SOLEMNITY OF THE NATIVITY
OF THE LORD
HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS
BENEDICT XVI
Saint Peter's Basilica
Monday, 24 December 2012
Monday, 24 December 2012
Dear Brothers and Sisters!
Again and again the beauty of this
Gospel touches our hearts: a beauty that is the splendour of truth. Again and
again it astonishes us that God makes himself a child so that we may love him,
so that we may dare to love him, and as a child trustingly lets himself be
taken into our arms. It is as if God were saying: I know that my glory
frightens you, and that you are trying to assert yourself in the face of my
grandeur. So now I am coming to you as a child, so that you can accept me and
love me.
I am also repeatedly struck by the
Gospel writer’s almost casual remark that there was no room for them at the
inn. Inevitably the question arises, what would happen if Mary and Joseph were
to knock at my door. Would there be room for them? And then it occurs to us
that Saint John takes up this seemingly chance comment about the lack of room
at the inn, which drove the Holy Family into the stable; he explores it more
deeply and arrives at the heart of the matter when he writes: “he came to his
own home, and his own people received him not” (Jn 1:11). The great moral question of our
attitude towards the homeless, towards refugees and migrants, takes on a deeper
dimension: do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our
roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God
himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for God. The faster we can
move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we
have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already
completely full. But matters go deeper still. Does God actually have a place in
our thinking? Our process of thinking is structured in such a way that he
simply ought not to exist. Even if he seems to knock at the door of our
thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it
must be structured in such a way that the “God hypothesis” becomes superfluous.
There is no room for him. Not even in our feelings and desires is there any
room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want
happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed.
We are so “full” of ourselves that there is no room left for God. And that
means there is no room for others either, for children, for the poor, for the
stranger. By reflecting on that one simple saying about the lack of room at the
inn, we have come to see how much we need to listen to Saint Paul’s
exhortation: “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom 12:2). Paul speaks of renewal, the
opening up of our intellect (nous), of the whole way we view the world
and ourselves. The conversion that we need must truly reach into the depths of
our relationship with reality. Let us ask the Lord that we may become vigilant
for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the
door of our being and willing. Let us ask that we may make room for him within
ourselves, that we may recognize him also in those through whom he speaks to
us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor
of this world.
There is another verse from the
Christmas story on which I should like to reflect with you – the angels’ hymn
of praise, which they sing out following the announcement of the new-born
Saviour: “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men with whom he
is pleased.” God is glorious. God is pure light, the radiance of truth and
love. He is good. He is true goodness, goodness par excellence. The angels
surrounding him begin by simply proclaiming the joy of seeing God’s glory.
Their song radiates the joy that fills them. In their words, it is as if we
were hearing the sounds of heaven. There is no question of attempting to
understand the meaning of it all, but simply the overflowing happiness of
seeing the pure splendour of God’s truth and love. We want to let this joy
reach out and touch us: truth exists, pure goodness exists, pure light exists.
God is good, and he is the supreme power above all powers. All this should
simply make us joyful tonight, together with the angels and the shepherds.
Linked to God’s glory on high is
peace on earth among men. Where God is not glorified, where he is forgotten or
even denied, there is no peace either. Nowadays, though, widespread currents of
thought assert the exact opposite: they say that religions, especially
monotheism, are the cause of the violence and the wars in the world. If there is
to be peace, humanity must first be liberated from them. Monotheism, belief in
one God, is said to be arrogance, a cause of intolerance, because by its
nature, with its claim to possess the sole truth, it seeks to impose itself on
everyone. Now it is true that in the course of history, monotheism has served
as a pretext for intolerance and violence. It is true that religion can become
corrupted and hence opposed to its deepest essence, when people think they have
to take God’s cause into their own hands, making God into their private
property. We must be on the lookout for these distortions of the sacred. While
there is no denying a certain misuse of religion in history, yet it is not true
that denial of God would lead to peace. If God’s light is extinguished, man’s
divine dignity is also extinguished. Then the human creature would cease to be
God’s image, to which we must pay honour in every person, in the weak, in the
stranger, in the poor. Then we would no longer all be brothers and sisters,
children of the one Father, who belong to one another on account of that one
Father. The kind of arrogant violence that then arises, the way man then
despises and tramples upon man: we saw this in all its cruelty in the last
century. Only if God’s light shines over man and within him, only if every
single person is desired, known and loved by God is his dignity inviolable,
however wretched his situation may be. On this Holy Night, God himself became
man; as Isaiah prophesied, the child born here is “Emmanuel”, God with us (Is7:14).
And down the centuries, while there has been misuse of religion, it is also
true that forces of reconciliation and goodness have constantly sprung up from
faith in the God who became man. Into the darkness of sin and violence, this
faith has shone a bright ray of peace and goodness, which continues to shine.
So Christ is our peace, and he
proclaimed peace to those far away and to those near at hand (cf. Eph 2:14, 17). How could we now do other
than pray to him: Yes, Lord, proclaim peace today to us too, whether we are far
away or near at hand. Grant also to us today that swords may be turned into
ploughshares (Is 2:4),
that instead of weapons for warfare, practical aid may be given to the
suffering. Enlighten those who think they have to practise violence in your
name, so that they may see the senselessness of violence and learn to recognize
your true face. Help us to become people “with whom you are pleased” – people
according to your image and thus people of peace.
Once the angels departed, the
shepherds said to one another: Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing
that has happened for us (cf. Lk 2:15). The shepherds went with haste
to Bethlehem, the Evangelist tells us (cf. 2:16). A holy curiosity impelled
them to see this child in a manger, who the angel had said was the Saviour,
Christ the Lord. The great joy of which the angel spoke had touched their
hearts and given them wings.
Let us go over to Bethlehem, says
the Church’s liturgy to us today. Trans-eamus is what the Latin Bible says: let us
go “across”, daring to step beyond, to make the “transition” by which we step
outside our habits of thought and habits of life, across the purely material
world into the real one, across to the God who in his turn has come across to
us. Let us ask the Lord to grant that we may overcome our limits, our world, to
help us to encounter him, especially at the moment when he places himself into
our hands and into our heart in the Holy Eucharist.
Let us go over to Bethlehem: as we
say these words to one another, along with the shepherds, we should not only
think of the great “crossing over” to the living God, but also of the actual
town of Bethlehem and all those places where the Lord lived, ministered and
suffered. Let us pray at this time for the people who live and suffer there
today. Let us pray that there may be peace in that land. Let us pray that
Israelis and Palestinians may be able to live their lives in the peace of the
one God and in freedom. Let us also pray for the countries of the region, for
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and their neighbours: that there may be peace there, that
Christians in those lands where our faith was born may be able to continue
living there, that Christians and Muslims may build up their countries side by
side in God’s peace.
The shepherds made haste. Holy
curiosity and holy joy impelled them. In our case, it is probably not very
often that we make haste for the things of God. God does not feature among the
things that require haste. The things of God can wait, we think and we say. And
yet he is the most important thing, ultimately the one truly important thing.
Why should we not also be moved by curiosity to see more closely and to know
what God has said to us? At this hour, let us ask him to touch our hearts with
the holy curiosity and the holy joy of the shepherds, and thus let us go over
joyfully to Bethlehem, to the Lord who today once more comes to meet us. Amen.
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