We come together today to celebrate one of the most important feasts in the Liturgical Year, the feast of Christmas, the day on which we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. In the hierarchy of things, Easter, the day on which our salvation was won, is considered the more important feast. But Christmas runs a close second since it marks the dawning of our salvation, the day on which the Divine Saviour was born into our world and so began his work of salvation. So, for Christians throughout the world this is rightfully a day of rejoicing, a day of feasting. Yes, we celebrate with parties and with gifts, with food and with wine, but it is just as rightfully a day of worship, a day of reverence.

     We come to Church to listen to the Word of God, to celebrate the Eucharist, to reverence the Christ Child displayed in the Crib and to pray to God for peace in the world and in our homes. It is a day too on which we think of others, especially those less fortunate than ourselves. However, there is a danger when we celebrate Christmas that we look at the feast and the Christmas story through rose-tinted glasses. We see it through the eyes of the Gospel writers, but we also see it from the perspective of artists down through the centuries and now interpreted by the countless printers of Christmas Cards and the producers of Christmas decorations. In these depictions of the Christmas story even the ox and the donkey are idealized; there is hay but no manure as there would be in the depiction of a real stable.

 There is a warm glow from a lighted lamp, but it would have been a cold and drafty place. The harsh realities of life more often than not are painted out of the scene that the artists lay before us. So inevitably our view of Christmas becomes a bit distorted and over romanticized. If we think about it, we realize that the Christmas Story is an account of a very gritty reality. We have a dirty stable not a comfortable hotel room, shepherds rather than gentle midwives and in the background lies the threat of Herod and his soldiers resulting in the exile of the Holy Family and the massacre of many innocent children. This is no romantic tale for naive children but a real story of hardship, poverty, exploitation and cruelty. Yes, there are Angels and Magi, but in their wake come soldiers and brutality. What this shows us is that the infant Jesus was not born into any kind of idealistic world but into the real world with all its grittiness and harsh reality. He comes into our own real-life situation; he experiences our particular problems and all our various difficulties. Of course, as in the telling of any great story we see in its beginnings a reflection or shadow of the final outcome. And so, in telling of Christ’s birth we inevitably tell something too of his death.  As we are told, the Cross is never far from the Crib.

 And yet in the account of Christ’s birth and in the eventual description of his death there is something utterly glorious. At the birth of Jesus despite the squalor and the threats of violence in the background there are in contrast the predictions of the prophets, the singing of Angels and the worship of the Magi which tell us that this is no ordinary birth but rather the coming into our world of the Son of God and the Lord of Lords. The same goes for his death. We read of the forgiveness of the Good Thief, the tearing of the veil in the Temple, the earthquake and many other wonders which indicate that this death was nothing ordinary but reflected the glory of God. But whether it be in his birth or in his death the message of the Gospels is the same, Christ has come to save us. He is the perfect expression of God’s unconditional love for us. And he comes into a real world; he comes into our actual world to make this Good News known. It is this earth-shattering message of undeserved love that is the true meaning of both Christmas and Easter.

 When we speak about the Cross, we always remember that in the background there lies an empty tomb which is the ultimate symbol of hope for us all. It is this vacant tomb that marks the triumph of Christ over sin and death; it is his resurrection that enables our resurrection to new life with God forever. Christ comes from God the Father at Christmas, and he begins his return to him on Easter Day culminating as it does on the Day of the Ascension. So, when we celebrate Christmas, we are in fact celebrating the whole Christian mystery, we are marking the great love of God for us all which leads as we know to the fact of our redemption. There could be no greater cause for rejoicing than this; that the infant Jesus, the King of the Jews, the Prince of Peace, appears among us to bring us healing and salvation. He comes to show us the love of the Father for us all and to bring each one of us, with our sins forgiven, to new life with God in heaven.