Homily for Midnight Mass

December 25, 2023
Saint Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

Isaiah 9:1-6
Psalm 96: 1-2, 2-3, 11-12, 13
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14

We heard in our second reading the words of Saint Paul written to Titus, “The grace of God has appeared, saving all and training us to reject godless ways and worldly desires and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age, as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of our great God and savior Jesus Christ.”

The Old Testament records in the Law and the prophets that the human condition wounded by the sin of Adam prompted human beings to run away in fear whenever encountering the Lord God. Because of this fear became the default position for human behavior even as God sought to save them through the Law given to Moses or the preaching and example of the prophets who cried out that God desired His People to return to Him.

The medieval theologian William of Saint Thierry once said that God – from the time of Adam – saw that his grandeur provoked resistance in human beings, that we felt limited in our own being and threatened in our freedom. So tonight, we celebrate the new way that God chose to come to us. He became a poor infant. He made himself weak and completely dependent on others. He placed Himself not in a palace, or even an inn, but in an impure stable.  He appeared trusting and in need of our love. Now – this God who has become a child says to us – “you can no longer fear me, you can only love me.”

Two thousand years later after Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, this new way of God’s appears fresh and awe inspiring in its newness as we come together in this Cathedral – called to the light amidst darkness. The way that God has chosen to train us to reject godless ways of lawlessness is by becoming fully human and showing us our own humanity in its created and redeemed glory.

The Ten Commandments alone written on stone tablets are no longer enough. The words of the prophets spoken with dramatic zeal are no longer enough. So, God has chosen not only to command us nor to direct us on how to reject godless ways of lawlessness. He instead has decided to show us by becoming fully human in Jesus Christ through the “yes” of the Virgin Mary.

The angels’ hymn of this revelation shows even their surprise and awe at God’s ingenious simplicity. The angels have always sung to God giving glory to Him in the highest for His power. They have praised Him in the majesty of the universe’s limitless expanse, in the created order and the beauty of nature that comes from Him and reflects Him.

As Pope Benedict XVI once described the newness of this event, “now something new had happened, something that astounded the angels. The One of whom the universe speaks, the God who sustains all things and bears them in His hands – He himself had entered into human history, He had become someone who acts and suffers within history. From the joyful amazement that this unimaginable event called forth, from God’s new and further way of making Himself known, a new song was born, one verse of which the Christmas Gospel has preserved for us: ‘Glory to God in the highest heavens and peace to his people on earth’.” God is now one in a new way with humanity.

The message of Christ’s Nativity is that to approach the glory of God in the highest we must approach Him in the lowest and most humble – the poor Infant lying surrounded by Mary and Joseph, seeking refuge in a dark stable crowded by animals in a Bethlehem. The manger scene in this Cathedral and in our homes carries the joy of this message even more clearly than words. We must bow down to approach the Infant in the manger, we cannot follow from a distance. We bow down so we can hear His cries for our love and for our compassion and then rise again in humility with our humanity renewed to find Him again present in other human beings in need of the same.

When one makes a pilgrimage to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, one can only enter the site of Jesus’ birth through a doorway that is just under five feet tall. This door was once about eighteen feet tall but was bricked up for defense so as to prevent soldiers from entering on horseback. In order to find the Divine Infant, we must stoop down from our false opinions and dismount the high horse of secularism and intellectual pride because these prevent us from becoming small and low enough to embrace God in His closeness. In finding the Divine Infant, we receive our true and full humanity.

The Grace of Christmas humbles us to bend down with courage and hope, to pass through the portal of faith and encounter God who is so different from the false idols of our fears and ideals, the true God who both reveals and conceals Himself in the humility of a newborn baby, who trains us “to reject godless ways and worldly desires and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age, as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of our great God and savior Jesus Christ.”