Well, we got through the end of the year (the end of the world), and through Thanksgiving, and even Black Friday. We’re now on the glide path to Christmas, right?
So what’s with today’s readings? Our first reading, if you squint a bit, might be looking forward to a merry Christmas – and since it’s from Jeremiah, we know it’s got to be a bit miserable (Jer 33:14-16). We’ll just wait for Isaiah to roll around to get fully into the Christmas spirit, complete with eggnog and holly.
Paul tells us to behave ourselves (1 Thes 3:12—4:2), which is fair enough, but hardly uplifting. So maybe the Gospel will get us straightened out and headed in the right direction – peace, love and goodwill – that’s what we expect, isn’t it?
Unfortunately the gospel reading (Lk 21:25-28, 34-36) doesn’t help either. It seems to be carrying a lot of that end of the world baggage. People dying of fright and imminent tribulations doesn’t sound much like a build up to Christmas.
Perhaps of all our holidays – which really are Holy Days – Christmas is the most encumbered with baggage. Maybe tying it back to what we were saying, only two weeks ago, about the end of the world will help our perspective.
Even if we strip away the commercialism and the schmaltzy muzak we probably still want to feel Christmas as a retreat into an idealized world of shepherds and angels and babies and goodwill. Taking a retreat can be a good and necessary thing, and if we are able to achieve that at Christmas it is for sure a blessing. But there is also a risk. The Christmas of our scriptures and our liturgy doesn’t easily fit into that mould.
The birth of Christ is indeed the ultimate intervention of God in human life, a radical remaking of our world, but it wasn’t and isn’t an escape from the challenges and complexity of our lives. St Francis of Assisi introduced the ox and the ass into the Christmas tableau to make it more real to his audience of poor farmers. For us the equivalent might be a birth in a migrant “facility” on one of our borders. And if you prefer to take the message direct from scripture without any interpretation, remember the Christmas story comes complete with a massacre, of babies. There is no outburst of goodwill in this world.
The reality of Christmas is that God became flesh and blood in our actual world, a world full of fear and tribulations. He didn’t provide an escape from that world, he transformed it. The transformation is not something out there that we have to go find, or run away to, it’s a transformation inside us. That transformation won’t remove the tribulations, it may help with the fear. For it to have any effect at all it has to change us, and we have to believe in that change. That’s more of a challenge than buying presents and dealing with the family stresses of the season. Insofar as we achieve it then we will be safe and secure, living in a land ruled by justice, even when the world around us doesn’t seem any different.
For all the tribulations that Jeremiah suffered:
Cursed be the day on which I was born!
May the day my mother gave me birth never be blessed!
Why did I come forth from the womb,to see sorrow and pain,
to end my days in shame? (Jer 20: 14,18)
his message that we hear today is one of hope:
In those days Judah shall be safe
and Jerusalem shall dwell secure;
this is what they shall call her:
“The LORD our justice.”