In Obscurity and Hiddenness

Christmas Mass at Dawn

Of the three Masses which make up the Christmas liturgy (one could add a fourth Mass if you include the Vigil Mass too), this Mass celebrated at Dawn, is the most obscure of all. Generally, most parishes will have a slew of Christmas Masses during the night (traditionally known as the Christmas Midnight Mass) and the Christmas Mass of the Day. But the Mass at dawn is a rare anomaly, most likely because most Catholics who had attended the Mass in the night would have been too sleepy to wake up for this Mass which is celebrated at such an inconvenient and unearthly hour. Secondly, most priests would never think of preparing a different homily for Christmas. One homily works well for all Masses!

Perhaps, the obscurity of this Mass and its timing seek to highlight the paradox of God’s revelation at Christmas. The gospel reading speaks of an epiphany to the Shepherds. Unlike the visit of the Magi, those wise men from the East who may have been kings, there is little pomp and pageantry and glittering costumes associated with these humble shepherds. The silent, secret and obscure birth of the King of the Universe is now made manifest to a group of persons who share His anonymity, due to their profession and status in society. God takes on the flesh of a deplorable and reveals Himself to the deplorables of society. God who is the centre of the Universe enters into the fringe of the universe and makes Himself visible to the marginalised and disenfranchised.

The presence of these shepherds is no accident. Outside the Holy Family, they are the first to receive this wondrous news from the lips of angels and they would be granted the inestimable honour of being the first to be granted an audience before the King of kings - a privilege many prophets, seers, kings and queens could only dream of.

Why would God choose these shepherds to be the first witnesses of His birth? Obscurity may be one of the reasons that united this child with the shepherds. The humility of the Messiah may have been another reason. But perhaps more significantly, the shepherds and the Christ Child shared a common vocation. Throughout the history of God’s involvement with His chosen people, shepherding has been the key way in which He cared for them. David was a boy whom God had taken from among the sheepfolds to be king of Israel. Shepherding was intended to be the model for the monarchy.

In the darkest despair of their defeats, when king, prophet and priest had failed, God declared Himself to be the Shepherd of Israel. So, when God descends to Man in the Christ Child it is entirely right that the first visitors of this Shepherd-King, His admirers and companions should be those whose ministry most clearly reflects His. “Birds of a feather flock together!”

The role of both shepherd and king is to watch over their flocks, to defend them from the prowling predator, to lead them into good pasture, to rescue the lost and foolish who stray, to tend the wounds and to bring them safely home to the fold. That is why Christ came – to be the Good Shepherd. Those are the very tasks our Shepherd-King takes upon Himself and thus upon His Church.

It is the self-same job description that is one of the most beautiful of the Papal titles, Pastor Pastorum, shepherd of the shepherds. For, wherever the Church is, there is the Pastoral work of Christ. And that work cannot be done other than among the flock. It is why Pope Francis uttered that pithy reminder, ‘The shepherd should smell of the sheep’.

The Pope’s comments seem to be utterly counter cultural today. Most of us reasonable and upstanding folks would not wish to smell like unwashed sheep. For most people today, and Christians are by no means an exception, personal identity and fulfilment depend upon being well-known not unknown, visible and not invisible, honoured rather than ignored, important instead of insignificant, and in demand rather than out of commission.

But when we consider how thoroughly invisible our Lord’s birth was, visible only to those who are regarded invisible in the eyes of the powerful and influential, we are reminded that God can be found in obscurity as well as in spectacular fanfare, and He often chooses the obscure to overturn our evaluation of what is important and throw us off our high horses.

So, let us strip ourselves of our false pretences of grandeur and face this ignoble truth - most of us live unexceptional and unheralded lives. We live, die, and then will be forgotten to history. However, hidden and obscure our lives might feel, either literally or figuratively, whether voluntary or involuntary, in that very hiddenness God is redemptively present. If we recall that we are mere sheep, we would know that we will always have a Shepherd who has our back.

So, this morning, as we come before His august presence so humbly concealed under the guise of bread and wine, let us kneel with those shepherds as the sky is filled with the glory of the whole company of Heaven praising God - for that is what we do every time we come to Mass. From the Gloria to the Sanctus we raise our voices and our hearts to join the Angelic chorus before the throne of grace. At every Mass, we come to adore our Shepherd- King and receive Him in the Holy Sacrament of the altar, as the Lord of Lords and God of Gods places Himself in our hands and in our hearts. And finally, with amazed and thankful hearts, let us remember what the shepherds did next; St. Luke tells us, “When they saw the child they repeated what they had been told about him, and everyone who heard it was astonished at what the shepherds had to say.”

In short, the shepherds were the first to preach the Good News. They were the first evangelists. Imagine that? Shepherds, the obscure, deplorables, the unwashed, the insignificant ... but evangelists nevertheless. Like the shepherds we know the truth. We have beheld His Glory. We know who Jesus is. The last act of the Mass is to send us out into the world to share that truth. And we do so in imitation of the shepherds who went home “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen; it was exactly as they had been told.”