CHRISTMAS 2020

Today we want to read in silent prayer and contemplation the Gospels of the birth of Jesus which are read at Christmas.   

Christmas invites us to let the mystery of God, made vulnerable, surprise us. 

Christmas invites us to be silent and to allow the Presence of our Creator and Redeemer fill us.    

Christmas invites us to discover His presence in each human face, especially in the children and in the most vulnerable.  

There three Masses for Christmas. One at Midnight, another at dawn and the third one during the day.  Gospel of the Midnight Mass – Luke 2:1-14

This Gospel has two different scenes. Let us contemplate each one of them:  

The first scene is the birth of Jesus:  

v Luke puts the birth of Jesus in the context of the history of his time. He gives names and events which we can find in any historical book. Luke wants to tell us that Jesus is a real human being, not a figment of our imagination.   

v There is a census, something that all of us are familiar with, because  we just had the census taken in our country during the current year.  Census is always about counting people. How interesting it is to realize that behind the data of the census there are realities that we do not know, joys and sufferings in the lives of those counted, as it happened with the census of Quirinius.   

v Joseph belongs to David’s family. According to the way the census were conducted, everyone had to go back to their place of origin to be counted.  Therefore Joseph had to go to Bethlehem the city of David. He goes there with his wife who is with child, at a very late stage of her pregnancy.  

v The time to give birth came as they arrived in Bethlehem. I leave it to each one’s imagination, especially of the women who have given birth, what this moment means for a woman. Then we may look to Mary and try to discover her feelings.  She is a  very young girl, probably a teenager, it is her first child and neither her mother nor any known woman from Nazareth are with her to help her, to support her

v There is no place for them at the inn. This can be understood in several different ways:  

o   There is no place because they are poor   

o   There is no place because the inn is full.   

o   There is no place because they do not want to be disturbed by a woman in labor.     

o   There is no place because the inn is full of people and this is not an adequate setting for a woman to give birth. To give birth  requires privacy,  intimacy  and   sacredness.   

o   And the innkeeper, that I am inclined to look at as a good man, offers them the cave where the animals take refuge at night. There they will be able to be by themselves. 

v And Luke says very briefly  ”the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to her firstborn  son.  She wrapped him in swaddling clothes.”  

o   And the time came for her, the hour that every pregnant woman expects with joy, because she is going to see for the first time the face of her baby. But at the same time she is overcome by anxiety, she does not know what will happen to her, especially when it is the first child, as in the case of Mary. 

o   Joseph helped Mary to give birth to her son. I like to imagine Joseph, the just man, the good man, with tears in his eyes as the mystery was enfolding in front of him. Tears of thanksgiving and emotion on seeing the face of the Son of God made the Son of man. He would have to be the father of the son of God, his God who had asked him to change the plans he had for his own life, and thus cooperate in the work of the salvation of the human race.  

o   Pope Francis has dedicated 2021 as the year of Joseph. Let us nurture a friendly relationship with that humble carpenter, the adoptive father of Jesus, the protector of Mary and of the Church. Let us ask him to teach how to be poor, humble, and meek as he was.

o   Mary sees, kisses, and feeds for the first time her baby, who is the Son of the Eternal Father. 

o   I believe that it is impossible for us to understand the fullness of this mystery, so full of joy and suffering at the same time.  Let us contemplate in silence, admiration and unconditional love this mystery.   

Let us contemplate the second scene of this same gospel: There are some shepherds watching their flock during the night.  

v They live in the fields; they do not live in houses, not even in stables.  They take turns in keeping their flocks.    

v Shepherds were considered to be people of not good standing in society: they were poor but they were seen as liars, as thieves, people who had to do many things in order to survive.     

v To them the angel of the Lord is sent to announce the good news of the birth of the Son of God among us. An angel was also sent to Mary,  to Zechariah, to Joseph.   Let us analyze the message, because it contains several of the themes so dear to Luke:    

o   Be not  afraid.  Fear is the natural reaction of the human being in the presence of the Mystery, of God or of his messengers. Jesus will repeat these same words to his apostles on Easter Sunday evening.      

o   I have good news to proclaim to you, which will be the cause of great joy.   The joy of the presence of God in our life, in our society, in our history. God is always a cause of joy. In the Old Testament Zion was invited many times to rejoice because “your King comes to you.”  

o   Today, it is the “now” of salvation. Luke uses several titles to describe the child who has been born and who is the cause of joy: Savior, Messiah, and Lord. Jesus is all of that and more, but this is the paradox of God’s work, so different from our works and our parameters, our King comes as a poor and vulnerable baby.    

o   Poverty, although Luke does not mention the word poverty, he says that the baby was wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lay in a manger. These are signs of poverty.  God could only be born in poverty, because riches many times are void of meaning, and of truth. Real poverty is the truth,  because all of us a poor and needy even if we think that we are powerful and able to do whatever we want, and this is not true. Covid19 has helped us to acknowledge our indigence, our lack of power, our indigence, but God comes to us in the littleness of a baby in need of everyone and of everything .  

o   The praise,   many more angels join the first angel and they sing “GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST AND ON EARTH PEACE… to men and women of good will.   Praise and peace, two words that we find more than once in the Gospel of Luke. After the annunciation Mary sings, in the evening of Easter Sunday Jesus greets his own saying: PEACE.   

Let us continue now with the Gospel of the Sunrise Mass. 

Gospel of the Mass at Dawn   - Luke 2:15-20

It has been said that Luke was a painter, and that he painted the portrait of Mary; but some commentators say that the best paintings of Luke were painted with his words, not with brushes.    

The gospel of the Midnight Mass  had two scenes. The gospel for the Sunrise Mass has also two different scenes: the shepherds, and Mary.   

v The shepherds decide to do something about the good news they have received, they go to see the truth of what has been told to them. 

v And because they go they see. But, what do they see? A new born baby in a manger, Joseph and Mary.  We have here another of the themes cherished by Luke, faith.   He does not mention the word, but the scene speaks more eloquently than words. They see a baby and they recognized in that vulnerable baby, as vulnerable as any other baby, the Messiah and Lord.   

v And the shepherds made known the message that had been told about the baby.   

v The first scene ends here.     

The second  scene is about Mary.   

v Mary kept all those things, reflecting on them in her heart. 

o   She kept them, these are her memories. The memories of everything that had to do with the baby:

§  at the annunciation, the reaction of her parents, of Joseph and  the people of Nazareth. 

§   The journey to Bethlehem, during which both Joseph and Mary could share their experience of Mary’s pregnancy,  the baby that was in Mary’s womb. The birth, the shepherds… All of these are her memories.

o   She cherishes them in her heart, meditates on them. Luke does not say that Mary understands, she cannot understand them, they go beyond our human understanding. But she cherishes them, and believes because she trusts in the God who has made the promises to her. Faith is to trust he who has called us to life and has given us his salvation. 

Gospel of the Mass of the Day –  John 1:1-18

Ø  The Gospel for this Mass is taken from the Prologue of John’s Gospel.  Luke has painted, described for us four different scenes related to the birth of Jesus.   

Ø  John leads us into the mystery, he removes the curtain, this is the meaning of revelation, to see what is behind the curtain. He helps us to discover the mystery hidden behind the events and the different characters. 

Ø  In the two former Masses Luke has narrated the birth of Jesus, called Messiah and Lord.   

Ø  The Church, the community of the believers and followers, led by the Spirit sent by Jesus to her, has deepened into the theological meaning of the events related to the birth of Jesus.  Let us hear what John has to say

o   In the beginning  was the Word… and the Word was God.   If we go to the first book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis the first words are “In the beginning…God created… and God said … God says his Word and the abyss becomes a wonderful and beautiful creation.   

o   John continues his theological reflection and says that the Word existed from the beginning, that without him nothing came to be.  But the darkness did not acknowledge it. Our darkness, our own and the that of our society, and of our world cannot understand and accept his light.    

o   John proceeds and says that the light, the Word was in the world, but the world did not acknowledge the Word. 

o   He came to his own and they did not welcome him. Sometimes we think that these words are said of the people of Bethlehem; but I believe that we need to enter into our heart, and to discover in how many ways we do not welcome him into ourselves. Only in this way we will be able to understand the dreadful mystery of the human heart that can refuse to recognize his or her Creator.  

o   To those who did accept him…   According to some commentators verses 12 and 13 refer to the virginal birth of Jesus, and also to our baptism.  

o   And we reach now the climax of the prologue AND THE WORD BECAME FLESH  

§  The creating Word, the Word who is the Eternal Son of the Father. 

§  Became flesh. Flesh means the condition of the sinful and vulnerable human being. Without having any sin, because God cannot sin, he becomes like us, to be able to nail to the cross, as Paul says, our flesh and in so doing to give us his life, the life of the Father’s Son.   

§  He made his dwelling among us, in some translations he “put his tent among.” This sentence makes us think of the nomads, the pilgrims who do not stay in a same place forever.  We are all pilgrims in this world. He puts his tent and lives like anyone of us.     John Paul II in the document for the preparation of the Third Millennium wrote:  he loved with a human heart, he worked with hands of a man, talked… he was and is one of us.    

§  This gospel ends with the words that John will repeat in his Ist Letter. He is fascinated in awe by the truth of what they had experienced living with Jesus “and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.”   

§  THIS IS THE BABY WE CONTEMPLATE IN BETHLEHEM WITH MARY AND JOSEPH, SURROUNDED BY ANIMALS, GREETED  BY THE SHEPHERDS AND PROCLAIMED BY THE ANGELS:      

GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST AND ON EARTH PEACE TO MEN AND WOMEN OF GOOD WILL.

CLARETIAN CORNER

Whoever wants to repair the ruins of my House cannot forget my first entrance in the world. Look the extreme poverty I experienced, because my Mother hardly had what was needed to cover my most holy little body and to warm me the breath of the beasts was necessary. O! poverty of our God!  (Venerable María Antonia París, Foundress of the Claretian Missionary Sisters. First Constitutions  Trat,I, ch 2,2.)

On December 25 God infused in me a love of being persecuted and slandered. The Lord even favored me with a dream the following night. I dreamed that I had been jailed on a charge I was innocent of. Because I considered it a gift from heaven to be treated like Jesus, I was silent, as He had been. Nearly all my friends had abandoned me, as had the friends of Jesus, too. One of my friends wanted to defend me, as Peter had wanted to defend Jesus, but I said to him, "Don't you want me to drink the chalice my Father has prepared for me? St. Anthony Mary Claret, Founder of the Claretian Missionary Sisters, Autobiography 679.