In Nativitate Domini

Merry Christmas, friends.

May the dawn of the new creation draw us in and be the refreshment and renovation of our hearts and minds! I'm on the road for Christmas and Holy Family weekend, but I left this post to publish itself in my absence. I've posted this text before, but I remain happy with it. It's a homily for the Christmas Mass in nocte that I wrote as part of the final exam for a course on the Blessed Trinity:


Rejoice, friends, for the mystery of Christmas is the revelation of God’s loving plan for our salvation. “The grace of God has appeared,” as Paul tells us. The human birth of the Son of God reveals the mystery that God indeed has a son. Our God is a perfect love, and what is love that does not love someone? Therefore from all eternity there is lover and beloved in God, the Father and the Son.

Be assured that this Son of God whose human birth we adore tonight is God himself, “light from light,” and “true God from true God” as we shall soon pray in the creed. Paul himself calls him “our great God and savior.”

While contemplating the poor and simple birth of the Lord, let us pay attention to our attitude toward the mystery. Is it just that we have awe for the humility of the God who was willing to accept not only the poverty of our nature but to be born among simple parents in an obscure nation? Is Christmas here to teach us to be humble too? I assure you that the Son of God is much more than a role model, though he is surely that as well. Paul tells us that this appearance of the grace of God will, in fact, “deliver us from all lawlessness” and “cleanse” us, making us into God’s own people.

This is the great good news of Christmas: the Son of God is born in our human nature and thus provides our human nature a path to the divine life of God that he himself has been from all eternity. By becoming one of us, the infinite love that the Son has always received is now extended to us through the human nature of Jesus Christ.

The Incarnation connects the divine with the human, extending God’s life to us. This sacred exchange is voiced in the preface to tonight’s Eucharist prayer when it says that in Christ we see “our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see.” This stretching forth, as it were, of the eternal love of Father and Son to us is what we call the Holy Spirit. The Incarnation of God establishes a path for our human nature to be brought back to God, and God’s Spirit draws us in. This is what we mean when we say that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit; the Spirit of God, God’s desire to be known, works in the Incarnation so that God’s saving plan may be known.

This is good news! The birth of Jesus Christ reveals the new availability of the infinitely beautiful and satisfying love that is the personal life of God himself. This is our adoption into the eternal Sonship of Christ himself, through which we become the true children of God. We rejoice tonight for, through the human birth of Christ, the Holy Spirit includes us in the eternal and perfect relationship of the Lover whom we call Father and the Beloved whom we call the Son. And this is the grand and mysterious reality that we call God.