Dec 25: Emmanuel: God with Us

Antoine Pesne: The Birth of Christ
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, 1745

Mass of the Nativity of our Lord at Midnight

Reading I: Is 9:1-6

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness-- on them light has shined (NRSV, Is 9:2).

Tonight, Lord, we celebrate a great mystery. In the dark and cold of a desert night, in the recesses of a shepherd’s cave, a child is born to a new mother barely a woman. Her husband, alone, is there to attend her. The sole eventual witnesses of this event, Luke tells us, are impoverished herdsmen pasturing their sheep on the nearby hills. The times are bad. The people live under the double oppression of foreign occupation and a puppet ruler who is not really their own. But still this birth is a marvelous event, enough to make the angels in heaven sing.

The carrying of every human child is an occurrence that is filled with wonder. Your Son, in each instance, is sent down from on high into the darkness of a woman’s womb and you speak your holy Word, calling another human being into existence. In the power of the Spirit that which was already human life responds with a “yes” that is truly glorious as another human being now sharing in your own divine life comes into existence. How the angels sing with joy: Gloria in excelsis Dei.

Human existence after birth, in the best of times, is not easy. The sin of the world, that complex web of the totality of evil that has ever been committed on earth, surrounds us all, struggling, as something seemingly alive itself, to ensnare us. It brings confusion and temptation into every human life and eventually we collapse under its enticements. Turning against sister and brother we too sin and weave our own additional strands to the treacherous trap.

In the midst of all of life’s vicissitudes, Lord, your Word never abandons us no matter how much we may turn away from you, no matter how much we may surrender ourselves to evil. You are always there in your eternally spoken Word revealing yourself to us once and for all and summoning us to repentance and forgiveness in your Holy Spirit. In every instance, Lord, you offer us further growth in the divine life first breathed into us in the womb.

But now, since that mysterious occurrence in a cave two thousand years ago, your Word is not only pressing in upon us at every moment offering us your life. That very Word, eternally spoken once and for all, has taken upon himself a human body. He has become one of us, not only in the Spirit to strengthen us that we might confront life’s problems but also to be there, as one of us, to stand against every difficulty side by side with us. The Word has become a human being ready even to undergo death with us to show us that we have nothing to fear, that death can really be for us, as well, an “hour of glory.”

How we rejoice, Father, this night for the great love that you show us in all things but especially in the incarnation of your Son. Lord, you are truly Emmanuel, God with us!

Alleluia. Amen.