St. Luke reminds us what Christmas is all about

Bishop Peter Muhich
Homily from the Televised Mass, NewsCenter1
Christmas Mass, December 25, 2022

Today in the city of David a savior has been born for you, who is Christ and Lord.

We love Christmas. We love Christmas. The colored lights, Christmas programs and concerts, Nativity scenes, shopping, certainly receiving gifts, giving gifts. Warm feelings; people seem to kind of warm up at this time of the year, have more goodwill. There are lots of parties with great food and drink. The music. It goes on and on. You and I love Christmas for all kinds of different reasons.

We all have lots of memories of Christmas. Think of your childhood. Christmas was so magical. I remember with my four brothers and two sisters, those early childhood memories. I think I’ve told the story before, but one Christmas where we’d all gone to bed, excited in Santa was going to come during the night, and when we woke up, we went downstairs, and sure enough Santa had to come and there were presents under the tree, there were things in our stockings, and then the lights came on. We learned that later on, of course, my parents had been doing lots of work, and that they had gone to sleep about one hour before. It was two a.m. We were all ready for Christmas morning and got sent back to bed. Lots of memories from childhood of Christmas.

Or the winter weather. Lots of snow. Where I grew up in Northern Minnesota, we have great snow forts. We had a kind of a combination ski jump and sledding hill that came off the garage roof down into the back yard one year because we had so much snow . All kinds of memories of Christmas.

Going from our home to visit relatives. There was a certain order to things. Certain kinds of entertainment or food or drink were at different locations, and everybody kind of had their role: Tom and Jerry’s at my cousin Barbs or Auntie Francis’ or different kinds of food at other places.And of course, bringing gifts and visiting. All kinds of things. We all have all those Christmas memories.

We love Christmas. And why not? Christmas is great. It’s wonderful. Because of all these great things and memories and celebrations that we associate with Christmas, It is very important for us to remind ourselves, not to domesticate Christmas; not to domesticate Christmas and what we celebrate at this time of year. What do I mean by this? I’m borrowing some of this from Bishop Robert Barron. He’s a bishop in our province, by the way now in Winona/Rochester. Our province ecclesiastically is the province of St. Paul, —  Minnesota, North and South Dakota. I did tell him I borrow his homily ideas and he said that was just fine by him.

He has a great reflection on the meaning of Christmas and the passages that we have from Saint Luke’s Gospel today. We pay attention, close attention, to what’s happening in the Gospels to recover the real deeper meaning of Christmas. They tell us about the Christ’s birth and its meaning.

Let’s take a look at Saint Luke and this passage. By the way, we read this, passage always on the Masses, there are four Masses for Christmas — there’s a Vigil Mass and there’s Mass During the Night, and Mass at Dawn and Mass During the Day. The Mass and Night and the Mass at Dawn are always taken, the Gospel is taken, from Saint Luke’s accountant of Christ’s birth, and Mass During the Day is always a prologue of Saint John’s Gospel about the word becoming flesh and the light entering the darkness of the world. We don’t leave out Matthew’s account, by the way, we’ll catch up with Matthew during the feast of the Holy Family, and the feast of Epiphany.

Saint Luke’s account of Christ’s birth features the census taken up by the Roman emperor, the city of Bethlehem, the city of David where Christ was born, the inn and the manger, the shepherds, and the angels. As we focus on Saint Luke’s account, I want to specifically draw our attention to two comparisons, or juxtapositions, that  we see in Saint Luke’s telling of the Christ’s birth.

The first juxtaposition is the one between Caesar Augustus and the newborn king of the Jews. The other one is a juxtaposition between the shepherds tending their sheep outside by night and the angels that appear to them.

First Caesar Augustus and the Christ child. Caesar Augustus ruled at the time Christ was born. He was king of the world. He ruled over the vast Roman empire. He lived in splendor in a palace on the Palatine hill in Rome. He was protected and sheltered and well-fed. He lived in luxury. He also had a great range of power. His Roman legions assured him that he had power over this vast empire, so much so he could take up his census or levy a tax and it would be collected. He was arguably the freest man in the known world at the time. He could go anywhere in the empire he wanted to go. There was really no limitations on him.

So, there we have Caesar living luxury and power in Rome, with all this vast range of movement, and all this worldly power. And he’s juxtaposed with this newborn king of the Jews, the Christ child, the savior of the world who was born not in a palace, but in a stable. We hear  there’s no room at the inn when Mary and Joseph go to Bethlehem for the census. So, he’s born in a barn or a cave, the most humble of circumstances. Quietly too.

He’s born to an ordinary humble family. Mary and Joseph were not wealthy. They lived a pretty poor and simple life. Joseph is a carpenter.

And when Christ was born, he was laid in the manger. Of course, we romanticize that in our ideas about Christmas. Well, what’s a manger? It’s a feed box for the animals in that cave or barn. And there’s no mistake that he’s laid there because he will become food for the world. This is pointing to, it’s foreshadowing Christ giving himself to us as the bread of life in the Eucharist. Bethlehem, by the way, means the “house of bread,” another connection to bread and the Eucharist.

And when he’s born as a baby, he’s wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed in that manger. What were swaddling clothes? Well, they kept the baby’s arms and legs from moving around too much. It was considered the safest way to keep newborns. So, unlike Caesar who had this vast range of movement and all this power, the Lord is born in simplicity and poverty. And he’s all wrapped up, he’s bound up, shedding his divine glory to be born into our world as our savior. This comparison  is  intentionally made by Saint Luke in his Gospel.

Now the shepherds and the angels. The shepherds, again we romanticize them but, they really had one of the lowest kinds of status in society at the time. Their work was menial. They were low regarded as a profession, just above slaves, socially. In fact, they were not looked upon favorably at all. Their testimony was not admissible in a court of law; they were suspect. Yet they are the first to hear the good news of this newborn king. This foreshadows that Jesus came to sinners to save them. Jesus, of course, would later associate himself with shepherding. He would say, “I am the good shepherd.” He was always with the social outcasts. He was looked down upon and really suspected because he spent  so much time with them.

And then the angels. The angel’s appearance inspires fear. You can see that every single time an angel appears in the scriptures. They’re awesome and powerful. These are beings from a whole different dimension. To meet an angel is to be overwhelmed with awe and they always say, “do not be afraid. Do not be afraid.”

They are glorious beings. And we hear not only one angel appears to the shepherds but then there’s this whole revelation of a heavenly host. Again, we think of cherubs and a choir and that’s not the picture here at all in Saint Luke. The word is stratia in Greek which means an army arrayed for battle. So, these angels have come to do battle. To do battle with what? The darkness of the world. The newborn king of the Jews slips behind enemy lines silently, stealthily. But he’s got his armies too. Not that he would wheel  the kind of earthly power that the Roman Empire’s legions did, although they could, they certainly had more than enough power to do that. They will defeat our worst enemy sin, by wielding  the weapons of love, and humility, and goodness.

So, shepherds and angels. Despised, lowly and then these awesome beings. This army of angels come to do battle with the fallen world.

Luke is telling us intentionally here, a tale of two kings. Caesar Augustus with his Roman legions and Jesus Christ, vulnerable and lowly, born as a child in a manger but king with his army of angels come to help him do battle.

So, do not domesticate Christmas too much as we celebrate it once again. In fact, I would invite you to ask and answer this question. Which king do you choose? On which side will we line up? With worldly power or with the divine power of the love, because this king has come to free us from sin and death not using worldly power, but the power of divine love.

Saint Luke reminds us what Christmas is all about. As we celebrate with family and friends another Christmas, the Gospel tells us once again of Jesus Christ, the baby king, come to do battle with a sin, our mortal enemy, and by humility and love to save the world.

Today in the city of David a savior has been born for us, who is Christ and Lord. Merry Christmas.