ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Christmas 2005 – Mass of the Day

Fr Ivan Aquilina

We have managed to domesticate the significance of this day and turn it into a Christmas card scene. We have snow scenes of a peaceful starry night, with a very tidy stable, a well-groomed Joseph with an adoring Mary with manicured hands, well-behaved animals and neat shepherds bearing gifts and a blonde blue eyed baby boy smiling and blessing the onlookers. This is a reassuring sight that brings a glow of warmth to our hearts and evokes many happy memories. Indeed this is Christmas as seen through the rosy spectacles of our Victorian forbears. A Christmas without the sting.

By way of going into it one might point to the heartlessness of some people that had no room and above all no time to humanity at its best: to a woman giving birth to new life. A fact that keeps on happening every day also not far from us; just like some of the good folk in Bethlehem we might be too busy to notice. It is interesting that those who were tied up in the business of a census did not have the time to see what was happening in their midst while the Shepherds who lived the sacrament of the present moment rather than the heresy of what comes next did go to the town where generally, they were not very welcome.

Maybe for us one of the first extra gifts that the Christ child shares with us today is the realisation of the importance of living every moment to the full: the sacrament of the here and now redeemed by the love of God.

Caught up as we are in front of the Nativity scene we need to remind ourselves of the bitter reality of this birth. This birth happened as a means to achieve the end. Christ was not born and than through endless options ended up on Calvary. Calvary and the Easter garden are the reason for this season; he was born so that he might die to save us. Today we celebrate the first step towards the completion of the Mystery of Love which we will round up and celebrate on Easter Day.

This is the real meaning of what we celebrate today; God shares our bodily form as a man so that he can lift up our bodily existence to Divine heights. He shares with us our human life so that we can share with Him His divine life. Today He assumes human form; on Easter we are able to assume Divine life. Today our transfiguration begins. We have reason to rejoice!

This truth has tremendous implications on our bodily existence. Some Christians still see the body as an enemy of spiritual life as if the dualism of Descartres still goes unchallenged. This feast day is the biggest challenge to such a distorted concept. God becomes tangible to us in a body, He communicates His word through a body, He gives to us His body in the last supper and on the cross. We believe in his bodily resurrection, and we believe in a bodily resurrection and until than our focus and sustenance is the sharing of the Eucharistic Body and Blood of Christ. Is there a religion that glorifies the body more than ours?

So this great feast day speaks to us also about the importance and respect to our bodily existence, the responsibility of love we are to have towards our body and of those around us. It speaks to us about the ugliness of lust and about the nobility of true chastity: giving ourselves to others in true love. I was brought up on the idea that we give each other gifts on this day as a symbol of the gift God gave us in Jesus Christ and to remind ourselves that we are called, like Jesus, to give ourselves to others. This day speaks to us about living in the freedom of the children of God in the sacrament of the present moment.
My wish for all is that we have a blessed, joyful and peaceful Christmas and that we make right use of this great gift that we have received: our own body. Today God embraced a body to enable us to lift our bodies beyond the horizon of our limitations into the infinite possibilities of the divinity. Indeed this child in the manger is our only hope.