In the beginning

Christmas Mass During the Day 2022

The great Feast and Solemnity of the Nativity of Christ is the second most important feast in the Church’s Liturgical Calendar after the Great Pasch, the Feast of Easter. Its importance is attested by the liturgy in the three masses celebrated on Christmas Day proper – the Midnight Mass, the Dawn Mass and presently, what we are celebrating now, the Mass during the day. Because the feast of Christmas is so great, the Church does not stop rejoicing after one or even two special Masses. She continues her worship with a third, the Mass of the Day. And so after a marathon of masses, just when you thought you’ve exhausted everything that needs to be said about Christmas, we find ourselves right back at the beginning. Not just to the beginning of the Christmas story that took place two millennia ago in Bethlehem, but to the very beginning, before God embarked on the great enterprise of creation, before the beginning of the history of man and the universe.

“In the beginning…” that’s how the Prologue of St John’s gospel begins. St John does not start the story of Jesus in the usual way as in the case of Ss Matthew and Luke who provide two different versions of His infancy narratives. He says nothing about the way Jesus was born. Rather, he takes us back in time to "the beginning” and his opening line is deliberately chosen because everyone knows that’s how the entire bible and first book of the Bible (Genesis 1:1) begins: “In the beginning.” In Hebrew - be’ resh’ it. If in the book of Genesis, we hear how everything began with God’s creative act, in John’s prologue we will see the One who was behind that act and who is responsible for our salvation.

In the beginning, John says, was "the Word" or ‘logos’ in Greek. To the uninitiated, the "Word" here may seem ambiguous, but it becomes clear in verse 14 that John is talking about a person: "The Word was made flesh, He lived among us." The Word is not just an impersonal concept but a person. The Word became a human being, a Jew by the name of Jesus. But the Word was also at the beginning, the Word was with God and then John makes this audacious claim, “the Word was God!” Jesus Christ, the child born in the humble stable of Bethlehem and laid in a manger is no ordinary child. He is the Divine Creator-Word, He is the Son of God; He is God.

By using the word ‘Word’ or ‘Logos’, St John was using a term that had rich meaning to Greek and Jewish philosophers. They also believed that God had created everything through His word, or His wisdom. Since God was a rational being, He always had a word with Him. The "word" was His power to think — His rationality, His creativity. According to Plato, the world of ideas was more perfect than the material world, which could only provide a poor copy of the former. John takes this idea and gives it a radical twist: The Word became flesh. Something in the realm of the perfect and the eternal became part of the imperfect and decaying world. That was a preposterous idea, people might have said. It is no wonder that John tells us that when the Word came into the world, “the world did not know him. He came to his own domain and his own people did not accept him.”

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI gives us a beautiful reflexion. He says that this rejection by His own people, “refers first and foremost to Bethlehem, the Son of David comes to his own city, but has to be born in a stable, because there is no room for him at the inn. Then it refers to Israel: the one who is sent comes among his own, but they do not want him. And truly, it refers to all mankind: He through whom the world was made, the primordial Creator-Word, enters into the world, but he is not listened to, he is not received. These words refer ultimately to us, to each individual and to society as a whole. Do we have time for our neighbour who is in need of a word from us, from me, or in need of my affection? Do we have time and space for God? Can he enter into our lives? Does he find room in us, or have we occupied all the available space in our thoughts, our actions our lives for ourselves?” These are questions we must constantly ask ourselves.

Jesus did not just bring a message about God — He Himself was the message. He showed us in the flesh what God is like. We are more than just people of the Book, as Muslims would claim. We are people of the Word of God, the Word who is, who was and will ever be God. We are not just called to be acquainted with the words in our Bible or in the Catechism of the Church. We are called to encounter the Word Himself, Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Saviour – the true light that enlightens all men – a light that shines even in the dark, a light that darkness could not overpower.

Our celebration today is testimony to the immense beauty of encountering the word of God in the communion of the Church. In listening to the word, may we become one with the Word. But it is also the Word that became flesh. So, as Catholics we are called not only to be in communion with God and with each other through the words of scripture but more perfectly through Holy Communion. Christmas is a call to conversion, to be renewed in our “personal and communal encounter with Christ, the word of life made visible, and to become his heralds, so that the gift of divine life – communion – can spread ever more fully throughout the world. Indeed, sharing in the life of God, a Trinity of love, is complete joy (cf. 1 Jn 1:4). And it is the Church’s gift and inescapable duty to communicate that joy, born of an encounter with the person of Christ, the Word of God in our midst. In a world which often feels that God is superfluous or extraneous, we confess with Peter that he alone has “the words of eternal life” (Jn 6:68). There is no greater priority than this: to enable the people of our time once more to encounter God, the God who speaks to us and shares his love so that we might have life in abundance (cf. Jn 10:10).” (Verbum Domini, # 2)