Bringing Christmas With Us
Bringing Christmas With Us
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
I pray that you and your families are enjoying a blessed Christmas season, and that the Year of Our Lord (AD – Anno Domini) 2024 is off to a great start, as well.
For some reason this year I have been particularly aware of the superabundant richness of the feasts celebrated annually by the Catholic Church in this Christmas season.
The Christmas season has always been a time to refocus our attention on the astounding gift of the Incarnation, and to contemplate again the glory of the love and mercy our God has for us.
In the Nativity of Our Lord at Christmas, we see the incomprehensible magnificence of the Divine Providence of God. The Almighty and eternal God takes on our human nature, and in uniting our broken, wounded nature to his divine nature becomes for us Emmanuel – God with us – in such a humble, intimate way, that it defies all description. When we see the helpless Christ child, lying in a manger, we begin to see just how much God loves us, and the lengths to which He would go to save us.
Small wonder, then, that the Christmas season is filled with feasting, or that the feasts constantly place before us the reality of Emmanuel, God with us, and often in stark contrast with the darkness of a world that, still today, so often rejects Him, and those who follow and proclaim him.
God has, indeed, become one of us, and become one with us. Emmanuel has come among us to show us the merciful face of Our Father who art in heaven. Emmanuel has come among us to lead us home to the Father, if only we will follow Him. Emmanuel has come among us to show us how to live in obedience to the two greatest commandments – love of God, and love of neighbor.
But from the very first moments of the Christmas story, we see that Christ is truly a light shining in the darkness. St. John assures us that the darkness has not overcome this divine light, but – then as now – the darkness never ceases to oppose it. The Christmas feasts do not shy away from this grim reality, but neither do they end with it, instead they show forth the great and luminous hope that, despite the ever-present darkness of the Enemy’s deception and malevolence in the world, the light of Christ has shone in the darkness, “and the darkness has not overcome it.”
Immediately after the Nativity of Our Lord, on December 26th, we have the Feast of St. Stephen (my patronal feast) which shows us, in the martyrdom of St. Stephen, the reality of what Jesus promised when he said the world will treat his followers in just the same way it treated him. Nonetheless, this feast also reveals the supernatural grace, peace, and power Christ grants the martyrs at the moment of their ultimate sacrifice for the faith – the grace not just to stand firm and endure the worst the world can do, but the even greater grace to forgive, as Jesus did, those who kill them.
Two days later, on December 28th, we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating those nameless babies sacrificed to the satanic pride and cruelty of Herod. It takes no imagination at all, in an age of legalized abortion, to see the connection to our own day, and to realize that the Enemy has never stopped bending his malevolence against innocence and childhood.
On the Sunday after Christmas, we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family. Here again, in an age where marriage and family life seem to be falling apart all around us, the image of the Holy Family fleeing into exile in Egypt reminds us that the Holy Family is a gift to our families. The Holy Family stands ready at every moment to intercede for us, to protect us, and to guide us to God’s will for our marriages and families, but they are not just some distant ideal of perfection. The Holy Family is also a family that endures true suffering, a family that also has to face danger and an unknown future, a family that was uprooted and lost everything secure and familiar, but which, in the end, placed its faith in God and obediently went wherever His will took them.
On January 1st we celebrate Mary, Mother of God. This beautiful feast, a holy day of obligation, reminds us that the glorious story of Christmas, of the Christ Child, God incarnate, Emmanuel, God with us, is inseparable from the story of Mary’s history-shaping “Yes” to the will of God.
Jesus entrusts his Mother to us, and entrusts us to His Immaculate Mother. Mary is the very embodiment of the world-changing power of true and total surrender to the God’s will. She is both our model and our mother – the model disciple of Jesus Christ, and Mother of God, Mother of the Savior, Mother of the Church, and Mother of Christians. Not a day should go by that we don’t entrust ourselves to her maternal care and guidance, and we would do most well to live, with real intentionality and commitment, in obedience to her final words in the Gospel, “Do whatever He tells you.”
On the Sunday following the Feast of Mary, Mother of God, we celebrate the Epiphany. The Magi, the three wise men, foreign kings, who arrive to pay homage to Jesus reveal an entirely new dimension in God’s plan of salvation – Jesus is savior not just of the Jews, but Lord and savior of all the nations. We, too, must come and bow down before the baby King, Lord of all Nations and Savior of all mankind. We, too, must worship Him and bring him our very best.
And, finally, we close out the Christmas season with the Baptism of the Lord. As Jesus goes down into the waters of the Jordan River to be baptized by John, He consecrates the waters of baptism that have cleansed all of us. He claims as His own all those who will follow Him into the waters of baptism. As we follow Jesus up out of the waters of baptism, Our Heavenly Father speaks over us the same words of love He spoke over Jesus on that day, “Behold my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” And just as the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus as He comes up from the waters of baptism, so that same Holy Spirit descends on us at our baptism, freeing us from sin, and giving us the life of the Holy Trinity in our souls.
These are the beautiful feasts of the Christmas season, each of them a reminder of the living presence of Emmanuel, God with us; each of them a reminder of our call to live our faith courageously, like Stephen, under the protection of the Holy Family, devoted to our Blessed Mother, and filled with the Holy Spirit, so that we, too, can bring the luminous presence of the Incarnate Word of God to all nations, allowing him to dispel the darkness in us, and through us, as we do.
The beginning of the new Church year prepares us well to surrender and sanctify the new calendar year. So, as we move forward from this blessed, glorious Christmas season, let us recognize that we are being called by Our Lord to follow Him to the end, and to be joyful missionary disciples willing to suffer and sacrifice for the Gospel in all we do.
Jesus is, truly, Emmanuel, God with us. We have welcomed Him again this Christmas, now let us take Him with us into this new year, consecrating ourselves, and our lives, with His presence, and bearing witness to the great good news of the God who so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son.
May the Holy Family bless, protect, and inspire your families, now and always!
In Christ,
Steve