24th and 25th December 2009 : CHRISTMASS : Year C
Midnight Mass / 9:30am : Camillo
Isaiah 9:2-7 : Titus 2:11-14 : Luke 2:1-20
Isaiah 62:6-12 : Titus 3:4-8a : Luke 2:1-20
The central paradox of Christmass is that we all tend to come to this day thinking it’s about a baby and yet the true focus of the Christ Mass is not the baby but the whole gathering of people who find something or other drawing them to this day, this event, this child. More than that – if the baby means anything at all, then the focus is every single human being on this planet.
According to the website worldometers, which claims to provide real time statistics on the world’s population, among other things, at the time I began writing this sentence the world’s population was 6,814,292,943. Having finished writing that sentence and switched back to check the current world population, I now find that it is 6,814,293,112…13…14…15…85 people.
I’m not sure if worldometers is a gimmick but the figures are probably more or less in the proverbial ballpark. That’s a lot of people in just a few seconds. Every one of whom falls within the Living God’s area of care and concern; every one of whom lives and dies as a unique creation of the one creator.
Well, that’s the theory, anyway. I doubt if any of us can grasp how many people that number refers to. As Stalin didn’t say: One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.
So maybe that’s why we find it easier to turn our attention to this newborn baby, remembering his birth year by year and re-telling the story to each new generation.
Needless to say, however, we’ve also become accustomed to the industrial sentimentality that, some would say, has hijacked “our” religious observance. Of course it’s not “ours”. Let’s lay that one to rest quicker than an exhausted parent can put the newborn to bed after rocking him or her to a miraculous sleep…
If God comes into the world and assumes human flesh in the form of this baby, Jesus, then it is for all the world. Remember the paradox? And that means for people who call themselves Christians and those who salute the Jewish flag; for Hindus and Buddhists and atheists and agnostics.
Like it or not.
And yes, Christmas has become commercialised and trivialised and sentimentalised and paralysed in a syrup of sickly goo, no more powerfully symbolised than in the so-called elevator music that assaults our ears the moment we step inside shopping centres. I suspect I’d derive more pleasure from blowing up a brown paper bag and making a loud bang than from continuing to allow this muzak to damage my delicate sensibilities.
But wait! Let me not get carried away with self-righteous superiority as if I have once again forgotten that I and my religious heritage do not own Christmass.
For many of us this music is part of a genuine joy we feel at this time of year. By what authority do the self-appointed arbiters of propriety seek to substitute disapproval or disdain for that joy? Likewise, for many of us the sentiment surrounding the gooing and cooing at the baby Jesus may be our first religious experience. By what authority does anyone assume that it won’t be our last or only religious experience? Does anyone really believe that the Living God is helpless in the face of muzak and mush?
When the kid in the crib grew up he said something about not judging, I seem to recall. And I know I’ve said this before, and I promise I’ll say it again, just as I’m about to say it now: we all have far too much to do just trying to follow Jesus faithfully to worry about anyone else’s beliefs.
Our faith – and we have to agree with Richard Dawkins here – is not a rational system. It can’t be. It’s a willing surrender into the mystery of a Being we call God whom we believe has somehow communicated with us. The story of the birth in Bethlehem is part of that communication. The other characters – Mary, Joseph, the shepherds; in Matthew’s gospel, the Magi – are part of a communication that tells us that something extraordinarily special and different takes place here in this narrative.
In many ways it resembles birth stories from other cultures and other belief systems. A god is born into the world, in human form. But in this story so many genre elements are missing. This baby isn’t rich, powerful or privileged. He’s not born in an important geo-political region. And what’s most remarkable, perhaps, is the absence of violence attending his conception and birth.
In the myths and legends of other cultures violence is a central part of the birth narratives of godly offspring, often in the form euphemistically-described rape. In the Jesus story this does not happen.
It’s a telling reminder of last Sunday’s observation – the radical social conscience of Mary, passed on to her son, Jesus, takes a non-violent cue from the very beginning. Here we have the birth of another who will show how well and profoundly he understands the pronouncement of the Hebrew scriptures: I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
At this point we might want to ask why it is that showing mercy seems to be such a difficult thing. After all, isn’t it a lot cleaner, less blood-thirsty, less putrid and smelly, and considerably less violent than sacrifice?
Of course it is! But mercy – or any other form of lovingkindness and compassion – demand connection, interaction, engagement. That is always an extremely difficult task. It asks a great deal to reach out unconditionally to another human being. Far easier to keep it distant, symbolic, stylised and definitely familiar.
Ultimately, it’s the old difference between being and doing. Sacrifice in biblical terms is an action. Being merciful, on the other hand, involves relationship – and relationship expressed authentically is about being.
Always more difficult, more demanding – because authentic relationship requires profound self-knowledge, especially with regard to our motives, needs and desires.
It’s little wonder that we so easily become uber-sentimentalised at Christmass. Because the sentimental makes few, if any demands of our self, our being, our soul. Yet the heart of spirituality is the totally irrational surrender to mystery I mentioned earlier. Trusting something we can’t see and can’t demonstrate using the scientific method.
Of course the flaw in the rationalist argument is the assumption that this is the only way and kind of knowing that is legitimate. It clearly isn’t. Finding the loving, redeeming, compassionate, global-directed essence of the Living God in a vulnerable and helpless baby who will remain dependent on his parents, to one extent or another, for the next twelve years of his life shows us that it is possible to enter relationship, to take risks, to be vulnerable and self-giving.
Yes we do need to remember that Jesus grew up, that Bethlehem becomes Nazareth and Capernaum and eventually, horrifically, Jerusalem.
But we also need to remember that the grown Jesus still needs our own love, compassion, vulnerability and willingness to take risks as we seek him in the only places we will ever find him in flesh and blood – in other people, in their pain and suffering, in their lostness, in their hopelessness, their rejection, their oppression.
The birth of Jesus – however it happened, wherever it happened – is the invitation to seek relationship with him in other people. It will not be easy – it never is.
But if we are willing to make that move then we will make real God’s love and the offer of God’s hope in a world now even more desperately in need of them.
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