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December 22, 2006

A Shepherd’s Christmas Message

By Archbishop Daniel N. DiNardo

In a beautiful homily, Sermon 29, Pope St. Leo the Great wrote that December 25 is the sacrament of the day of Christ’s birth; the prophets and the Gospels teach us that the Lord’s birth, by which the Word became flesh, “is not a past event that we recall, but a present reality upon which we gaze.” The feast of Christmas seems to have been introduced to the city of Rome around the year 300, probably from the Christian community of North Africa. Subsequently, there occurs an immense development in understanding the theological meaning of this festival. The Christmas and Epiphany homilies of St. Leo the Great witness to over 100 years of this development, of meditation and reflection on this great day. The striking words for me from his homilies concern the notion of “sacrament” (sacramentum). The birth of Christ is itself a sacramental beginning, the beginning of the grace of salvation generously given to needy human beings. That beginning grace is completed in his Passion, Death and Resurrection, what we call the Paschal Mystery, the greatest sacrament of all, since it contains all other sacraments.

It should be noted that in the course of Church history and theology, the word sacrament was made more precise and technical and was limited to those seven great divine signs or mysteries that flood us with saving grace and favor and initiate or intensify our relationship with Father, Son and Holy Spirit, namely: Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Penance, Anointing of the Sick, Holy Orders, and Matrimony. The Early Church sees the word in broader ways and is filled with wonder in proclaiming the entire sweep of the coming of the Son of Man among us, how every action and deed of the Word Made Flesh saturates us with saving power, and is therefore, sacramental. St. Leo the Great is simply giving voice to this reality for he states that by divine mercy, the Eternal Word took on our very own nature and substance so that we can acquire “the divine nature that we adore in our own nature.” He writes this long before there were any Christmas cribs, Christmas trees, or holly. Christmas is about transformation, for the babe in the manger, who is “much in little space,” is Savior and will take up the Cross and be glorified so that we can share all that is His and by grace receive it as our own.

The human mind always loves itself too much and is quite prepared to explain away the fact that God became man and dwelt among us. (In many ways, the human mind is always “anti-sacramental.” It prefers tidiness to the joyful serendipity and messiness of a sacramentally created reality.) The history of our faith is filled with examples of a certain repulsion with the fact of God in the Flesh with us and encountering us. One might deny that Jesus Christ is God at all or proclaim that the divine nature swallowed the human in Christ. I once heard someone say they found it better to see Christ as a good man and prophet and that made him beautiful. I thought it would make Christ simply pathetic if that were true, but the variations on avoidance of the genuine humanity and divinity of Christ Jesus are legion. Even the iconoclastic tendencies that have appeared in our midst in recent years in church architecture, in the denuding of our sacred spaces of image and statue, of cold efficiency and antiseptic starkness in church buildings, have their origins in this same attitude. God has come close to us, has pitched his tent among us in the Incarnation, the Word Made Flesh. You encounter the Lord of all in the human-divine face of Jesus. This is the mystery of Christmas. It is a present reality now; it is a “sacramentum.” It requires of us, even as it invites us, to come to the obedience of faith. We need the Father’s grace to embrace His Son in the manger, follow Him to the Cross, and be transformed by His Resurrection. The best Christmas carols (usually the older ones) make this fact abundantly clear; the more sentimental ones draw us away from the mystery and distract us from the sacrament of Christ’s birth.

It is true that the birth of Christ is seen by many as a sign of the birth of every child. There is indeed some excellent truth to this since each human person at birth represents a new beginning. Though we are all mortals, each human birth reminds us that “man” was born not just to die, but to begin, to initiate someone and something altogether unique. The conception and birth of Jesus Christ is staggering because this new beginning is changing everything, the very God and Creator of all becomes flesh in the Eternal Word. Like a good virus, Christ’s humanity will “infect” us all and grant us a friendship with God that is as surprising and startling as it is joyful and glorious and always new. Our response to the birth of every child is joy and gratitude; our response to the birth of Jesus Christ is “Venite Adoremus,” (“O Come, let us adore him, Christ the Lord”)!

I join with Archbishop Fiorenza, Bishops Rizzotto and Vasquez, in wishing all the priests, deacons, religious and faithful of this great archdiocese a most blessed Christmas. I pray that the celebration of this mystery will revivify your hope that God is indeed close to us, so close that He loves us in the very flesh and blood of our existence by assuming that existence. I pray that the worries about our world and the daily cares and anxieties that you bear will not extinguish the flame of Christ’s love that burns for you and in you from His lowly place in the manger. I pray finally in the words of another great Pope, our present one, Benedict XVI: “God does not leave us groping in the dark. He has shown himself to us as a man. In his greatness He has let Himself become small. God has taken on a human face. Only this God saves us from being afraid of the world and from anxiety before the emptiness of life” (Regensburg, September 12, 2006).

Merry Christmas!