Christmas December 25, 2021
Fr. Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
There’s just something about a good beginning, isn’t there? When you first crack open a great book… when the last preview ends and the movie’s title screen comes up… the first day of college… your wedding day… the birth of a child… There’s a sense of possibility, of openness, of hope for more to come.
I think perhaps that’s one reason so many people love Christmas. New gifts to enjoy, new memories to make. Not only is it just a week away from New Years, it’s a birthday, the beginning of the extraordinary life of Jesus Christ. It conveys this sense of something cosmic… that goodness begins again, that we can hope for peace because of what began that day 2000 years ago. And really, it was the beginning of an entire era of history. The whole world divides time into before and after Christ, acknowledging that his birth began something new. Even when secularists insist on using BCE and CE for “common era” instead of BC and AD… they’re still basing it on the same point in time… what this era has in common is that it takes places after the birth of Jesus.
Yes, Christmas is a beginning and that’s part of what we love about it. But that feeling of beginning doesn’t last, does it? Beginnings fade into the middle of things and eventually come to an end. The joy of Christmas fades into New Year’s which fades into going back to work, to school, to ordinary life. Some people almost immediately start counting down until the next Christmas, waiting to recapture that hope, the joy, that time of year pregnant with meaning and possibility.
Why is that? Births and weddings and jobs might begin with excitement, but who hasn’t gotten to the hum drum, the dragging along? Why can’t life be more like the great book, the wonderful movie that pulls you in right at the beginning, holds you tight, brings you up, down, and sideways before coming to an ending partly expected, partly surprising, and wholly satisfying?
Because that’s reality, right? Myth, legend, fiction, fantasy – these condense the boring, gloss over the tedious, and keep us on the highlights. Life just can’t be like that. That’s true… well, it’s partly true. Myth and legend are rooted in history and there’s a reason the word “history” contains the word “story.” The Lord knows Christmas has its fair share of myths and legends attached to it, hinting at something of what we’re after in this celebration. Still, boredom is a part of life… but, life is – or should be – part of a greater story, one that can satisfy in a way no mere myth could hope… if we’re paying attention to it.
That’s what brings us here, right? The story of Jesus Christ. No serious historian denies that he really existed, but how much of that story is real? That story that fundamentally reshaped how we view the world, how we count time, how we structure society… how much of the beginning of the story – or the rest of it for that matter – is really just myth and legend trying to inject excitement into something that is perhaps a little boring if left to itself?
No doubt, there are many myths and legends around Jesus Christ – from birth to death and beyond – but the truth is stranger than fiction. You often hear the slogan, “keep Christ in Christmas.” The Peanuts Christmas special famously insisted on doing this by having the scriptural story of Christ’s birth proclaimed right at the climax of the cartoon. That strange truth – the virgin birth, angels, moving stars – it’s true. Keep Christ in Christmas. But it doesn’t stop there, as you yourselves bear witness to by being here tonight. There’s the other half: “keep Mass in Christmas.” At the heart of this beginning, this story of Jesus Christ, is myth made real.
Jesus is not some astounding guru, some inspired rabbi. Jesus. Is. God. If he is not, we are all wasting our time right now. Our savior is not just a great man, but God-made-man, Emmanuel, Divinity married to humanity. This beginning is not the beginning of a movement, a philosophy, a moral code. It is the beginning of a relationship between God and his people made possible because he became one of us. The virgin birth? It is true. The angels singing? True. Miracles of healing, walking on water, raising the dead, multiplying food, and finally the resurrection? All true. It is true or I deserve death for so badly misleading so many. And I pray I have the courage to choose death rather than deny any of it, because it is true.
And the best part? The birth of Jesus, the myth-made-real of Christmas is the beginning of a story that still goes on, a story to which we all belong! Better than the latest Spider-man, better than the Lord of the Rings, better than all of the greatest stories, we are in this story even now and, if we know how to see it, the essence of that excitement, the deepest part of that hope that we find in every beginning is still there, accessible, able to be fulfilled in a narrative and ending that surpasses our wildest hopes. God became man to make us like God.
Do not let this beginning go to waste! The decorations will come down (not too soon!), school and work will resume, the season will pass, but the heart of what you love – or of what you wish you could love – about this season… that heart still beats. I cannot promise you all boredom will be gone. Boredom, like suffering, illness, and death, is a consequence of that beginning before this one – the beginning where human beings chose to reject the greatest story to try to write their own. We’ve been writing that tragedy ever since. But God has not stopped writing and this beginning, the best of beginnings that is Christmas, is an invitation to step out of the tragedy of humankind into the divine comedy, the eternal victory written by God.
Jesus was not just born and died and gone. He still lives. That heart beats in the Mass at the heart of Christmas. No longer visible in human flesh, he is visible in the Eucharist – bread and wine mythically, mystically, and actually transformed into the body and blood born all those years ago… made present now to see by faith, to receive not just once every now and then, but continually, consistently, consciously.
That best of beginnings, the birth of our savior is accessible in every confession, no matter how many times it is the same sin, where you begin again to walk in the grace won for us by God made man, crucified and risen. By this grace, the tragedy of humankind is woven back into the triumph of God and even our greatest sorrows can be transformed, given meaning where there seems to be none, and eventually overcome.
There’s something about a beginning. Not that Christmas is a beginning like others, but Christmas is the beginning that gives all other beginnings their power, their attraction. This is because Christmas is when eternity and infinity step into time and space to invite us back into itself. Christmas is the beginning of a joy that transcends all else that begins because it never ends. What God has begun in you, what will you make of it? Will you turn aside to write the tale of woe and sin that is the only thing humanity can write on its own? Or will you stay to the story, become part of that legend of love that is not only inspiring and uplifting and heart-warming, it is true.