Gospel Commentary Dec. 25, Jn 1:1-18
“Beloved, our Savior was born today, let us be glad, for there is no proper place for sadness when we keep the birthday of Life!” With these words, Pope Leo I begins his most famous Christmas homily, urging his hearers to perfect and total joy. This is certainly a familiar theme for us today as we sing “Joy to the World” and wish one another a “Merry Christmas!” Yet, what is the source of this Christmas joy? Certainly, we don’t want to think on sources of sorrow today, but when so many frightening and distressing things surround us — wars, sicknesses, political instability, cultural tensions, relationship struggles, family conflicts and personal crises — what does Christmas joy really mean? Are we not just focusing on the good for a brief moment to give ourselves passing relief? We know that Jesus himself is the “reason for the season” and the heart of true Christmas happiness, but what does that joy mean when more than 2,000 years after his birth, we still bear earthly burdens? What has the Christ child brought us, if “peace on earth” seems like it still eludes us?
There is an answer to this question — moreover in finding it, we find the way to a joy greater than anything even a perfect and peaceful world could ever offer.
We can discover that answer by returning to St. Leo’s Christmas sermon. Reading further, we hear Pope Leo give the reason for the joy we have on “the birthday of life.” He says that this Nativity of Jesus “destroys the fear of mortality and brings to us the joy of promised eternity.” In other words, the birth of Christ tells us that heaven is open to us, that friendship with God is possible, that even our sins cannot keep us from the Father’s love, and that God’s own life can now belong to us. Pope Leo, in thinking on the baby Jesus, is not seeing only the Bethlehem cave and manger, but the entire story of salvation. He is not seeing merely the Nativity scene, but the glory of all heaven, open to us in the heart of the newborn king. Christmas, for Pope Leo, is not just a silent moment of winter peace, a contemplation of Joseph’s virtue, Mary’s goodness, or the innocence and humility of the Christ child, but an event of power, containing within it the entire weight of God’s saving action.
The opening prayer for Mass on Christmas Day, also composed by Pope Leo, puts this truth into even more astounding terms: “O God, who wonderfully created the dignity of human nature and still more wonderfully restored it, grant we pray that we may come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” Not only do we consider that Christmas is the beginning of our salvation from sin and death, but we hear how that is to happen, namely, through a great exchange. Christ has taken on human nature, and in return, we now share in his divinity. This is Christmas joy in all its fullness. Not only has the Lord come to dwell among us in our wounded and often futile world here below, but he has joined us to himself through baptism, so we might follow him into his perfect and ever-radiant world. We rejoice on the birthday of life not because Christ has fixed our temporary life here below, but because he has offered us his own life that neither changes nor fades. If we have the courage to follow the little Lord Jesus back to the place from which he came, then in joy that does not end, we too will sing with the angels, “Glory to God in the highest.” Merry Christmas!
Fr. Rampino is parochial vicar of St. Ambrose Church in Annandale.
Corpus Christi