What Kind of a Christmas Story Do You Want to Hear?
The Nativity of the Lord
What kind of a story do you—the faithful, the parishioners, the people out there in the pews—want to hear about the birth of Christ when you come Christmas Mass? I think that is the question behind much of the drama that unfolds in some parishes in the last weeks of Advent. Maybe you know this or maybe you don’t, but the Church assigns a different set of readings to each of the Christmas liturgies: the Vigil Mass, Mass at midnight, Mass at dawn, and Mass during the day. Four sets of readings for four different liturgies, each liturgy and each set of readings designed to get at some unique truth about the Incarnation of God—the birth of Christ. Here is, I think, the genius of the Church. There is no single story that captures the glory of the Incarnation. The Church knows this. The Incarnation, the birth of Christ, is like a prism turning on a string, the light of Christ illuminating the darkness of our lives, a light that refracts and then colors the shadows of our sorrow with its own irreducible intensity, depending upon which face of the prism we confront. The Church knows this.
The drama that unfolds in some parishes reduces to the claim that you—the faithful, the parishioners, the people out there in the pews—only want to hear about the birth of Christ as we know the story from the Gospel of Luke: the taking of a census, the no room at the inn, the manger, the angels, the shepherds, the swaddling clothes. Who wants to hear seventeen verses on the genealogy of Christ at a Christmas Mass, as we just did? Or who wants to hear an esoteric proclamation about a Word that was there in the beginning and was with God and was God and who was there in the beginning with God, as those who come to Mass tomorrow morning will hear from the Gospel of John? A decision needs to be made about which set of readings to use at the Christmas liturgies. Most parishes, it seems to me, decide to take the readings from midnight Mass—with the Christmas story as we know it in Luke’s Gospel—and use those readings at each liturgy. Give the people the Christmas story, the story they know and love, runs the argument. And the argument has its merits.
We spent enough time talking about our choice of readings here at the Basilica, going back and forth in conversation for the last couple of weeks, before deciding to use the readings for each liturgy as the Church assigns them. Why make that choice? Well, there are a few answers to the question. The first thought that comes to mind is that this is what the Church asks of us. And then there is that prismatic reality to the Incarnation: each of the readings radiates the glory of Christ’s light in its own way, a light that shines in the darkness, and a light that the darkness cannot overcome. Why make the choice to reduce the light of Christ to a single intensity of color?
My final answer gets back to the question I asked you not long ago: What kind of a story do you want to hear about the birth of Christ when you come to Christmas Mass? The Christmas story is not a fairytale. Yes, there are angels singing and animals in a manger. Yes, there are shepherds who are fearful of a power that is beyond them and there is plenty of family drama—a young mother giving birth to a child far from home. The story of Christ’s birth in the Gospel of Luke is full of these fantastical elements. But no one dies for a fairytale. No one experiences conversion from the grip of addiction or sin because of a fairytale. No one is miraculously healed through the telling of fairytales and no one makes the most important decisions there are to make in life because of stories told to them when they were young.
The Incarnation of Christ is not a fairytale. The Incarnation is an event in human history—a human history that is consumed by sin and evil without Christ. The genealogy of Christ given in Matthew’s Gospel makes it clear to us both the depths of our depravity without God and the depths of God’s love for us. The lives of Christ’s ancestors are astounding: David was an adulterer and a murderer; Judah sold his brother into slavery; Ahaz an idolator who sacrificed his son to a foreign god; Joash ordered the murder of the prophet Zechariah; Manasseh practiced witch craft and offered his own son in a fire to the Cannanite God Molech; Solomon abandoned his God for the sake of lust. The genealogy of Christ that is given to us in Matthew’s Gospel is consumed by sin and evil.
There is nothing fanciful at all—no hint of fable nor fairytale—about the history of the world into which God enters through the Incarnation. The story of our human history is far too broken and violent for bedtime stories and children’s fiction. But the story of our human history is not too broken and violent for the love of God. God claims our tragic history for himself. And Christ, there wrapped in his swaddling clothes in the vulnerable flesh of a child, is the light shining out into the darkness of our world, a light that the darkness cannot overcome. Christ gives us a light for which people die. Christ gives us a light that bestows the power of conversion so that we might live free from the bondage of sin and addiction. Christ gives a light that heals and restores, a light that becomes the foundation for making the most important decisions that we will ever make in the lives that have been given to us. The history of the world changes because of the birth of Christ—and every one of you knows that is a fact, an incontrovertible truth, regardless of the strength of your faith or the love you have for God. The history of the world changes because of Christ.
The question remains: What kind of a story do you want to hear about the birth of Christ when you come to Christmas Mass? The Incarnation of Christ is not a fairytale. My guess is that you won’t die for a fairytale or find yourself free from addiction and sin because of a famous bedtime story or change the course of your life because of a fiction told to children. And there, I think, is the real challenge with which we are confronted at Christmas. If we are not changed because of the light of Christ who shines into the darkness of our lives—if we are not living differently, making different kinds of choices, seeing the world as redeemed and restored through Christ and not as some theater consumed by sin and evil—if we are not changed because of the light of Christ who shines into the darkness of our lives, then it does not really matter what kind of a story we want to hear about the birth of Christ. Because we will have turned the Incarnation of God into a fairytale, a fable, a pious story told to children. We need to be living differently because of Christmas.
Homily preached on December 24th, 2022 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary