Christmas, 2006

“In the beginning was the Word. … The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

            These words of St. John are huge.

First, his phrase, “In the beginning was the Word.”

            What does beginning mean?

            In our experience, the beginning of something simply means that at first it did not exist.

            In the case of the Word, that is, the Son of God, there was no beginning before which he did not exist.

            Beginning implies time, and in God there is no time.

            God simply is.

            He is in what we call the past; he is in what we call the present; he is in what we call the future.

            He is Alpha and Omega, the same yesterday, today and forever.

What does Word mean?

            As Word, the Son of God is the total self-expression of the Father.    We can say that the Word articulates the meaning of God, just as our words express what we mean.

            But if the Word is the meaning of God, he is also the meaning of the beginning and of the end, that is, of time.

            Likewise, he is the meaning of what existed before the beginning and after the end, that is, eternity.

            The Word is the meaning, then, of both time and eternity.

            The Word expresses what cannot be expressed in words: an Origin which is origin-less; an End which is end-less.

            In the end, all things must therefore share in that meaning or else fall into meaninglessness, into nothingness.

            All that exists in time, all who exist in time, find their meaning, their original meaning, their only meaning and their ultimate meaning in the Word.

            For nothing that truly exists can exist without him.

            And if something or someone claims existence without him, then it, he or she is not existing in truth, but in deception.

            Their existence is a lie.

            Whether or not someone accepts the Word is, in the end, what will determine the meaning of their existence.

            In the end, the Word will reveal all that is hidden in the secret recesses of all of history and of each human heart, and because the Word is Truth, he, and He alone, will judge it all.

            What I say to you is not just my opinion.

            It is quite simply, and quite majestically, the truth.

            Before the Son of God our opinions, our claims, our positions, our ideologies are like smoke in the wind. Before the Son of God, all that counts is truth working through love, but not any old thing we call truth or love.

            No, only his love, his self-sacrificing love given to us as a free gift by the Holy Spirit poured into our hearts from the wounded side of the Crucified.

            Only his truth, as taught to us in the Gospel and through the teaching authority of his Church. Only that truth can set us free.

            In Jesus, love and truth have kissed, not as mere words, but as ultimate life-giving reality.

And here is where the second huge statement of St. John comes in.

            “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

            The Word did not remain aloof in his eternity, in his existence before the beginning.

            He became flesh.

            Nor did he remain aloof in the flesh.

            He dwelt among us.

            With the incarnation, eternity and time have been married, because eternity fell in love with time.

            The divine and the human have been married, because the divine fell in love with the human.

            The incarnation of the Word now means that every second of time is potentially eternal; every human being is potentially divine.

            Potentially.

            Because it takes two for a marriage to work. One party cannot force the other.

            A one-sided love is beautiful, but its beauty finds the consummation of its restlessness only if the other responds.

            Thus, for time to become eternal and for the human to become divine, the human must freely love in return, in every moment of time and in every aspect and dimension of his or her humanity.

            The difference between the pure passing of time and history is that history is the result of decisions.

            Animals live in time.

            Human beings live in history.

            If I don’t take decisions that are deep, all-embracing, faithful and committed, my time will remain only time.

            If I do take those decisions, personal time becomes personal history.

            Decisions transform time into the density of history, and when those decisions are taken in the light of the Word, that history becomes dense with divine meaning.

When the Word of God by his decisions enters time and creates a history of the eternal God in time, then the free response of any human being transforms their personal history into a history of salvation.

Their history becomes part of the history of the timeless God.

And if this is done by an entire community, that community becomes a community of salvation and a sign of salvation.

Is this not the meaning of the Church?

Is it not the meaning of the Catholic family? Of the religious institute? Of the parish?

But the Word of God, that is, Jesus Christ, did not enter time in the way Yahweh entered time in the Old Testament.

Yahweh spoke through prophets and signs and wonders.

You might say that Yahweh’s interventions were a criss-crossing in and out of time.

But the Word actually became flesh, actually entered time, actually took up the project of history.

In so doing he united himself with every human being and transformed human flesh into an instrument of salvation.

It is the Devil, not Christ who hates human flesh.

The Devil wants us to be mesmerized by the flesh, not because he loves it, but because he wants to destroy it by separating it from Christ; he wants to undo or at least deny the incarnation and deprive the flesh of the promise of immortality.

But the Word loves the flesh he created and assumed.

He created it because he loves it; he assumed it because he loves it.

He destines it to share fully in eternal life because he loves it.

Our bodily life in all its aspects must therefore be lived with a view to resurrection, not to disintegration in the grave.

Because of Christmas, our flesh belongs to Christ.

How then can we live in it as if it were not his?

How can we use it against him?

“And the Word dwelt among us.”

Christ rejoices to be among his own, as any person enjoys the company of friends.

But his presence among us in history is not an end in itself.

He descends among us only to draw us up with himself in his ascension to the Father.

The Word dwells with human beings so that human beings may dwell with God.

Christ’s descent signals our ascent.

Human history will only find its fulfilment in the vertical, not in the horizontal.

Unless we turn to God, we will not return to God.

Peace can be on earth only if we give glory to God in the highest.

And so Christmas must draw us to recall all these things, to fire our hearts with the hope of an eternal destiny, as individuals and as a race.

Our eyes look to the Crib that our hearts may look to heaven, where the child in the manger now sits at the right hand of the Father.

As we rejoice to be with our families and join in Christmas cheer, we are experiencing a foretaste, a very dim and minimal foretaste, of that banquet where the marriage of the Lamb to his Bride, the human race, will never end.

Then, there will be no more pain, no more tears, no more separation, no more death.

War, famine and disease will be banished from the memory of humanity.

The collective Prodigal Son who we are will know the eternal embrace of the heart of the Father, and the Word will have drawn us back to that beginning which will never end.

In this sense, I wish all of you most holy Christmas, and a year of grace, 2007, filled with the longing anticipation of eternity, and of the work of love and truth which will make those longings a reality.

 Msgr. Peter Magee

 Christmas Day, 2006

Annunciation, DC: 11.30 am