Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Christmas Day

December 25, 2021

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.25.21_Landry_ConCon.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation God wants to have with each of us as together we celebrate the great gift of the birth of the Lord Jesus.

* On Christmas, the Church gives us four different Masses to help us to mark the wonder of the day, and the Gospel and liturgical prayers of each of them have a different focus. At the Vigil Mass we ponder the Angel’s words to St. Joseph not to be afraid to take Mary and the Child growing within her into his home and we ask God for the grace to help us “joyfully welcome” Jesus as our Redeemer. At Midnight Mass we contemplate the radiant glory of God shining around the angels as they announced the good news of great joy to the shepherds awake keeping watch over their flocks by night and we pray to God that the light of Christ’s birth might shine in the darkness and lead us to see all things in the light of Christ. At the Mass at Dawn, we accompany the Shepherds in their going with haste to Bethlehem to see the infant Savior and we ask the Lord to allow the light of faith to shine through our deeds and help us to go to encounter Christ and offer ourselves to him as worthy gifts. In all of them, we retrace the history of progressive revelation by God and deepening awareness among his people, seeking to lead us step-by-step into a greater assimilation of the mystery.

* At the Mass on Christmas Day, however, in the Gospel and in the prayers, we come to the dramatic conclusion, the Church’s most profound explanation of the meaning of the birth of Jesus. Many people, as you know, talk about the “reason for the season” of Christmas and by it they basically mean Jesus is the reason for the season as they seek to keep themselves, their families and our culture focused on God rather than on commercialism. But as praiseworthy as those efforts are, we need to state that it’s not sufficient or theologically precise to declare that Jesus is the reason for this season. The real reason for the season of Christmas iswhat Jesus seeks to do in us. It’s the why behind the what of the Son of God’s becoming man. This is what Christmas Mass During the Day helps us to ponder.

* The Gospel for the Mass from the Prologue of St. John is one of the deepest passages in all of Sacred Scripture. Unlike the Gospel readings at the other Christmas Masses, which have had hundreds of Christmas hymns written about them in various languages, this passage seldom makes it into music. There are no herald angels singing, no shepherds watching, no cattle lowing, no stars brightly shining, no little town of Bethlehem, no swaddling clothes, no Mary and Joseph. But it brings up to the heart of what lies underneath all of those unforgettable details.

* It communicates to us, first, that the child placed in the manger is the actual incarnation of the Word who was in the beginning with God and was God, that this Child is the eternal word who out of love for us took on our flesh, our whole human nature, and made his dwelling among us.

* Second, it points to the whole mystery of whether we and others accept or reject this gift, whether we’re like the ancient Bethlehem inn-keepers who refused to make room even for a pregnant woman in labor, or whether we’re like that woman and her construction worker husband who welcomed that child and allowed him to alter the trajectory of their lives.