Heb 1:1-6 Jn 1:1-18 (or 1-5, 9-14)
Jesus the Life and Light of the World
A Contribution to the Meaning of Life
1st Reading – Isaiah 52:7-10
7 How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger and the preacher of peace! Announcing good and preaching peace, they are saying to Zion, “Your God will reign!”
8 The voice of your watchmen. They have lifted up their voice, they shall praise together: for they shall see eye to eye when the Lord shall convert Zion
9 Rejoice and give praise together, O ye deserts of Jerusalem, for the Lord has comforted his people: he has redeemed Jerusalem.
10 The Lord has prepared his holy arm in the sight of all the Gentiles: and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.
Responsorial Psalm – Psalms 98:1, 2-3, 3-4, 5-6
R. (3c) All the ends of the earth have seen the saving power of God.
1 Sing to the LORD a new song,
for he has done wondrous deeds;
his right hand has won victory for him,
his holy arm.
R. All the ends of the earth have seen the saving power of God.
2 The LORD has made his salvation known:
in the sight of the nations he has revealed his justice.
3 He has remembered his kindness and his faithfulness
toward the house of Israel.
R. All the ends of the earth have seen the saving power of God.
3 All the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation by our God.
4 Sing joyfully to the LORD, all you lands;
break into song; sing praise.
R. All the ends of the earth have seen the saving power of God.
5 Sing praise to the LORD with the harp,
with the harp and melodious song.
6 With trumpets and the sound of the horn
sing joyfully before the King, the LORD.
R. All the ends of the earth have seen the saving power of God.
2nd Reading – Hebrews 1:1-6
Brothers and sisters:
1 In many places and in many ways, in past times, God spoke to the fathers through the Prophets;
2 lastly, in these days, he has spoken to us through the Son, whom he appointed as the heir of all things, and through whom he made the world.
3 And since the Son is the brightness of his glory, and the figure of his substance, and is carrying all things by the Word of his virtue, thereby accomplishing a purging of sins, he sits at the right hand of Majesty on high.
4 And having been made so much better than the Angels, he has inherited a name so much greater than theirs.
5 For to which of the Angels has he ever said: “You are my Son; today have I begotten you?” Or again: “I will be a Father to him, and he shall be a Son to me?”
6 And again, when he brings the only-begotten Son into the world, he says: “And let all the Angels of God adore him.”
Alleluia
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
A holy day has dawned upon us.
Come, you nations, and adore the Lord.
For today a great light has come upon the earth.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel – John 1:1-18
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 He was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made through Him, and nothing that was made was made without Him.
4 Life was in Him, and Life was the light of men.
5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
6 There was a man sent by God, whose name was John.
7 He arrived as a witness to offer testimony about the Light, so that all would believe through him.
8 He was not the Light, but he was to offer testimony about the Light.
9 The true Light, which illuminates every man, was coming into this world.
10 He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not recognize him.
11 He went to his own, and his own did not accept him.
12 Yet whoever did accept him, those who believed in his name, he gave them the power to become the sons of God.
13 These are born, not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
14 And the Word became flesh, and he lived among us, and we saw his glory, glory like that of an only-begotten son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
15 John offers testimony about him, and he cries out, saying: “This is the one about whom I said: ‘He who is to come after me, has been placed ahead of me, because he existed before me.’”
16 And from his fullness, we all have received, even grace for grace.
17 For the law was given though Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
18 No one ever saw God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he himself has described him.
Or John 1:1-5, 9-14
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 He was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made through Him, and nothing that was made was made without Him.
4 Life was in Him, and Life was the light of men.
5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
9 The true Light, which illuminates every man, was coming into this world.
10 He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not recognize him.
11 He went to his own, and his own did not accept him.
12 Yet whoever did accept him, those who believed in his name, he gave them the power to become the sons of God.
13 These are born, not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
14 And the Word became flesh, and he lived among us, and we saw his glory, glory like that of an only-begotten son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
HOMILY
Because so much depends on an author capturing the attention of the reader as soon as possible, one author (Donald Newlove, First Paragraphs [New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992]) searched through the very best first paragraphs he could find in famous writers of all time. He went through a panoply of such authors as Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Eudora Welty, and many others. He concluded that the greatest first paragraph ever written is the beginning of St John’s Gospel that we just heard. He spoke of John’s great canvas of eternity and his getting down to earth with the coming of Christ. He said that John must certainly have read Homer and the Book of Genesis, and comments that John’s first paragraph is bigger than both of them.
In the first words of his Gospel — “In the beginning” — John echoes the very first words of the Bible. In the very beginning, God’s creative words gave life and light. From the very beginning was the one whom John calls “the Word”. “Word” in Greek (the language John was using, for his non-Jewish audience) is Logos, which to those schooled in philosophy meant much more than “word”. It meant everything from “word” to “intellect” all the way‘ to “the meaning of existence”. So John was announcing that in Jesus we find the ultimate explanation of the meaning of life.
Our use of the word “word” still shows its importance. In praise of an upright man we say, “He’s a man of his word.” Children, imitating the nobility of old, say, “Word of honour”. When we’re after some deep information, we ask, “What’s the word?”, and there are few condemnations worse than “You can’t take his word for anything.”
In the Jewish Scriptures, a word was far more than just a sound. It was something that was alive, charged with power. The Jewish Scriptures are full of examples of that. In the creation story, for example, at every stage we read “And God said. .. ,” and an aspect of creation came into being. Isaac, having been deceived into giving his words of blessing to Jacob instead of Esau, couldn’t take the blessing back (Gen 27). And the Jews had in their Wisdom literature the concentrated presentations of the words of wise men. Wisdom and the Word are the same: God’s agent for enlightenment.
John saw that “the Word was with God” — not as a single action of the past, but in a continuous, timeless existence. But not only “with God”: “the Word was God” — so that the Word, Jesus, is in the best Note: This homily is for the Mass during the Day. For the Vigil Mass, see Cycle A; for the Midnight Mass, Cycle B; for the Mass at Dawn, see immediately above position to reveal who God is, Sometimes we think that, when Jesus came, he changed God — from angry into loving. But God has always been like Jesus. It isn’t God who’s changed; it’s humankind’s understanding of Him that has changed.
Then (v. 4) John, like a composing artist, enunciates the two themes of his work: life and light. The life is the life of God: the eternal life that God lives, the opposite of destruction, condemnation, and death. Life for human beings isn’t mere existence — even inanimate things exist — but a sharing in the being of God.
The word “life” is frequently on the lips of Jesus. Jesus regrets that people won’t come to him that they might have life (5:40); he asserts that he came that humankind might have life and have it more abundantly (10:10); he says that he’s the way, the truth, and the life ( 14:6). In John’s Gospel, the word “life” occurs more than 35 times, and the verb “to live” or “to have life” more than 15 times more. At the very end of his Gospel, John says that he has written that through belief in Jesus we may have life in his name (20:31).
John’s light is the everlasting light, the timeless light revealed in time, the light manifested in the flesh although hidden by nature, the light that shone around the shepherds and guided the Magi. It’s that light which came into its own people, and they didn’t receive it.
The word “light” occurs in John’s Gospel no fewer than 21 times. He says that Jesus’ light is that which puts the darkness of disorder to flight, like God moving upon the dark chaos and replacing it with the creation of light. Darkness, the antithesis of light, means whatever is in opposition to God. It stands for life without Christ. One of human kind’s oldest fears is fear of the dark — still present in children, but even for adults the world is full of forebodings and threats. No matter how hard the darkness has tried, it hasn’t overcome the light.
Jesus is the true light (v. 9) — different from the lights of the deceptions and illusions that people have followed. Some are only flickers of the truth, others will-o’-the-wisps. Jesus the true light dissipated the shadows of doubt, the blackness of despair, the starkness of death. When the star brought the wise men to the humble cave instead of to a regal palace, God was making a statement about our value system: that it wasn’t His. The tragedy is that, though “the world came to be through him” (v. 10), he came to people who were his own, but they didn’t accept him (v. 11).
The phenomena apply to people of all time. They applied to the Israelites of Isaiah’s time. Isaiah visualized the lonely task of the watchmen of Jerusalem looking out hour after hour, day after day for the least sign on the horizon of the return of their king. He imagined them Seeing God Himself returning to the city to save it and to once again make His people great. He saw the messengers shouting along the mountain ridges, “peace… salvation… Your God is King!” (v. 7), the watchmen repeating the messengers’ cry (v. 8), and all the people breaking out in song (vv. 9f). All of that resounds in other First Testament texts and echoes in the New Testament. God prepares not only the Jewish people for His coming, but every person in this world in one way or another. And to those who accept Him and His values He gives the power to become His children (v. 12).
That brings John to the climax of his hymn, what we celebrate today: the Word made flesh (V. I4). Flesh is all that’s transitory, mortal, imperfect, and at first sight seemingly incompatible with God. This is the tremendous mystery of the incarnation, the story that brings the infinite one, the creator, the divine, to the insignificant town of Bethlehem, where in a smelly stable He became one of us in everything but Sin.
Man’s maker was truly made man — so that the Ruler of the stars was in the thick of life. He came in the most unlikely circumstances. A helpless baby, the child of a poor family, in a subjugated country — all of it doesn’t seem a hopeful seedbed for liberation, redemption, and freedom. He could be hungry and tired from his journeys, and he was accused by false witnesses, evaluated by a mortal judge, beaten with whips, crowned with thorns, suffered, and died. It’s the stuff of life as it’s lived around us.
That’s the depth of the Christmas story. People who don’t understand that don’t understand the goodness of humanity. When God created us, He saw all that He had made and found it very good. Yet down through the centuries there have been those who claimed that one aspect of God’s creation, humanity, is bad. Their position is summed up in the ditty, “Had I been the Deity’s adviser, methinks I might have planned it wiser.”
At the same time as he is human, Jesus is God. The early Christians realized that they couldn’t think of God without thinking of Jesus, that all that the word “God” conveyed found adequate expression in Jesus Christ.
For a time, Jesus “made his dwelling” -— literally, “pitched his tent” —— with humankind. And we saw his glory: Jesus’ whole life was a manifestation of the glory of God as spoken of in the Jewish Scriptures, which indicated the presence of God in the desert during the Exodus, on Mt. Sinai at the giving of the Commandments, over the Tabernacle, and above the Temple. Now this glory was uniquely Jesus’ own. By living among us, Jesus enables us to come to the heart of God. That’s the message of Christmas.
The letter to the Hebrews ratifies John’s ideas. Today’s portion is a Splendid summary of the history of salvation, and a condensed treatment of the mystery of incarnation and redemption. It also makes clear that Jesus alone brings to humankind the full revelation of God. It says that Jesus is superior to the prophets (W. 1—3) and over the angels (W.4-6). He’s the new place where the spoken Word, the dynamic activity of God, is to be found. He’s God’s ikon, the light of God reflected in our world. God spoke through the prophets only in fragmentary and varied ways (v. l). Often the prophets were characterized by one idea: Amos for social justice. Isaiah for the holiness of God, Hosea for the forgiving love of God. But no prophet had grasped the entire truth.
Jesus did, and in our time, the final period of humankind’s religious history, he’s the one through whom God preeminently speaks. Since Jesus’ redemptive sacrifice, God spoke to‘us through a Son (v. 2). With thoughts similar to John’s Prologue, the letter to the Hebrews reminds us that this Son existed before he appeared as man. No creature, not even an angel, can match the unique dignity of his person (v. 4).
Today, we’ve split the atom, conquered a portion of space, and harnessed nuclear energy, and we play with new kinds of life in test tubes. Yet many people don’t realize our need for the revelation of Jesus. Christ is born to us today in order that he may appear to the whole world through us. The mystery of Christmas lays upon us all a debt to God and an obligation to the rest of humankind. Bethlehem is no longer a hillside cave. It is, rather, every place where we create justice, freedom, and love. We do this not only by preaching the Good News, but by living it and thus revealing Jesus. May your living Jesus and revealing him to those around you through your love give you and yours a blessed Christmas!
