Dearly beloved, today our Saviour is born; let us rejoice. Sadness should have no place on the birthday of life. The fear of death has been swallowed up; life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness.
So the second sentence above sums up what I was already thinking - how I was judging myself - on Christmas Eve. I knew that Christ's presence in my life has overcome all the petty things in which I was wrapped up, yet couldn't seem to get beyond them. Ultimately, the joy of worshiping together finally overcame my frustrations.
In the fullness of time, chosen in the unfathomable depths of God’s wisdom, the Son of God took for himself our common humanity in order to reconcile it with its creator. He came to overthrow the devil, the origin of death, in that very nature by which he (the devil) had overthrown mankind.
And so at the birth of our Lord the angels sing in joy: Glory to God in the highest, and they proclaim peace to men of good will as they see the heavenly Jerusalem being built from all the nations of the world. When the angels on high are so exultant at this marvellous work of God’s goodness, what joy should it not bring to the lowly hearts of men?
The angels' song seems so distant, beyond my reality somewhere. Sometimes I wish for the opportunity to witness the undeniably miraculous, and in the process I know that I tend to denigrate the circumstantially miraculous which I have experienced. I sometimes think that it is a matter of my faith not being simple enough - all those who seem to experience this type of encounter seem to be far less complicated than I imagine myself to be. I envy them, and yet I cling to my own gifts. "But you should appreciate your own gifts!" you might argue, but it seems to me that there is a difference between appreciating and clinging. The latter has a sense of not being willing to to let go even for the sake of gaining God more fully. The truth is, I have a hard time praying the prayer of St. Ignatius: Take, Lord, receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all I have and call my own. Intellectually, I know that what I will gain far outweighs what I might lose, yet I still seem to lack the faith to truly return these gifts to the care of the One who gave them in the first place.
Beloved, let us give thanks to God the Father, through his Son, in the Holy Spirit, because in his great love for us he took pity on us, and when we were dead in our sins he brought us to life with Christ, so that in him we might be a new creation. Let us throw off our old nature and all its ways and, as we have come to birth in Christ, let us renounce the works of the flesh.
Christian, remember your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Bear in mind who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God’s kingdom.
Through the sacrament of baptism you have become a temple of the Holy Spirit. Do not drive away so great a guest by evil conduct and become again a slave to the devil, for your liberty was bought by the blood of Christ.
I often find that, after a grace-filled season such as Advent or Lent, I quickly fall back into a less focused approach to life in the immediate aftermath of the great feasts for which they prepare us. This reading helped me this morning to remember this tendency and to choose better, for one day, at least.
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