Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

Homily

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Tuesday 24 December and Wednesday 25 December, 2024
St Mary's Cathedral, Perth

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For more than two thousand years, Christians have been gathering together, as we are tonight, to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Sometimes Christians have gathered in beautiful cathedrals such as ours, sometimes they have gathered in much humbler churches, and sometimes they have gathered in burnt-out churches and chapels which have been destroyed by the horrors of war.

We know that many of our sisters and brothers are gathering tonight in such ruined buildings in places like Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and in other places plagued by war and violence. Tonight, in the peace and beauty of our celebration, it is important that we unite ourselves in prayer with those who, like Mary and Joseph at the first Christmas, were living under oppression, discrimination and the threat of violence.

What unites all of us in the midst of all this suffering is our belief in Jesus Christ, whose birth we celebrate tonight. All the prayers, scripture readings and Christmas hymns we will share tonight, and the very fact of our gathering together, all testify that in celebrating the birth of Jesus, we are not simply celebrating a great figure from history. We are celebrating the birth of the man who will become known as the Prince of Peace, the Son of God, the human face of our Heavenly Father’s mercy, the one who brings God down to us and lifts us up to God.

Because we can so easily get caught up in what we might call the “froth and bubble” of Christmas in a society such as ours, it is important that we take the opportunity which this Mass offers us to step away for a moment from the external things and allow ourselves to be drawn into the mystery of Christmas. This mystery is expressed in a few short words from the opening chapter of St John’s Gospel: the Word became flesh and lived among us.

The Word, of course, is God. The most fundamental of all Christian teachings is this: that God, the creator and sustainer of the vast and mysterious universe, the giver of life in all its forms, the one on whom every single one of us depends for his or her existence, should so love and esteem humanity that he becomes one of us in Jesus Christ, so as to reveal to us the very reason why God created us - that we are made for endless life and joy with him - and to show us the way to follow if we are to fulfil this destiny.

What makes this great mystery even more surprising is that the way of Jesus, the way to our eternal destiny, is not the way of power or control, and certainly not the way of violence and domination, but rather the way of simplicity and of humility. We need only to look to the Christmas crib and contemplate Mary and Joseph rejoicing in the birth of Jesus, in a humble and simple stable with only rough and uneducated shepherds as the first witnesses to this amazing event, to understand that the way of Jesus - the way of God’s encounter with us - is indeed the way of humility and simplicity.

By becoming one of us, and by doing so in such a simple and humble and obscure way, it is as if God is signalling to us that if we take him seriously, and stop pushing him to the extreme edges of our lives, then we are in for quite a ride, for it seems to be the way of God that he turns all our expectations inside out and upside down. Through Jesus, God tells us that those who think of themselves as the first and most important will become the last, while those who do not have tickets on themselves will be the very ones who are celebrated and have pride of place in the kingdom of heaven. Through Jesus, God tells us that while we might spend so much of our time accumulating possessions, increasing our wealth and securing our future, it is the poor in spirit, the simple and humble ones, who will have a deeper understanding of the true meaning of life. Through Jesus, God tells us that while we may harbour grudges, nurse resentments and pursue revenge, it is those who forgive, and forgive from the heart, who are living their lives to the full.

One of the great saints of the early Church, Saint Augustine, once said in a prayer, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”. Saint Augustine was right, and the words of his prayer can help us understand why we find the Christmas story so beautiful and so compelling. It is also why, as we enter more fully into the story, we find it more and more challenging. Humility and simplicity are not the ways of the world in which we live. They certainly do not seem to be the ways of worldly success, of ever-increasing financial prosperity, or of coercive power and control over others. But the Christmas story, and the Christian faith, assure us that they are the way to the fullness of life, to true happiness, and to deep and lasting peace.

Pope Francis speaks about all this with a very beautiful phrase. He tells us that “The Son of God, by becoming flesh, summoned us to a revolution of tenderness”. It is not a summon to weakness but to strength; it is not a call to fear and timidity but to courage and boldness. My prayer for all of us this Christmas night is that as we contemplate the child Jesus born in a humble stable, we might experience a revolution of tenderness in our own hearts and in our own lives, a revolution which will spill out into the lives of those we love, those with whom we live, and all those we meet. Then we will know what it means to celebrate the Prince of Peace.