Christmas Vigil

At Christmas we celebrate that God is with us. On this night, all of creation (if we dare to listen) proclaims this good news and sings along with the Angels - Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth, goodwill to all people.

 Tonight we celebrate that in God’s peace, the earth will no longer be made desolate and forsaken. In God’s peace all people will become espoused and joyful as the bridegroom delights in them.

 We celebrate that with the birth of Jesus, God brings vindication to those who have believed in him and so have lived good and worthy lives to the best of their abilities.  We celebrate the unimaginable truth that God comes, as an infant, to bring Truth, Justice and Goodness to the world.

 A child is born to us, human and divine. Jesus is the son of Mary and Joseph and the Son of God, conceived by the Holy Spirit. This is an extraordinary story. This is Jesus’ story. So why does Matthew begin it with a list of odd sounding names?

 For us it might seem a boring way to begin such an amazing story. But, for Matthew’s community it was simply shorthand for the whole of Salvation History. A way to show God’s saving action within the history of Israel. The list reveals that Jesus, through his human ancestry, is the fulfillment of God’s promise, the embodiment and culmination of all that God has done and of course, is still doing.

 Matthew’s list “peoples” God’s great enterprise. It begins with the patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah called to become a people of a God, it runs through Israel’s experience in Egypt, the Exodus, continues in the rise and fall of the Kingdom of David, the Babylonian exile and the return of the exiles to Israel, the Roman occupation and ends up in a manger, with the birth of the child Jesus.

 Matthew’s list also makes clear (with a little scriptural study) how unpredictable God is as he makes his plans known in unexpected ways and accomplishes his purpose through the most unlikely cast of characters: the important and the unimportant, the good and the not so good, the powerful and the weak. In God’s work, and in Matthew’s list, the extraordinary rubs shoulders with the ordinary.

 
Matthew’s list of names begins with God reaching out to a man named Abraham and ends some two thousand year later with the child Jesus. And at Christmas we celebrate that with God the impossible was made possible through the humble and the lowly. God choose the Virgin Mary, not some highborn princess and he choose Joseph, a simple carpenter to be the parents of Jesus, the Son of God.

 Tonight we celebrate that God comes as a helpless infant. I imagine that the first thing the baby Jesus saw was the faces of Mary and Joseph smiling down at him. (is this not how we all begin to love God?) It was they who held him and loved him first. It would be Mary and Joseph who would teach Jesus what it means to be human. And it was through their love that Jesus learned to love God.

Think on the wonder of it all - this baby (dressed in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, this little nobody born to nobody parents in a nothing town, drew angels and shepherds to him, the heavens in the shape of a star gave him glory and wise men (from the far away east) came bearing gifts of homage. They all somehow knew the Truth.

 This is the impossibility of Christmas that we celebrate today: the unbelievable, the unimaginable reality that God became flesh to dwell among us, to feel what we feel and see what we see, to love and to be loved. On this day, in the little town of Bethlehem, the transcendent unknowable God wished to be known and this changed everything.

Marry Christmas