From the bulletin for the Fourth Sunday of Advent (Dec 29, 2024)
Holy Family 2024
Though each is a universe unto itself, the high feast days of the Christmas Octave together offer a consoling-but-challenging Word for Christians in the world today.
First, we have the Nativity. Especially this year, I was impressed by the texts of the Sacred Liturgy, which invite us to marvel at all the paradoxes packed into the condescension of the Infinite who is now bounded by an infant’s body. The bookend or coda of the octave is Mary Mother of God, which strikes a similarly-tender note in a more feminine key. There, the Church contemplates the great privilege of our Lady, from which all her others flow. If she is conceived without sin, if she was uniquely and intimately associated in the work of our redemption, if she was assumed into Heaven, and made our mother (and she certainly was all of these), it is because she was (or was to be) the Mother of God.
But the feasts that come within the octave are notably less tender, more stark. Holy Family is charming enough, rejoicing in the fact that God who is from all eternity a family (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) willed to have a human family too, a family into which we are called and incorporated in Christ. But for the world today, this feast is also “fighting words.” In the age of the “modern family,” a.k.a. the family as a human creation, a fluid thing that can be made up of whatever members we decide (be they married or not, men or women, humans or dogs), the reminder that God is the author of the family–for which He has a will and a plan and has given a fixed nature–is both abrasive and countercultural.
The feast of St. John the Evangelist has already clued us to the reason. His gospel tells us that at Christmas “the true light that enlightens every man has come into the world” (cf Jn 1:9) and that we who observe the feast with faith “have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” (Jn 1:14). Yet sadly, mysteriously: “this is the verdict, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (Jn 3:19). The light continues to shine in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (cf. Jn 1:5) but the majority of men do not want to step into the light, “because their deeds are evil” (Jn 3:20).
If we hadn’t been paying attention, Holy Innocents (Saturday the 28th) then rouses us rudely from our tender Christmas contemplations. Scores of darling baby boys–the same age, perhaps, as some of our sons, nephews, or grandchildren–brutally ripped from their mothers arms and executed, just in case one is the newborn Messiah sent to save us from our sins. Such is the hostility of the world to the Light. Like the body’s immune response to the presence of a foreign body, the world bristles and reacts with mortal jealousy towards a perceived threat. Yes, the world has hated Jesus from the beginning (cf. Jn 15:18). Therefore His own people did not receive Him (Jn 1:11) but sought rather to put Him and anyone who resembles Him to death. So in our day. The world seeks to blot out face of Christ from the celebration of Christmas, neutering it into an end-of-the-year occasion for feasting and family gatherings, shorn of any confession of the One “who is both Christ and Lord” (cf. Lk 2:11).
The feast of St. Stephen brings this lesson to bear on Christian discipleship. If the world hates Christ, it will hate too those who follow Him (cf. Jn 15:18). If the world refuses to receive Christ or to step into His light, it will also reject those who reflect that light and walk in it themselves. We can only persevere in adoring the newborn savior if, like the wise men and shepherds, we are also willing to confess Him before others and share the good news concerning “the newborn King of the Jews” (Mt 2:2). If Christ conformed Himself to our human condition, entering this world just as we do, it was so that we might conform our lives to His, exiting this world as He did, persevering in our Christian confession until death.
At year’s end, I ask myself: do I end 2024 standing more firmly in the Light than I began it? When opportunity arose, did I witness to Christ and His will/plan for humanity, even when I percieved I would be made to pay for it? Is my discipleship (and therefore celebration of Christmas) superficial and sentimental, like the world wants it to be, or is founded on solid rock, like the faith of the martyrs? (New Year’s resolutions then make accordingly)
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