Dear Friends in Christ:                                  Dec 25, 2006, midnight mass

A midnight mass has its own character and atmosphere quite different from any other mass of the year. The night represents an obscure, often-time sinful, usually disoriented, world or culture. The gospel reading [the account of the birth of Jesus in Chapter 2 of St. Luke’s gospel] extends and heightens the drama of Advent: it is not a cry in the wilderness, but a loud trumpet blast, a celestial choir with myriads of angels and saints, spelling out the good news that proclaims glory to God and peace to earth, and demands a quick journey from a group of wretched shepherds. And yet, when you arrive to Bethlehem, you find not just the poetry but the immense poverty of a child wrapped in waddling clothes, with a Virgin Mother and a noble but impoverished and old man.

You forget your prejudices, and you do not know which detail to sample: Caesar Augustus closing, by sheer coincidence, the Temple of Janus and thus creating, as a birthday present for Jesus, one of the few peace times of ancient Rome. Or the Virgin, kneeling before her son, worshipping the God to whom she gave a share of her and our humanity. Or the shepherds as the remnant of Israel believing in their newborn Messiah. Or maybe the kings from Orient, the Magi who with precious gifts and extraordinary fatigue hit the ground in adoration before the Light of the Nations, the “Lumen Gentium”, the Torch to be held high by the Church in order to dissipate the dark and to surround mankind in the light of reason and faith all at once.

My preference goes to one single thought, the one that Pope Benedict announced a year ago in his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est. God is love and therefore there is no other way to put an end to our exile from paradise than to move into the house where the Baby is with Mary and Joseph and dwell there. For he who dwells in love dwells in God and God in him. The mystery of Christmas is God’s last word of to mankind -- not because he ran out of things to say exhausted, or we have been so bad that this is his last call and thereafter we can decide how to mess up our lives on our own. Quite the contrary is true: this last word he has planned for all eternity – this is the last word, because this is the fullness of times. There is no more that even God can say to his lost sheep – to his human creature gone astray -- than the word implied in the Christmas events: “with everlasting love have I loved you, and now I came as a child, asking for a place on earth, a lifetime companionship with you, a new covenant in which I am a fellow human being and you are my fellow human beings. Since the project “I am your God and you are my people” has not worked, here I come with the last word about the old project: I am one of you, mortal, temporal, crying for food, asking for drink, begging for clothes, patting the animals, looking at the stars, and you my fellow human beings, mending your ways, wandering in the darkness and seeing the light – following the light, listening to my teaching and starting to treat each other as I treat you and as you want to be treated.

I announce you great joy, a message of joy for the whole world. Millions of years spent wondering in the night and the desert of history amidst intellectual ignorance, fear and longing, you can finally reach out to your God who manifests his love for sinful man.

The Christmas message is only the first part of the good news – the second part follows only thereafter, it is pre-figured in the manger, in the coldness of the winter night, the poverty of the Virgin and Child, and the persecution which follows after the arrival of the Magi. God was born as a man not for taking a Christmas vacation on earth. He was born in order to be able to suffer and die. And he died so that he would rise on the third day.

There is nothing more beautiful and uplifting than the face a little child; and normally there is nothing more distressing than the face of a dying person ready to expire. And yet God became man, so that he could die for us and with us. Every time a person is born into the world what lies ahead is a great deal of suffering, crisis and conflict, where a mortal body eventually has to lose its battle to live and face the inevitable. When sending his Son in the world, God foresaw and foretold that becoming a man he was also destined to die and to die a shameful and excruciating death after being betrayed and defeated. He wanted that so that we could embrace our destiny, the challenges and tribulation we await not only with a sense of acceptance, but also purpose, a certain kind of humble heroism fitting for the cross of Christ. In hoc signo vinces: “in this sign you will conquer” – Constantine the Great was told as he entered the greatest battle of his life. And St. Johns first letter cries out with a sense of triumph: “the victory that conquers the world is our faith.” (1 John 5:4).

God took flesh so that he might be a companion in our fleshly existence. We celebrate Jesus’ birthday by asking him to lead us into our own battles, our own challenges, the small and great trials and crises, the physical pain, the mental anguish, the dark moments of confused signals, fearful losses, painful separations, renunciations and sacrifices, large and small, massive and trivial. This is the only Baby that embraced you and your life before you were able to embrace him. He is the only person in the world who ensures you that you are never left alone. He is the only one who can grant you a dignity by which you are not a pathetic beggar of love, but a happy giver and taker of the greatest gift of God. This night tells us: GOD IS LOVE AND HE WHO ABIDES IN LOVE, ABIDES WITH GOD AND GOD IN HIM.